The Raskins

I always enjoy reading things by the Raskins, both Jef, and his son Aza.  The latest article making the rounds is The Mac Inventor’s Gift Before Dying: An Immortal Design Lesson for His Son, which is a charming story about the mindset that makes them both so interesting.  There is an ever present bit of pretentiousness and excess verbosity to both of their writing, but between their overt self-awareness of the behavior, and my own writing having many of the same properties, it rarely bothers me.
The really interesting thing in stories about Jef, and his own writing is hearing what the prime mover for the direction of computer interfaces for the last thirty thinks went wrong, especially with regard to things he was directly responsible for – it helps remind me that the currently dominant interface paradigms are the result of a long evolutionary process with lots of missteps, not some sort of manifest destiny.