Yesterday we had another interesting talk with the professional group Software Ergonomics/SwissCHI  about Raskin.
Raskin is an alternative to the “Finder” application on Mac. It directly shows a preview of your files:

Perfect for photographers, graphic designers and video artists
As the demonstration showed, Raskin is most useful when you have files which are visually distinct. Currently this is hard with documents and music files. Still, the spatial layout may help to find files again.

A different paradigm on the desktop: Zoomable user interface
The idea is compelling: You zoom closer to a file, then you edit it, without knowing that you jumped into an application, and after you are done, you zoom away again. Raskin is not there yet, but goes in this direction. Other examples for zoomable interfaces:
* iPhone Safari Browser
* The tab-organizer of the new Firefox 4 Beta
* Google Earth

Now go to the Raskin website and try the application 30 days for free.