Sunday, September 23, 2007

The countdown to Leopard

One of the most exiting new features in the upcoming Leopard has got to be Stacks. This could be a great new workflow for people who have to manage several files all over their system. For myself, I often find that I have a desktop littered with various files. What Stacks aims to do is to group those files by kind and stack them ontop of each other in a 3D style pile. With a click you can open the fan of files or have them arranged in grid. Thus saving a whole bunch of real estate on the desktop. Here's what you can expect from Apple in Leopard...



But of course what Apple does well has usually been done by other people first. I recall seeing the following video about a year ago and just highlights exactly the kind of bleeding-edge stuff that people are working on. An attempt to make the desktop a more intuitive space and more like the kind of space we actually have around us. Don't forget when the personal computer first came out we were expected to take on the notion of files and folders to understand the hierarchy of a computer's directory. This is just the next step....



And could this be the future. Apple is well in place to provide a home computing system like the following video. Multi-touch iMac? Open GL graphics. It's all there. The question is do we really want to be using hand gestures to navigate our personal computers?

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