Don Hopkins is anartist andprogrammer specializing inhuman computer interaction andcomputer graphics. He is an alumnus of theUniversity of Maryland[1] and a former member of theUniversity of Maryland Human–Computer Interaction Lab.
He inspiredRichard Stallman, who described him as a "very imaginative fellow", to use the termcopyleft.[2] He coinedDeep Crack as the name of theEFF DES cracker.[1] He ported theSimCity computer game to several versions ofUnix and developed a multi player version ofSimCity for X11, did much of the core programming ofThe Sims, and developed robot control and personality simulation software forWill Wright's Stupid Fun Club.
He developed and refinedpie menus for many platforms and applications includingwindow managers,Emacs,SimCity andThe Sims, and published a frequently cited paper about pie menus at CHI'88 with John Raymond Callahan,Ben Shneiderman andMark Weiser.[3] He has published manyfree software andopen source implementations of pie menus forX10, X11,NeWS,Tcl/tk,ScriptX,ActiveX,JavaScript,OpenLaszlo,Python andOLPC, and also proprietary implementations forThe Sims and thePalm Pilot.
Hopkins also wrote demonstrations and programming examples of the ScriptX multimedia scripting language created by the Apple/IBM research spinoffKaleida Labs, developed variousOpenLaszlo applications and components, and is ahacker artist known for his artistic cellular automata.[4] He is also known for having written a chapter "The X-Windows Disaster" onX Window System in the bookThe UNIX-HATERS Handbook.
Hopkins, supported byJohn Gilmore, adaptedSimCity for theOLPCXO-1 laptop.[5] The current version includes pie menus and is explained in depth in a video[6] 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.[7] 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 integratingSimCity with OLPC'sSugar user interface are to focus on education and accessibility for younger kids, as well as motivating and enabling older kids to learn programming.[8]
The Sims is asimulation video game developed byElectronic Arts. 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 inThe Sims after he worked atSun Microsystems.[1]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 portThe 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.
