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 as an open source computer program at the Raskin Center for Humane Interfaces under Raskin's leadership, but his death in February 2005 makes the project's future uncertain.

Archy in large part builds on Raskin's earlier work with the Canon Cat and Apple SoftWare , 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.

Archy used to be called The Humane Environment or The Hessling Editor. 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.

Basic concept

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. It aims to cater to the poor, the blind, the young, the aged, the technology-averse, those not in the first world as well as technologists and computer specialists. 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.

The plan includes making the interface modeless. In order to achieve this, modal features of current graphical user interfaces like windows and separate software applications are removed.

Persistence

All content in Archy is persistent. This eliminates the need and the concept of saving a document after editing it. The system state is preserved and safe from crashes and power outages: if the system crashes or power goes off, one simply restarts the system and takes up working where one left off when the problem occurred. A detailed history of the user's interaction allows all actions to be undone and re-done.

Leaping

A main innovation of the interface is the Leap™, a means of moving on-screen via incremental text-search. The system provides two commands, Leap™-forward and Leap™-backward, invoked through dedicated keys, that move the cursor to the next and prior position that contains the search string. Leaping is performed as a quasimode operation: press the Leap™ key and, while holding it, type the text that you want to search; finally release the Leap™ key. This process is intended to habituate the user and turn cursor positioning into a reflex.

Leaping to document landmarks such as next or previous word, line, page, section, and document amounts to leaping to Space, New line, Page, and Document characters, which are inserted using the Spacebar, Enter, Page and Document keys respectively. On a standard computer keyboard, Archy uses the Alt keys as Leap™ keys, Backquote (`) as a Document character and Tilde (~) as a Page character.

The cursor can still be moved forward and back by one character using the Left and Right arow keys, and the text can be scrolled up and down by one line using the Up and Down arrow keys.

Commands

Another feature is intended to provide the power of a command line interface to a graphical user interface (GUI). Command names can be inserted and executed at any place in the interface. This reduces the need to move a mouse pointer to a menu bar or toolbox to execute commands, and allows for quickly composing the results of several commands in sequence.

Since a command can be used anywhere, applications are obsolete as the core of the interface's design. Installing a new package of commands provides a functionality related to their common task. In this way, the user is not restricted to the closed environment of a single application in order to use these functions. Rather, the API is exposed to the user so that these functions can be used system-wide and combined in ways unforeseen by the designer. Ideally, commands could be installed in the system one by one, so that users can acquire and install only what they need.

Many commands operate on selected areas of text. Selections are displayed by using a background color, and the color of a given selection changes as newer selections are made. For example, to send an e-mail message, you might type and select the text of the message, type and select the address of the recipient, and invoke the SEND MAIL command.

Zoomworld

Archy's Zooming User Interface (ZUI) element is called Zoomworld. It is a spatial, non-windowing interface: an infinite plane expanding in all directions and zoomable to infinite detail. Extra information on an item is provided by "flying" closer to inspected it, and the destinations of hyperlinks are inserted in-place instead of being represented by textual reference. Browsing in this Zoomworld can be done with a mouse; leap functions are used as a search facility.

Project members claim that a similar, but limited, zooming interface was tested in real world applications with remarkable success. In 10 minutes, users became efficient at using this radically new interface for a complex application — a timetable for multiple hospitals.

A simple ZUI is found in the Squeak Smalltalk programming environment and language.

External links

• Download Archy (Alpha phase)
• The Raskin Center for Humane Interfaces
• Screenshots and ZUI Demo
• Open Directory: Archy