interactions magazine | The Linguistic Command Line

The Linguistic Command Line
Aza Raskin

I’m a Mac baby. Twenty-three years ago, I was born. So was the Macintosh.

Looking back, I haven’t fundamentally changed since my lower-than-your-kneecap days. I’m just a larger, differently proportioned version of my younger self. Unfortunately, the same thing is also true for the GUI: It’s matured, but hasn’t fundamentally changed in the last 23 years. We are still stuck juggling windows in a time-wasting dance to find the application we need to get a task done …

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Posted by Natural language commands : Koans of code on February 24th, 2008 at 4:49 pm:

[…] most recent issue of Interactions there is an article by Aza Raskin on language command line. Aza postulates using the power of natural language and […]

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Posted by The Modern Command Line Interface | Own Page One: Search Engine Visibility Blog - Online Marketing Strategy and Tips on February 14th, 2008 at 2:12 pm:

[…] Raskin does this subject justice in the latest issue of Interactions (January+February 2008), envisioning a linguistic command line that figures out what you want […]

Posted by Preston Smalley » New Interactions Magazine » Blog Archive on February 8th, 2008 at 12:45 pm:

[…] I really enjoyed Aza Raskin’s perspective on the formation of Humanized’s Enso product. As Jon Raskin’s son (original Mac team), […]

Posted by Jon on November 10th, 2007 at 1:55 pm:

It’s interesting to compare Aza’s thoughts to Don’s recent article on command line interfaces; I’m skeptical of a mass transformation back to a unix-style command line, but there is something to be said for providing rapid novice-to-expert transitional cues in interfaces …

Thank you, Katie
By Richard Anderson on November 18th, 2008.

Our thanks to Katie Minardo of MITRE for working with Aza to bring this article to interactions magazine.

Beyond interior decorating
By Richard Anderson on January 1st, 2008.

How interesting it is that Aza was born during the same year as the Macintosh, the proposal for which his father -- Jef Raskin -- had given birth.

Only ten years into his life, Aza joined his father on the BayCHI stage in September 1994 for a presentation entitled, "The Interface Paradox." (I was there, having scheduled the presentation as BayCHI's Program Chair.)

The paradox addressed during that presentation was how user interfaces had not gotten better since the birth of the Macintosh, though the HCI community had jelled during that time. The reason? "...most of what practitioners do is more akin to interior decorating than to architecture..."

How much has that changed?

In this article, Aza describes an approach to user interface design that clearly goes beyond the boundaries of interior decorating.

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