Don Hopkins is an artist and programmer specializing in

human computer interaction Humans (''Homo sapiens'') are the most abundant and widespread species of primate, characterized by bipedalism and exceptional cognitive skills due to a large and complex brain. This has enabled the development of advanced tools, culture, ...

and

computer graphics Computer graphics deals with generating images with the aid of computers. Today, computer graphics is a core technology in digital photography, film, video games, cell phone and computer displays, and many specialized applications. A great de ...

. He is an alumnus of the

University of Maryland The University of Maryland, College Park (University of Maryland, UMD, or simply Maryland) is a public land-grant research university in College Park, Maryland. Founded in 1856, UMD is the flagship institution of the University System of M ...

and a former member of the

University of Maryland Human–Computer Interaction Lab The Human–Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL) at the University of Maryland, College Park is an academic research center specializing in the field of human-computer interaction (HCI). Founded in 1983 by Ben Shneiderman, it is one of the oldest HCI ...

. He inspired

Richard Stallman Richard Matthew Stallman (; born March 16, 1953), also known by his initials, rms, is an American free software movement activist and programmer. He campaigns for software to be distributed in such a manner that its users have the freedom to ...

, who described him as a "very imaginative fellow", to use the term

copyleft Copyleft is the legal technique of granting certain freedoms over copies of copyrighted works with the requirement that the same rights be preserved in derivative works. In this sense, ''freedoms'' refers to the use of the work for any purpose ...

. He coined

Deep Crack In cryptography, the EFF DES cracker (nicknamed "Deep Crack") is a machine built by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in 1998, to perform a brute force search of the Data Encryption Standard (DES) cipher's key space – that is, to dec ...

as the name of the

EFF DES cracker In cryptography, the EFF DES cracker (nicknamed "Deep Crack") is a machine built by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in 1998, to perform a brute force search of the Data Encryption Standard (DES) cipher's key space – that is, to decry ...

. He ported the ''

SimCity ''SimCity'' is an open-ended city-building video game series originally designed by Will Wright. The first game in the series, ''SimCity'', was published by Maxis in 1989 and were followed by several sequels and many other spin-off "''Sim ...

'' computer game to several versions of

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, an ...

and developed a multi player version of ''SimCity'' for X11, did much of the core programming of ''

The Sims ''The Sims'' is a series of life simulation game, life simulation video games developed by Maxis and video game publisher, published by Electronic Arts. The franchise has sold nearly 200 million copies worldwide, and it is one of the best-selling ...

'', and developed robot control and personality simulation software for Will Wright's Stupid Fun Club. He developed and refined

pie menus In user interface design, a pie menu or radial menu is a circular context menu where selection depends on direction. It is a graphical control element. A pie menu is made of several "pie slices" around an inactive center and works best with styl ...

for many platforms and applications including

window manager A window manager is system software that controls the placement and appearance of windows within a windowing system in a graphical user interface. Most window managers are designed to help provide a desktop environment. They work in conjunctio ...

s, Emacs, ''SimCity'' and ''The Sims'', and published a frequently cited paper about pie menus at CHI'88 with John Raymond Callahan,

Ben Shneiderman Ben Shneiderman (born August 21, 1947) is an American computer scientist, a Distinguished University Professor in the University of Maryland Department of Computer Science, which is part of the University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathem ...

and

Mark Weiser Mark D. Weiser (July 23, 1952 – April 27, 1999) was a computer scientist and chief technology officer (CTO) at Xerox PARC. Weiser is widely considered to be the father of ubiquitous computing, a term he coined in 1988. Within Silicon Vall ...

. He has published many

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...

and open source implementations of pie menus for X10, X11,

NeWS News is information about current events. This may be provided through many different media: word of mouth, printing, postal systems, broadcasting, electronic communication, or through the testimony of observers and witnesses to events. N ...

Tcl/tk Tk is a free and open-source, cross-platform widget toolkit that provides a library of basic elements of GUI widgets for building a graphical user interface (GUI) in many programming languages. Tk provides a number of widgets commonly needed to ...

ScriptX ScriptX was a multimedia-oriented development environment created in 1990 by Kaleida Labs; it was discontinued as a product by the time Kaleida Labs went out of business in 1996. Unlike packages such as Macromedia Director, ScriptX was not an aut ...

ActiveX ActiveX is a deprecated software framework created by Microsoft that adapts its earlier Component Object Model (COM) and Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) technologies for content downloaded from a network, particularly from the World Wide We ...

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior, of ...

, OpenLaszlo,

Python Python may refer to: Snakes * Pythonidae, a family of nonvenomous snakes found in Africa, Asia, and Australia ** ''Python'' (genus), a genus of Pythonidae found in Africa and Asia * Python (mythology), a mythical serpent Computing * Python (pro ...

and OLPC, and also proprietary implementations for ''The Sims'' and the

Palm Pilot The PalmPilot Personal and PalmPilot Professional are the second generation of Palm PDA devices produced by Palm Inc (then a subsidiary of U.S. Robotics, later 3Com). These devices were launched on March 10, 1997. Accessories and pricing Pa ...

. Hopkins also wrote demonstrations and programming examples of the ScriptX multimedia scripting language created by the Apple/IBM research spinoff

Kaleida Labs Kaleida Labs formed in 1991 to produce the multimedia cross-platform Kaleida Media Player and the object oriented scripting language ScriptX that was used to program its behavior. The system was aimed at the production of interactive CD ROM titl ...

, developed various OpenLaszlo applications and components, and is a hacker artist known for his artistic cellular automata. He is also known for having written a chapter "The X-Windows Disaster" on

X Window System The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X provides the basic framework for a GUI environment: drawing and moving windows on the display device and interacting wi ...

in the book The UNIX-HATERS Handbook.

Micropolis

Hopkins, supported by

John Gilmore John Gilmore may refer to: * John Gilmore (activist) (born 1955), co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Cygnus Solutions * John Gilmore (musician) (1931–1995), American jazz saxophonist * John Gilmore (representative) (1780–1845 ...

, adapted ''SimCity'' for the OLPC XO-1 laptop. The current version includes pie menus and is explained in depth in a video released by Hopkins. Since its primary objective is education, the OLPC project is looking not just for games, but for tools that enable kids to program their own games. Hopkins programmed Micropolis to make it easy to extend in many interesting ways. He added functionality to let kids create new disasters and agents (like the monster, tornado, helicopter and train), and program them like in many of the other games on the XO. The goals of deeply integrating ''SimCity'' with OLPC's Sugar user interface are to focus on education and accessibility for younger kids, as well as motivating and enabling older kids to learn programming.SimCity for OLPC: Applying Papert's Ideas About Constructionist Education and Teaching Kids to Program
/ref>

''The Sims''

'' is a

simulation video game Simulation video games are a diverse super-category of video games, generally designed to closely simulate real world activities. A simulation game attempts to copy various activities from real life in the form of a game for various purposes such ...

developed by

Electronic Arts Electronic Arts Inc. (EA) is an American video game company headquartered in Redwood City, California. Founded in May 1982 by Apple employee Trip Hawkins, the company was a pioneer of the early home computer game industry and promoted the ...

. The games are known for their very loose guidelines and no specific user goals. They allow the users to simply exist in the virtual world they create. Don Hopkins became involved in ''The Sims'' after he worked at Sun Microsystems. ''The Sims'' were a theme in his work since then and he has contributed to much of the design and conceptual development of the game. He was hired to port ''The Sims'' to Unix. He implemented the usage of pie menus to the game so that users could efficiently carry out actions in the game world.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Hopkins, Don Living people American computer scientists Human–computer interaction Cellular automatists University of Maryland, College Park alumni SimCity Year of birth missing (living people)