Apple Seeking Mac OS X Visual Interface Designer?

[Marvy]

4. Resolution-independent GUI! A TRUE, fully-scalable, resolution-independent interface, with everything scalable as a whole by a single global slider. See everything (menu text, apps, toolbar buttons, everything) larger OR smaller than we see them now. Show more detail or fit more windows? It will be YOUR choice, and you can change your setting at will. That means everything from window borders to stoplight widgets must be redrawn by apple at much larger bitmap sizes (and some vector images).

This is what I'm hoping for as well. It doesn't have to be 100% vector (such as icons), and it doesn't have to be a "live" slider either - meaning that UI elements could be pre-rendered from vector data into bitmaps, which would be used for display.
I think resolution independance is also an important step, simply because OS X is lagging behind here: Linux and Windows have had resolution independant UI's for years now. It's never good to have to admit: "Well, that's where windows is better."

 

[p0intblank]

Wasn't a similar job posting found a couple months or so? Either way, Leopard is going to be awesome. I just can't think of anything totally new that Apple can add. I'm hoping for something as revolutionary as Spotlight.

 

[nagromme]

Yeah, in Tiger (if you enable it) the UI scaling isn't live, you change the slider and then the res is different for apps from that time forward. (You can even mix apps of different res scalings.) It's a testing/debugging mode though, so it's hard to say how the final feature will work.

(I know XP has better resolution flexibility than OS X, you can change the size of the menu font and window title bars, but it's not truly globally scalable yet is it?)

 

[slb]

Windows Vista is going to have a 3D desktop.

Vista has a flat, two-dimensional desktop like OS X. Controls are rendered onto Direct3D surfaces using the GPU, but the interface is still displayed two-dimensionally and won't be any more 3D than OS X which composites onto OpenGL surfaces. A "3D desktop" would be one where the user actually interacts with a three-dimensional space. Vista is still flat, two-dimensional window surfaces staring at the user. The only actual 3D interface is the perspective-skewed alt-tabbing, which doesn't let you see the whole window face the way Expose does.

That turned out not to be true.

Windows Vista suffered from the WMF flaw and required a patch.