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Leap Technology

aamoviebb

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  • Recommended by 2 people: 2 on Hacker News.
  • A classic. People kept recommending it from 2016 to 2020.
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Beginner. No background in the topic needed.

24K views15 years ago2 recommendations

History and cultureHistory of computingRetro computing

A 1987 promotional video demonstrates Jef Raskin's Leap technology, showing keyboard-driven text search and cursor navigation on the Canon Cat.

Promotional video introducing Leap, the revolutionary navigation technology invented by Jef Raskin.

Why it's here

2 people recommend this

What people say. Recommended as a fascinating historical demonstration of an alternative, keyboard-centric user interface design that bypassed the mouse.

fzzzyon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Restoring YC's Xerox Alto: how our boot disk was trashed with random data”

I had read a lot about the Cat, but never saw it in action, so I decided to look for a video. This is a fascinating view into Raskin's user interface concepts. The world might have been a very different place if Jobs hadn't interfered with the Macintosh project. link to this video
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marttton Hacker News • Recommends

On “Leap Technology (keyboard vs. mouse on a Canon Cat machine, ca 1987)”

More on the Canon Cat: link link There are also a few previous HN discussions on this machine. EDIT: I just have to post this lovely scene from the original video separately. This is about human-computer interaction after all, isn't it! link to this video Aren't we actually approaching an age where this kind of (almost-)single-purpose machines might be making a comeback? The focus this model seems to allow or enforce on the user feels kind of... healthy.
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smorrowon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Jef Raskin's Swyft Card”

I don't know anything about the Swyft card, but I know something about the Cat (not much). The Swyft card implemented at least the cursor positioning stuff in this video: link to this video Some things about the Cat that aren't in that video are interesting. The whole thing was a single-user (fine by me), single-process (fine for the time) and single-program system. When you turn it off it writes its whole memory (incl. framebuffer) out to disk, which I think is the only thing on the disk actually, and when you turn it on it reads it back in to memory. So it never had any concept of a file, of saving a file, or opening a file. Saving a document was just saving your state, which includes the document, a…
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lprovenon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Canon Cat”

I have never played with one, only studied the videos (e.g. link to this video ) and documentation. It was a very radical UI. If you added programs, they just added new functionality to the existing editor. So, for instance, a spreadsheet module might mean that suddenly, when loaded, you can do operations like SUM{...} or MEAN{...} on a table of numbers in the editor. I've long wished that someone would implement the Canon Cat UI as an Emacs module. It would seem to me that Emacs has all or most of the necessary functionality already.
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jodrellblankon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Command palettes: how typing commands became the norm again”

I could have sworn I saw a dropdown command/search dialog designed by Jeff Raskin as part of The Humane Interface, and demonstrated in PyTHE a Python imeplementation of it. Can't find any evidence of it, but I can find a 2003 Guido van Rossum review of Jeff Raskin's book "The Humane Interface" in which Raskin mentions LEAP(r) a design for adding search-backwards and search-forwards keys below the spacebar to save people from arrow keys and mouse use, which is demonstrated on the CanonCat computer from 1987 in this2 video on YouTube. 1 link 2 link to this video
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retrocryptidon Hacker News • Mentions

On “The Canon Cat”

…he leap key to exit the search semi-mode. If you want to move the cursor to a subsequent instance of the search term, you press (and do not release) the "USE FRONT" key and press the leap key again (whose key front is labeled "Leap Again.") You can see this in action in this YouTube video, but it happens pretty fast so you have to watch carefully: link to this video…
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afry1on Hacker News • Mentions

On “Vim-like “jump” cursor for Mac OS Window Management”

For my emacs friends, here's a wonderful package that provides the same functionality: link And, if you're interested in some historical context for this "type characters and jump to point" functionality, the Canon Cat: link to this video
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throwaway71271on Hacker News • Mentions

On “PicoCalc: A Fully-Functional Clone of VisiCalc”

That looks seriously cool. Just the colors give me goosebumps :) completely offtopic: My dream is to build a super cheap child friendly computer, that the kids can build themselves, has a software keyboard that directly polls the gpio pins so that kids can modify their keyboard instead of having a keyboard controller (just so there is less mistery in what happens when a key is pressed). And the OS is something inspired from LEAP: link to this video that allowing you to evaluate code and apply it to your current file. A bit like your LOAD81 but with text. I have a prototype now: link but it has a long way to go.
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tiverton Hacker News • Mentions

On “Version Museum: A Visual History of Your Favorite Technology”

This is kind of neat from a nostalgia standpoint, but I wish there was some kind of "Encyclopedia of Operating System UI," that broke UI features and paradigms down into their smallest units and tracked them across different operating systems and versions. Probably with a particular emphasis on defunct systems when there was a lot more diversity and innovation (e.g. the Canon Cat Leap Keys: link to this video )
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kallebooon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Preliminary Macintosh Business Plan (12 July 1981) [pdf]”

> I can't find any demo or screen shots of the Canon Cat system in use There's an advertising video on YouTube showing it in use for text editing link to this video
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entaloneralieon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Writing my own text editor, and daily-driving it”

One of the first thing I added was Leap keys-type search, I didn't want modes. - Leap keys: link to this video The second was pragma-mark navigation, so I can always see a overview of the codebase. - navbar: link I also wanted a local copy buffer specific to the project I work on, so I could easily manage multiple copies of the clipboard data(it's part of how I work).
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OhMeadhbhon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Macs Since 1983”

Meh. the Lisa was absolutely, positively, explicitly NOT a Mac. If you don't get that, then you misunderstand the business of computing in the late 70s / early 80s. The author also ignored Jef Raskin's work on the original Mac project (I wrote a serial driver for him in the early 80s for a 6809 prototype he was working on.) If you're going to make one of these Mac hagiographies, it's useful to point out the Canon Cat (which was more in line with Jef's original idea for the Mac) and then point out how different it was from main-stream Macs. And then point out WHY the Lisa was not a Mac. So... Why do people think the Lisa was a prototype Mac? It's easy to understand the confusion. It has a 68k…
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