The Halo effect sadly is still the current state in which much people treats Apple, I would love to know who are the engineers that design and write the features of the operating system that I use everyday, suggest some new features to them, etc., and I hate keynotes.
The stories on this website tend to be uncorraborated, but they're important because they're from the actual players. While it's true that Raskin himself hasn't commented much on that site, it's interesting that he isn't portrayed very kindly. Notably, he was canned from Apple pretty early on.
By the way, the folklore.org book is also inaccurate; I seem to remember it including some of the website comments, but not any from Jef, and some of them were important. Can't remember any of them offhand, though.
And, of course, the bio section didn't mention that he'd died before the book came out.
From his own chapter notes from, apparently, 1981:
> ... Having been associated with PARC, I repeated called Apple's attention to the kind of thinking going on there, and it was gratifying that the company took note of and based a lot of the LISA software on the published work done at PARC.
Then he proceeds to describe his plans for the Macintosh word processor, which includes magical spread sheets, a calendar, and the ability to dial stuff. Which, of course, never saw the light of day - MacWrite is entirely opposite of what he describes. He also said that multi-moded tools are too complex, and doesn't mention anything about a desktop metaphor, icons, folders -- and he pans the mouse universally.
So, I honestly don't know whether I believe his account at all. I read his book Humane Interface cover-to-cover, and I simply can't imagine a person with his ideas had as much to do with the Mac design as he claims.
In HI, he seemed to claim the Canon Cat as his proudest accomplishment. A modal word processor machine, with no mouse, and a rather complex and arcane (if you ask me) system of changing operation modes with multi-function keys.
Given the content of his writing, and the nature of his ideas, I have never understood why people in the industry think of him as some patron saint of usability.
