#Centra archy software

The plan includes making the interface as 'modeless' as possible, to avoid mode errors and encourage habituation. This ambitious plan to build a general purpose environment that is easy to use for anyone is based on designing for the common cognitive capabilities of all humans. It aims to be usable by disabled persons, the technology-averse, as well as computer specialists.

#Centra archy software

The stated goal of Archy is to design a software system starting from an understanding of human cognition and the needs of the user, rather than from a software, hardware, or marketing viewpoint. Jef Raskin jokingly stated: 'Yes, we named our software after a bug' (a cockroach), further playing with the meaning of bugs in software. It is also an allusion to Don Marquis' archy and mehitabel poetry. The name 'Archy' is a play on the Center's acronym, R-CHI. On January 1, 2005, Raskin announced the new name, and that Archy would be further developed by the non-profit Raskin Center for Humane Interfaces. While these systems build upon the WIMP desktop paradigm, Archy has been compared as similar to the Emacs text editor, although its design begins from a clean slate.Īrchy used to be called The Humane Environment ('THE'). Archy is more radically different from established systems than are Sun Microsystems' Project Looking Glass and Microsoft Research's 'Task Gallery' prototype. It can be described as a combination of Canon Cat's text processing functions with a modern ZUI. Since his death in February 2005 the project was continued by his team, which later shifted focus to the Ubiquity extension for the Firefox browser.Īrchy in large part builds on Raskin's earlier work with the Apple Macintosh, Canon Cat, SwyftWare, and Ken Perlin's Pad ZUI system. The system was being implemented at the Raskin Center for Humane Interfaces under Raskin's leadership. These ideas include content persistence, modelessness, a nucleus with commands instead of applications, navigation using incremental text search, and a zooming user interface (ZUI). Designed by human-computer interface expert Jef Raskin, it embodies his ideas and established results about human-centered design described in his book The Humane Interface. JSTOR ( June 2011) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message)Īrchy is a software system whose user interface introduced a different approach for interacting with computers with respect to traditional graphical user interfaces.Please improve this article by adding secondary or tertiary sources. This article relies excessively on references to primary sources.