Panther Feature: 'Piles'

MacRumors · Apr 13, 2003

MacNews.net.tc linked this article from 2000 entitled "Apple Squandering the Advantage".

Of most interest is a description of a long-patented UI feature of Apple's... known as "Piles":

Apple holds a patent on this one. Developed by Gitta Salomon and her team close to a decade ago, a pile is a loose grouping of documents. Its visual representation is an overlay of all the documents within the pile, one on top of the other, rotated to varying degrees. In other words, a pile on the desktop looked just like a pile on your real desktop.

To view the documents within the pile, you clicked on the top of the pile and drew the mouse up the screen. As you did so, one document after another would appear as a thumbnail next to the pile. When you found the one you were looking for, you would release the mouse and the current document would open.

Piles, unlike today?s folders, gave you a lot of hints as to their contents. You could judge the number of documents in the pile by its height. You could judge its composition very rapidly by pulling through it.

A recent Naked Mole Rat Report from MacEdition claims that Mac OS X 10.3 will bring us an implementation of Piles... along with some new dynamic featuers causing windows to "shrink and jump" in response to users' movements. LoopRumors had recently claimed that Panther will be "unlike anything else" and raises hopes on the upcoming release.

TMay · Apr 13, 2003

i suppose....

...microsoft will now patent its competing ui...

....hemmoroids....

I'll be 'itching" for XP when that feature is dropped in!

iJon · Apr 13, 2003

wow, that sounds pretty badass. man i cant wait for wwdc so we can find out whats gonna be in this cat.

iJon

G4scott · Apr 13, 2003

Very Cool. This would really help me organize projects and other things that use multiple files that are hard to find in a folder.

It would also bee cool when organizing video files, where a pile would expand, and play clips of the files inside.

With some work and innovation, this would be a very innovative feature...

jholzner · Apr 13, 2003

I think I'll have to see this in action before I decide if it's worth it...can't wait for 10.3.

vniow · Apr 13, 2003

That sounds very interesting, I wonder how it looks in application?

DHagan4755 · Apr 13, 2003

Hmmm..

I think this feature is something I'd have to see in action before I decide whether or not it's useful.

MacBoy88 · Apr 13, 2003

Cool !

Sounds Cool ! I can't wait for panther !!
(Panther WILL work in my iBook, Right?)

tjwett · Apr 13, 2003

I don't know, sounds kind of annoying to me. then again, i don't like the spring-loaded folders either. still, the more features the better i suppose.

sergeantmudd · Apr 13, 2003

Reliability

I know that if it gets on the front page instead of Page 2 you believe it to be somewhat reliable, but I like what has been done in other posts. After the source of every rumor, comment on the reliablity of the source. I know about the reliability of the big one (Thinksecret and Spymac, great and terrible respectively) but I am not sure about the smaller ones.

bikertwin · Apr 13, 2003

Wasn't this something from Taligent or some other Apple/IBM collaboration? I remember discussions of piles back in my OS/2 days when it was supposed to be the next big thing. (We all know what happened to Taligent.)

Didn't make sense at the time, but the description above sounds more plausible.

Wow. Is Panther really going to be that different?

BillyShears · Apr 13, 2003

I'm not sure I understand this.

What is the benefit to this, as opposed to a folder with thumbnails turned on?

Maybe this is something (as others suggested) that needs to be seen.

chewbaccapits · Apr 13, 2003

Re: i suppose....

Originally posted by TMay
...microsoft will now patent its competing ui...

....hemmoroids....

I'll be 'itching" for XP when that feature is dropped in!

Yeah, T...No kidding..I can't wait till everyone mistakenly believes its inception was MS born...

BTW, even though its a rumor, I'm expecting to pay for this upgrade now. Seem like Panther will be chock full 'o NEW features...Start saving now boys and girls....

mnkeybsness · Apr 13, 2003

sounds sort of like paging through a book quickly. i think this could be a great feature, assuming it's SMOOTH and doesn't lag at all. there are parts of the aqua UI that still aren't smooth enough to everyone out there... on that note, i am really hoping that with 10.3, the UI is really fluid.

beatle888 · Apr 13, 2003

doesnt this sound like that feature apple was working on called clustering? as you moused over certain data it would expand and release sub divisions of that data. it doesnt sound very productive to me UNLESS you can SEE into the documents, that would help.

DakotaGuy · Apr 13, 2003

My guess with all of this new "animation" going on they will probably require a minimum 400Mhz G3 or any G4 processor to run 10.3, so this might be the first time we see some of the older Macs not running anything further then 10.2.5. Of course, as my iMac 400 G3 runs Jaguar pretty good I would think it would be painful on a 233 as it is anyway. Hopefully, like the dock, preferences can be set to avoid too much animation of folder to help performance on older computers.

MorganX · Apr 13, 2003

Piles sounds very cool. Wouldn't it be great if you could share "piles" over the network with a visual indicator on each document if someone else was current accessing it. Something like Mail's dock notification.

Windows shriking and moving based on actions sounds messy.

Freg3000 · Apr 13, 2003

Originally posted by jholzner
I think I'll have to see this in action before I decide if it's worth it...can't wait for 10.3.

Yeah, I don't really understand it and don't know if I'll even need it or use it. This is one of those things you need to wait and see on before making a decision.

MorganX · Apr 13, 2003

Originally posted by bikertwin
Wasn't this something from Taligent or some other Apple/IBM collaboration? I remember discussions of piles back in my OS/2 days when it was supposed to be the next big thing. (We all know what happened to Taligent.)

Didn't make sense at the time, but the description above sounds more plausible.

Wow. Is Panther really going to be that different?

Been a long time since I used OS/2 but you could create groups of related documents and launch with a single icon... Microsoft tried a less elegant Office only solution in Office Binder. Piles sounds much more intuitive and useable.

dynamicd · Apr 13, 2003

Yeah, I may not use this feature but I'm sure it'll just be another thing to show off to my pc friends. And if the rumor is right that next update will be something we've never seen before then I'm sure there will be plenty of other things that I'll be able to make use of.

nagromme · Apr 13, 2003

Sounds cool! Useful? Who knows. But they'll keep the file views we're used to anyway. This would just be one more view to choose from. So why not try something very different? Someone's bound to, may as well be Apple.

Remember "Project X"? Later called "Hotsauce MCF" and made into a plugin for netscape Navigator if I'm remembering correctly. (Something like Meta Content Format??) It was Apple's experimental data browser thingie that let you "fly" forward through 3D-layered "X space"--clusters of color-coded data--and see them expand to reveal more details as you approached. Piles sounds very similar. An interesting experiment--and one you can still download (for OS 9). I downloaded it last year (after MUCH searching) but it's considerably older than that.

http://hotsauce.apple.com no longer works, but here's a Google search that might start your investigation...
http://www.google.com/search?q="Project+X"+apple+download+mcf&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

Seems like there was once a LOT of attention being paid to Hotsauce in the computer science field. In some ways it sounds like MCF could have been what XML is now. (The "3D" browser was just one way of looking at the data.)

Ah--got it: Apple's official page. Good o'l Wayback Machine:
http://web.archive.org/web/19961224042753/http://hotsauce.apple.com/

May or may not be directly related--but that's what this "piles" talk makes me think of. (Well... that and Minority Report.)

Anyway, just because Apple's playing with it doesn't mean it will make the final cut. I still sting from the omission of the Minimize-in-Place which was seen in Jaguar betas. (Talk of an enhanced Panther Dock makes me hope MIP will finally arrive, though--a great improvement on windowshade.)

j33pd0g · Apr 13, 2003

I would like to see this "pile" in action... maybe we'll see some kind of artist rendering?
The only thing I can imagine would be if you held down on a folder long enough its contents would be displayed in a circle around it.
Maybe these "content displays" would have the same kinds of properties found in the dock. Maybe these "content displays" would only represent its given file type, and when you clicked on them you could see a "list menu" of those types of files.
This is what I visualize when I read that description of "piles".

medea · Apr 13, 2003

sounds great, let's hope Panther is as amazing as it is starting to be hyped up to be.
And let's hope for a upgrade discount.......

arn · Apr 13, 2003

Originally posted by j33pd0g

This is what I visualize when I read that description of "piles".

??? Really?

I thought it was clear what it described...

A stack of papers:

(but top down view)

Simply collecting documents of the same type... presumably the user would just drag them into a pile.

So, all my documents from a certain project or topic I can throw into one pile... and then just click on it, and scroll up and down to get to the right one.

That's my interpretation... and I think it would be very useful.

arn

MrMacMan · Apr 13, 2003

Hm... that sounds... weird enough...

I suppose its good, but, um I need to see it in action to get a good idea of what exactally it does do.

Panther Feature: 'Piles'

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