Just testing to make sure comments are working.
Sorry guys, your argument doesn't hold water. Three months' worth of developer time with an operating system is VERY little time to get up to speed, especially if you have a program that winds up breaking in the new OS. New programming features have to be understood, incorporated into an existing design (which inevitably must be tweaked to accommodate the new features), and thoroughly tested.
Your idea is interesting, but you really don't have a shred of supporting evidence.
The iPod interface is nice and my thumb likes it. I DON'T think I would want my Mac to work like a giant iPod; overlapping windows seem more efficient to me, at least until you convince me otherwise.
I agree that Leopard will feature a "refreshed" UI, with some very snazzy and impressive use of CoreAnimation, and several new UI additions on the level of Aqua's sheets or Dock, but I strongly doubt that Apple is going to break the "W" element of WIMP completely.
What they *may* do, however, is introduce (as a new user-luring trial balloon of sorts) some new and advanced forms of UI for a focused, specialized Apple application. For example: a version of Google Maps with a Apple UI that utilizes Jeff Han-like gestural UI for navigation via capturing motion from built-in iSights. Or something. ; )
Carl,
I don't think that you are that you are that far away from the truth. Steve Jobs even mentioned that the future battle of operating systems will be all about hot user GUI's. Apple CoreAnimation, CoreAudio, CoreImage and other Core Technologies are the big guns brought in position.
Thanks for all the comments. We have been kicking this around for a while now, so it's not a sudden epiphany. One of the things that made me think about it was installing the program Spirited Away, and realizing how much overlapping windows contribute to cognitive clutter. Do you need the ability to move between environments? Absolutely. Do you need to have little rectangles that you waste time on constantly resizing, minimizing, and arranging? Not so much.
One more thought. Our claim isn't that windows will disappear entirely. They'll be like OS9 -- deprecated and not the focus of new development for at least a release or two. But Apple's been advertising its direction in Leopard with its own interfaces for a while. We just think we're picking up on the hint.
One of my analyst friends once said that the mark of a great analyst is identifying the obvious -- before anyone else does. Look at all the current Apple apps and look for the common theme in the interfaces. It's an interesting study.
Thanks for all the comments -- looking forward to reading more!
Carl
"the mark of a great analyst is identifying the obvious -- before anyone else does"
We inventors strive to achieve this as well....
The idea of doing away with overlapping windows is intriguing, though I'm not exactly sure I understand what kind of UI you're saying will replace it. Are you saying that all applications will have full-screen interfaces like Time Machine? Certainly the new Spaces desktop management feature will change how I use my computer, but if Safari has it's own beautiful full-screen UI and iChat has it's own beautiful full-screen UI, what happens when I want to be looking at both programs on my screen simultaneously? Maybe I'm entirely misunderstanding what you're saying. I do think that Core Animation will provide for some great UIs, just look at iTunes with full-screen Coverflow. All it needs is the iPhone's ability to flip over album covers to select tracks and it will be truly stunning.
I do agree, however, that it's very likely Leopard was simply delayed so that consumers and the media would focus on the iPhone, and only the iPhone, this summer. Seriously, after WWDC there will be a few articles in the mainstream media about the feature-complete Leopard demo, but it will pale in comparison to the number of stories about the launch of the iPhone. It makes sense to stagger the launches, and smart use of media attention is one of Apple's strongest abilities.
The concept I have in my head is that you deal with multiple apps through 3D layering and compositing of the images. The front-most app is generally opaque. If you want to use a dialog box or panel from that app, it would translucently layer on top of that opaque screen. If you want to use the information on another app, you touch a screen or keyboard button (Alt-Tab?) that allows you to move up or down the stack of applications, just like in time machine. Alternatively, you could graphically animate moving among them in 3D, a la Front Row.
BTW, multi-touch gestures could make this a lot more intuitive than you might think. Imagine flicking down to push down an app and flicking up to move an application up, and you get the idea.
We have most of these graphical elements in our UIs today, but they are second class citizens. Our hypothesis is that based upon the success of these minimalist interfaces in Apple TV, iPhone, et al, Leopard might be designed to use them in new ways.
BTW, Microsoft has a similar concept that it is demonstrated using touch-screen panels, so it's not like Apple would be completely out in left field with this. It would, however, be the first company to pioneer something new like this for a mainstream OS. And that would be hugely noteworthy.
Overlapping windows and mice were radical at Xerox PARC in 1976. Steve Jobs and Co. may be thinking that they can do better than 30-year-old technology with today's hardware. You know what? We think so too!
Carl
I wouldn't put it passed Apple to have something like this in development. In fact I would bet they have a few such ideas developing in tandem and are putting the different systems through their paces.
Remember how much of a shock it was when we found out there where intel macs running os x from the very beginning.
"Remember how much of a shock it was when we found out there where intel macs running os x from the very beginning."
That didn't surprise me, since Steve had had NeXTSTEP on a ThinkPad for his personal machine for a while. I WAS surprised-- no SHOCKED-- when it was announced we would be switching to Intel, though. PowerPC was having troubles racking up the MHz numbers, and the power consumption had been increasing for a while, but I had no idea Intel had been able to improve their offerings by so much. I'd figured that PowerPC would "win" in the end.....
If I remember those early days of OS X, that (no windows) was the proposed interface, untill one of the original Finder creators push against it over the web...
Mmm, I really don't think you have it here.
When I first read that title I thought it meant the end to Windows - that is where I think we are headed, but probably not yet.
I think the delay was purely for development reasons. Now Apple has to justify why someone would go to WWDC if Leopard is not done. The answer is that developers will get a build that is feature complete - so they can start working.
We also have new features like the iChat theater and Time Machine. I can see Apple wanting developers to rev their apps so that they can utilize that when Leopard ships. 3 months is not a lot of time so better to get them started now.
At the same time, I think the whole industry is constantly surprised by Apple's aggressiveness to break "the rules." They threw away OS9, made their own mail client and browser, online service, office suite - all these things that were supposedly not possible because of MSFT dominance. I look forward to more of that... Should be cool to see what we get.
The biggest reason for using multiple windows is when using multiple applications. For example, using a text editor to hold notes, a layout program to create something and preview to view the latest draft copy pdf.
Apple did come up with Expose to manage multiple windows. It would be great if they had some new way to manage views of multiple applications that actually improved productivity.
I think you are off the mark on this one. There is no comparison here to OS9 - remember, that is completely incompatible with OS X- the only way to run both is to dual-boot, as the first flat-panel iMacs did, or run "Classic" mode, which was frankly a disaster- they did not "deprecate" OS9- you have to run one or the other. From day one.
Unless they have written tons and tons of "legacy" Tiger code into your idea of Leopard - ie, turned it into Windows XP/Vista - then this new interface of yours would presumably break every existing OS X program.
The whole point of OS X, and the secret of it's efficiency and success, is that it was a (somewhat traumatic for lots of folks) clean, complete break from OS 9.
If this is another Classic/Rosetta/Tiger emulation deal... heaven help us all. That certainly would defy everything Steve Jobs has said about Leopard to date, and in my opinion, be a huge mis-step.
Well written and entertaining article, but it doesn't make a lick of sense.
Apple will not introduce a "new interface" in leapard-- no way.
They learned that lesson when they introduced the newton. If you look closely you can see that the iPhone has "newton lessons" written all over it.
Core animation is a good core technology...and they will move the UI a little bit forward in terms of its animation and interactivity.
They are probably working to migrate the interface to better paradigms-- but this is being done with the iPhone, not Leopard.
Assuming the iphone works, they will attempt some new UI improvements in one of the iLife or other Apple apps.
this way if the new ui concepts are a failure, he damage is limited.
Apple is not betting the company on a radical new version of an established product... they can go all out wiht new products like the iPod and iPhone (but even there they are careful to make sure they understand the market very well before doing so.)
Apple always wants developers to adopt new features so that they can drive new OS adoption rates... and every WWDC is a tutorial and sales presentation on these new features to get developers adopting them.
I'm sure there will be some new stuff at WWDC and it will probably be interesting, but it will not be radical... and if it is, the radical newness will be limited to an application of single feature.
Not a redesign of the OS.
This kind of speculation is typical of fanboys who think apple's introducing a new machine thats an order of magnitude better than anything on the market-- Apple doesn't work that way. The Macintosh came aobut in the days when you could do that-- and still almost failed.
Apple is not going to act irresponsibly.
So, you want a file manager panel like Windows v3.11's file manager?!? Ick.
IF there is a new metaphor, it will be in addition to, not in place of, the traditional Finder. Lest people forget the user revolt over the OS X beta that did away with the traditional Finder's window views and replaced them with the column view ONLY.
this article is way off base in so many ways. Don't even know where to begin.
All interesting comments. So here's a question for those of you who doubt any new radical interface: why in heck would Apple spend all this time doing Core Animation as a major feature of Leopard? And why has transparency become such a big deal? I'll also point out that Windows Vista has some fairly radical ways of stacking windows transparently in Aero, although clearly they are keeping the windows paradigm.
One more point: I never said that old windowed applications would no longer work. I said that all the new Apple applications would use transparency and 3D as ways to prioritize information instead of windows. The key at WWDC will be to sell developers on using this new visual paradigm in their applications. So it wouldn't break WWDC as a developer selling session either.
My prediction: there's a reason that iLife and iWorks won't be introduced until Leopard. I believe those are the poster-child applications of the new interface. And even at the moment, none of those apps use overlapping windows except as expanded dialogs and video presentation.
Keep the comments coming,
Carl
I'd say Core Animation is being aggrandized a bit too much: my belief is that Apple just saw a way of translating some of its Motion development into a generalized API for animating textured rectangles in 3D space, just the same way it seemed to happen with Core Image and Core Video for hardware-accelerated shaders. Core Animation will be great for simplifying keyframe animation programming, but that's all there is to it. It is not something with the scope of, say, WinForms, although it would be interesting to see how Core Animation affects current apps' GUIs (probably it'll just help making certain manipulations easier to program and easier to the eye). That some iLife apps would come to depend on this API is just a natural thing: syncing Leopard apps with Leopard APIs helps development and eye-candying them.
The thing is, the true gigantic effort required for a radical GUI change is conceiving it, defining it, prototyping and testing, refining, testing, refining, testing!!!
When one sees Core Animation, the first thing that comes to mind are… er… screensavers. Radical GUI ideas? Time Machine is a curious piece of work: that it goes fullscreen seems due to it not wanting to feel like a windowed app but a Very Important system tool, and helping the user focus on an isolated group of files, but it wasn't the only way of doing it: it is a debatable choice. Windows versus fullscreen panes versus multipane windows versus… I don't know, Hollywood computer interfaces… Myself I welcome back the multipane window (see Adobe CS3, plus does anyone remember StrataStudio?): too much palettitis lately. Full screen windowing or paneling? The times I use Windows I feel the fullscreen windows for the main tasks are quite comfortable most of times.
I don't hope for anything really radical (I'd just wish that they FTFF :D
Overlapping windows issues??!
Learn: Cmd-H and Option-Cmd-H
Done.
I vote with you Carl; something is up and it has to do with core animation as I have been saying off and on. Remember when they showed core animation off they were quick to point out that all this could be done with a relatively small amount of code... It' won't be long now till we know anyway 
If you look at iPhoto, Pages, and iWebb the pattern is clear that reducing window clutter and user confusion is an Apple priority for the consumer Mac. Just compare Pages to Word--It does much more ( like newsletters) with a lot less user confusion. Also tools such as the photo adjustment sliders are consistent across iPhoto, Pages and iWebb.
As iPods gave birth to novel uses such as podcasts I think iPhone is a new media convergence appliance that by widespread use encourages novel applications for consumer use on the go and then a desire by users to get a Mac to integrate it all. One only needs to look at the CISCO deal to see where Steve Jobs wants to take the iPhone: http://arstechnica.com/journals/...ng-through-
voip
Leopard I think is probably being designed to more effectively integrate the iPod, iPhone, AppleTV experience for the working consumer. Apples byword is "simplify the workplace" while Windows continues to bloat its software with redundancy and extras most people never use. That is why I think that Apple will incorporate something like Parallels that is better supported by the Mac OS--Leopard may even bundle a Home XP or Vista service pack as an option. Jobs wants consumers to explore the difference and to take their experience back into the workplace where discontent with Windows is still brewing.
Something somewhat similar to Core Animation exists in Vista. It's part of the .Net 3 Framework, called Windows Presentation Foundation. It encompasses ideas of 2D, 3D, document and multimedia presentation and interaction. Also Silverlight is a cross platform subset of WPF; it lacks certain features like 3D rendering though.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Win...tion_Foundation
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