Monday
2 Oct 2006
Enso Beta: Hints
Applications are like isolated cities, each with its own customs and infrastructure.
Both applications and isolated cities have a lot of needless redundancy. Cities have an excuse: they’re in physically different places and are forced to duplicate a lot of things. Applications don’t have such an excuse—they all share the same hard drive, processor, memory, and operating system. Yet despite such proximity, for the end-user, applications don’t actually have that much in common with one another.
For example, both Microsoft Word and Macromedia Fireworks have spell check, but they work in different ways and include separate dictionaries. On my computer, I counted 7 separate implementations of spell check—all of which work slightly differently—with 7 different lists of every word in English. No wonder I have to upgrade my computer as often as I take out the trash*.
Learning a new application is like moving to a foreign city: everything is just similar enough to really throw you off. There are still cars in the new city, but they drive on the left instead of the right. Control-B might be bold in one application, but bookmark in another. Trying to keep everything straight consumes a lot of human resources; wasting our time and brain-power is much more egregious than wasting our computer’s cycles and disk space. Applications do both.
Applications are bad for both the computer and the human. So what would it mean if we could unite all applications by letting their infrastructure and customs be shared?
It would mean more humane and resource-efficient computing, which is the goal of Enso: Humanized’s soon-to-be-released product line.
Enso continues and extends the vision of Jef Raskin, the inventor of the Macintosh. Jef sought to unify and simplify everyday computing tasks so that we users can think about what we want to do, not how to make the computer do
it. Enso is the first step in making this vision a reality.
Exactly what Enso is, I won’t say yet. But this post, along with the transparent message post and Jef’s book The Humane Interface give pretty good hints.
We Need Your Help
The Humanized team is proud to announce, after a year of development, that Enso has hit beta: Enso’s first two products have all of their features in place. However, the software isn’t yet ready for public release: while
we’ve tried our best to make it a solid, stable product, the truth is that there are certain things that are out of our control: the variety of software and hardware configurations that can potentially affect Enso’s behavior is so vast that we can’t possibly exhaust all of them in-house.
We need your help to make sure that once Enso is released, it will work seamlessly on every single computer that meets its system requirements.
If you would like to get your hands on Enso beta in exchange for doing some bug hunting, please feel free to check out our new beta testing program and fill out an application.
Revolutionary?
Revolutionary is a label that’s applied to ideas and products far too often. I’m not sure what a revolutionary mop is, but I can buy at least three varieties at Target. Is Enso revolutionary? I don’t know. But it has certainly changed the way we use computers at Humanized—and we hope it will do the same for you.
*That’s fairly often for those of you who are doubting the merits of my house cleaning. [Back]
Please note: Since January 15, 2008, all Enso products have been free. To get the latest version of Enso, free of charge, see the main Enso page.
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