Finder designer talks of iFile and Apple advice
February 18, 2004 - 09:03 PST   by Dennis Sellers - Bruce Horn, one of the members of the original Macintosh team and the person who designed and implemented (along with Steve Capps) the Finder, is still a Mac user and Mac fan. He's also developing new projects, including iFile under the banner of his Ingenuity Software company. iFile is an information management system that runs under Mac OS X. Although still in development, Horn thinks that, when it's completed, it could someday offer "a nice alternative to the Finder." A new public release is slated for the spring.

Besides iFile, Horn is also assisting some "brilliant friends" with a new processor design, and working with Marketocracy, the mutual-fund company he co-founded in 1999 with Ken Kam.

"The new processor design is quite intriguing," Horn told MacMinute. "I didn't expect that there would be a truly novel processor architecture that would pique my interest. Back in the 80's, RISC was the big thing, then VLIW architectures, and so on, but nothing really seemed like it would provide the kind of performance improvements through architecture (as opposed to faster clock speeds) that I had hoped. But my friends at Out of the Box Computing, notably Ivan Godard and Art Kahlich, have come up with some truly exciting design approaches for their Mill processor family which will provide a 10x price-performance-power breakthrough. I'm planning on helping out on the software side at some point, once iFile is out and successful. Unfortunately I can't say much more, but interested folks can contact me at processor-interest@ingenuitysoftware.com."

Marketocracy uses a Mac-based Web site running WebObjects and a FrontBase database to allow over 50,000 people worldwide to buy and sell stocks in real time (but with fake money) to create a model stock portfolio. Horn says the company is doing well and its fund, the Masters 100, is exceeding expectations.

"It's half as risky as the market (e.g., compared to a S&P index fund) and it's returned over 39 percent since inception in November 2002, while the market overall has been flat," he explains. "It's clear that our approach of finding the best investors in the world and using their investment talent in a rigorous fashion is a real breakthrough, and a major departure from the way that money is traditionally managed by individual managers at mutual funds."

As far as his work on Apple-related products is concerned, Mac users will certainly want to keep their eyes on iFile as it develops. Horn says that he always wanted to have a new way of organizing information that mapped more closely to the ways that people think and perceive the world.

"In NLP (Neurolinguistic Programming, a model of subjective human experience) there is a concept called the Metaprogram Sort," he explains. "Basically, this describes five ways that we primarily index events in our minds: by people, locations, activities, things, and information. If you listen to people talk you can hear the order of the keys by which they index events. I might say 'Blythe and I went for a hike at the Marin Headlands '. Another person might say 'I went hiking at the Marin Headlands with Blythe .' Different people will remember (index) different events in different ways. This is one reason that I feel that a single hierarchical organization will never work for all people, and that there must be multiple organizations available and easy to specify in an information management system."

Horn says that there are also lower-level models that describe how people access and store information, such as modalities (visual, auditory, and kinesthetic) and submodalities (visual: location, brightness, contrast, etc; auditory: tone, volume, tempo, etc.; kinesthetic: temperature, smoothness, etc.). When he was in the Advanced Technology Group, he wrote a document for Apple that described how different modalities and submodalities could be used in user interfaces, and for what purposes. For example, dimming background windows is a submodality change that can indicate "less important" or "less relevant."

"There were dozens of suggestions that I made along those lines," Horn says. "Even the very first Macintosh incorporated some of these ideas such as maintaining spatial organization of icons in the Finder and dimming disabled menu items (though I won't take credit for dimming menus!). iFile is beginning to implement some of these ideas as well, and I am trying out different ways to present information using my current understanding of mental processes."

iFile grew out of a desire to experiment with some of these ideas in the information management domain, and incorporate them into a framework that he could expand and continue to explore. While iFile is primarily a test bed for new concepts, Horn says he fully expects to see "some thoughtful and interesting suggestions from my users." People interested in being notified when iFile is available for beta-testing may send an email to public-beta-notify@ingenuitysoftware.com."

"NLP has been a tremendous asset in helping me understand how people work and what kinds of interfaces might be effective," he says. "My friends and mentors Steve and Connirae Andreas, and Charles Faulkner, among others, have written some excellent books on the subject. While many of these books are primarily focused on therapy and human excellence, the basic structures and concepts of NLP are also discussed. I've put a booklist up on my site for those interested in learning more."

Even with everything he has going on, Horn still finds times to use lots of Apple products.

"The iPod, new PowerBooks and iBooks, and the iMac are all just tremendous examples of Apple's innovative style and design," he says. "Mac OS X is a nice, solid operating system and it's a pleasure to use. Once I upgraded my PowerBook to a 1.25GHz machine, it is definitely fast enough. I think Apple is doing a good job with the various iApps, making it easy for people to really use their computers. My favorite is iChat, of course; I have far-flung friends who are Mac users, and it is so much easier to keep in touch with them than before. I have an iSight, and that is a lot of fun as well!"

Besides his PowerBook (his "work machine"), Horn has a 400MHz Grape iMac upstairs at home that he's retrofitted with a 120GB hard drive and uses as a Retrospect backup server, Web surfing machine, and music server. He also owns a 12-inch PowerBook dubbed HotBook because... well, it really is hot; it's often loaned out to friends. Other of his Apple products includes the original 5GB iPod and an AirPort Extreme network in his house.

When asked to prognosticate on the future of Windows and its dominance of the computing scene, Horn said he doesn't give much thought to Windows as it rarely affects his day-to-day life.

"I guess I see that Microsoft is doing whatever they can to maintain the desktop monopoly, but the sheer need to reduce costs will drive more people to Apple and Linux solutions," he says. "Apple is starting to look much better in the media as well, with the iPod, new affordable laptops like the iBook, and the spotlight on the use of Apple hardware and OS X for supercomputing and scientific research. I think that Windows is going to be less and less of an obvious choice now that there are several other, superior choices available that have the stamp of approval of important groups such as the scientific community."

Horn left Apple in the spring of 1984, after doing a final (well, as final as things are in the software world) version of the Finder because he was looking for something new to do: For Horn's insights into the early days of the Macintosh, check out his interview with Adam C. Engst at TidBITS.

However, he also worked with Apple in the late 80's as a consultant in the Newton group, and in the mid-90's with the Advanced Technology group. While there he worked on a project called LiveDoc, which he says was an experiment in automatically structuring documents "so that various recognizers could determine that, for example, 555-1212 was a phone number and 124 Main Street was an address, and provide contextual actions on those items." However, some of LiveDoc's features can be found in Sbook, a Mac OS X, AI-based personal information manager. With Sbook, information is organized in free-format entries -- one for each person or company. Each entry can have any number of postal addresses, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, photographs, URLs and other information.

Horn has no real relationship with Apple and its management team these days, although he says he would certainly consider working at the company again "under the right circumstances." However, his advice for Apple is to "stay the course."

"Continue to make the best computers in the world, with the best software," Horn says. "But at the same time, offer a few more choices: a low-end laptop or $500 original colored iMac would do very, very well. Of course I'm not a marketing wizard, so I don't know in-depth the issues involved, but I do know that when I saw new iMacs on sale at a major mail-order company for under $500, I bought two."

(Other interviews with some of the original Mac team include "The Mac's creator on Apple, Jobs and his new project" and "Andy Hertzfield talks Folklore, open source and Apple.")

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