Archy

Archy is a proposed radically new system for interacting with many kinds of computers. 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. These ideas include content persistence, modelessness, a nucleus with commands instead of applications, navigation using text search and a zooming user interface (ZUI). The system was being implemented at the Raskin Center for Humane Interfaces under Raskin's leadership. Since his death in February 2005 the project is being continued by his team.

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Archy in large part builds on Raskin's earlier work with the Apple Macintosh, Canon Cat, and SwyftWare, and can be described as a combination of Canon Cat's text processing functions with a modern ZUI. Unlike Sun Microsystems's Project Looking Glass and Microsoft Research's Task Gallery prototype, Archy is more radically different than established systems and does not continue them in a major way.

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Archy used to be called The Humane Environment. 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, which received $2 million in funding. The name "Archy" is a play on the Center's acronym, R-CHI, and an allusion to Don Marquis' archy and mehitabel poetry, which is now in the public domain. Thus, the system is named after a bug.

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Computer: A computer is a device or for processing information from data according to a program — a compiled list of instructions. The information to be processed may represent numbers, text, pictures, or sound, amongst many other types....

Jef Raskin: Jef Raskin (March 9, 1943–February 26, 2005) was an American human-computer interface expert best-known for starting the Macintosh project for Apple Computer in the late 1970s....

The Humane Interface: The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems is a book by Jef Raskin, on the subject of user interface design. It covers ergonomics as well as quantification, evaluation, and navigation, and describes many interface design concepts that were used in Archy....