Apple Exploring 3D Desktop and Application Interfaces

[Peace]

I thought Apple had already patented "stacks" ?

 

[wrcardon]

swarmster got it right

My guess is that a 3D environment will be engaged by hitting a button (a la expose, timemachine, etc) rather than being the full time OS. This will be likely first be rolled in to the OS in an Expose upgrade.

Instead of multiple windows displayed flat on a 2D desktop you will get the last picture, windows with 3D stacks for each program which you can scroll through by hovering over and rolling the mouse ball on your mighty mouse.

 

[ivladster]

Wow

This is amazing. Only apple thinks of this stuff. I am sure it will be optional to turn it off and on. I love how you can stack windows on the bottom and pretty much see everything at once. Very smart.

I don't understand when people say: "I like mac the way it is" That's what everyone said about Tiger. Now Leopard came out everyone love it too. Apple knows better I think what will work and what will fail.

Their attention to detail is amazing. Plus how will Apple compete against Microsoft that keeps on copying. This is great research by Apple. I hope 10.7 will have new way to organize windows and files.

 

[olternaut]

My feeling is that this won't hit until Mac OSXI or OS11.

 

[Aeolius]

This one:

...was done in 1997 in the movie "Men in Black". They had an oval display in their headquarters that had items magnifying in the Dock below.

 

[RedTomato]

Look at how much of the screen is wasted so it can have a 3-D appearance. If that screen belonged to a MacBook then the application window is only going to be a little over 11".

The smaller the screen, the less cluttered it needs to be, so Apple should make it so we can ditch the dock and use the old style menu bar.

I actually quite like this implementation, it looks like it could be a workable way of organising projects. But you are right, it will only be worth it on a big monitor, 20'' plus. At work we use macbooks hooked to 20'' and 24'' monitors. I think with the macbook screen, it would have to be turned off, but on a 24'', it would work very nicely. As some posters have said above, this is most likely to be optional activation, like Expose or Spaces.

For small monitors, your suggestion of going back to the menu bar has some merit. I have a WM6.1 mobile phone, and the start menu displays which programs are running, (it's crappy in other ways but never mind). But remember you could just make the dock really really small, and it'd probably take even less space than a menu bar which has to show names as well as icons.

 

[Saladinos]

Dude! Don't you know your way around the 4th dimension yet?

The 4th dimension is time.

 

[Firefly2002]

Eh.... might be occasionally useful at very high resolutions (I suppose widescreens make them particularly practical), but not often. If they do use it, it should be optional... and switchable back to the usual 2D.

 

[aarchitect]

Silicon Graphics (SGI) used to have a 3D interface on their IRIS workstations at least 15 years ago. I remember in grad school hooking up the 3d headset and navigating the "virtual space". It was the Gibsonian cyberspace or straight out of Lawnmower Man that was all the rage. The average computer didn't have the graphics power to until recently to come even close to using it but we are almost there. The question always is how to render a 2-D world in 3-D, which is kind of the opposite problem of what I deal with everyday as an architect.

 

[Daniel78]

Automatically hide and show like dock.

Practical as long as it works like the dock with automatically hide and show.

 

[twoodcc]

very interesting. i bet this doesn't happen with 10.6 though. either 10.7 or 11.0 is my guess. and that's if it even happens at all

 

[liptonlover]

A way to use 3D would be "grouping" applications that are currently running into cubes, to create projects. When coding I use a bunch of windows in a handful of apps, and I have them open all at the same time. If I could have this cube of applications in the center that I could rotate quickly to get to the right app, without taking up more screen space, that'd be great. The only problem would potentially be drag and drop between applications.

Two other advantages to a 3D workspace is more room, and more wall room. People already mentioned putting secondary stuff on the side walls, like itunes. You also have more cubic room for your desktop. The problem is quickly navigating it.

 

[TJMcFisty]

This looks totally unusable.

Unless you argue for a truly immersive 3D environment with goggles and whatnot, in which case it isn't only the desktop metaphor that becomes unusable, but the whole computer system.

VR failed not only as a technology, but as a concept. Why people keep barking up that tree is beyond me.

Flat screen, flat images. Even our vision isn't really 3D, we can only distinguish depth based on horizontal distance... because our eyes are only offset horizontally.

Blah.

Spoken by philistine that's never worked in a 3D development application.

We distinguish depth on more than horizontal distance/eyes being offset--light and occlusion play large roles in determining depth. Without those factors, people with one eye wouldn't function very well in a 3D world.

Anyway, I've been dreaming of a 3D OS for quite some time, provided the design apps running on top were as well. What official has announced that VR failed as a concept? It's just extremely hard to implement and make saleable--give me a no muss, no fuss two handed/haptic environment, and my productivity doubles.

 

[jarjarblinks]

I imagine myself working with a desktop that has the functions as demonstrated in the vid.

- Making icons larger and harder to "bump" around so to remonstrate their importance? *damn the important documents are gona be there no matter what and if I accidentally delete them (hardly), Im gona restore it from the Trash Can. Or Time machine.

- lassoing the icons together *err, right now we create a folder and dump it into the folder? we can even name the folder as and what we want eg. Ibiza trip photos

- throwing the icons anyway in a corner *thanks. my wireless mighty mouse can do that too with a flick of my hand

- having the icons in cover flow, grid or fan *Leopard, baby.

- using a pen (if I heard the vid correctly) to move the icons around *damn if I had a terminal with larger real estate like a 24" iMac I'm gona be so damn tired after 10 mins. Not to say having to pick the pen up and down constantly.

- shrinking and crumpling the less important icons * Why don't I just dump the fella into my Trash Can? What, I cant decide if its meant to be deleted or not?

- Now if that version of OS is gona cost me say $200, and I like to have my desktop clean and organised, say, 2 files and 2 folders. Im gona feel shortchanged if the main value of it is the cosmetic appeal of the desktop and the 3D dsnt apply to the programs or have any other major overhaul.
I wonder how much its gona eat off the battery too. I shudder at a mere 2 hr battery lifespan.

That being said, its all clean bow wow now undoubtedly. Something to wow the peeps around. But I'll still stick to Leopard as it is.

 

[APPLENEWBIE]

This looks totally unusable... Blah.[/I]*

Ditto.

The innovation that would be most helpful to me would be an operating system that does not, maybe cannot CRASH. OS X is much better than windows that way (in my experience), but it could still use some love...

 

[RTiii320]

Amazing really.

 

[ebouwman]

it looks like its one of those things that look really cool but is really inefficient and unecessary

They could be super inefficient ya, but maybe if they developed a new input device, or something it might be more usable.

Imagine one of those glove things, and then instead of a mouse pointer you had a little hand on the screen, and you could grab and move and throw stuff around. Maybe pinch a window to make it smaller, or throw it to the back of the box and out of your way.

Now that would be sweet, although completely impractical, but ya, really really sweet

but that looks like Microsoft Bob!

I'm going to have to agree, to a small extent though

 

[ebouwman]

My feeling is that this won't hit until Mac OSXI or OS11.

maybe it is os11, as in, it would be almost a completely new generation, or redesign of the OS

 

[haravikk]

Seems gimmicky but ultimately pointless, I doubt it would be particularly useful; a monitor is a 2-d device, stick to 2-d ideas with the odd 3d effect for prettiness please

 

[alexbates]

maybe it is os11, as in, it would be almost a completely new generation, or redesign of the OS

I think they will call it OS X 11.0. I don't think that 3D desktop is going to be for a while, probably not until OS X 11.0. Does anyone think that 10.6 could be the last operating system before Apple decides to completely redesign the GUI?

 

[Masquerade]

This one:

...was done in 1997 in the movie "Men in Black". They had an oval display in their headquarters that had items magnifying in the Dock below.

wow a virtual reality periscope!

 

[headfuzz]

thts pretty kl , tho im guessing this was before they invented spaces

Apple didn't invent Spaces. Virtual desktops have been a staple feature of various operating systems' GUI's for over 20 years. OS/2 Warp had it back in 1996, numerous window managers for X window servers (ie Unix / Linux / Unix-like OS's) have had them for well over a decade, and according to Wikipedia, the Amiga 1000 had them back in 1985. Spaces is just Apple's implementation of a very, very old idea with no real additional functionality.

Money for old rope. I howled wth laughter back when Leopard had just been released as the fanboy sales guy in Cancom (local Apple reseller)'s face dropped after he'd been trying to tell me how awesome and ahead of the game this new feature of Leopard was when I subsequently gave him a lesson in GUI design history.

 

[Zerias]

Patent will be rejected. Looking Glass 3D was demonstrated by Jonathan Schwartz back in 2003, and the LG3d project was open sourced in 2004 : http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Linux-and-Open-Source/Sun-Opens-Its-3D-Looking-Glass-Linux-Desktop/

Prior art also exists in Compiz and it's re-absorbed fork of Beryl. Beryl can be observed on the Mepis 6.5 release, made on 04/04/2007 http://www.mepis.org/node/13328

Actually, in all truth, the Drawings submitted by Apple look like carbon copies of Mepis 6.5. Not at all surprising since Warren Woodford is one of the NeXT developers.

Anyways, Compiz itself is from 2006 an accompanied the launch of Novell's XGL X-server : http://www.novell.com/news/press/novell_raises_the_bar_for_the_linux_desktop

So... this isn't really news, and from initial looks, unless Apple has done a lot of work since the patent filings, they are still beyond where Compiz-Fusion is today.

 

[Aeolius]

Seems gimmicky but ultimately pointless, I doubt it would be particularly useful; a monitor is a 2-d device, stick to 2-d ideas with the odd 3d effect for prettiness please

But monitors as we know them won't be limited to 2D projections forever:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/10/06/holographic.television/index.html

 

[MattInOz]

I like how the bottom surface is depicted as working. Stacking windows like photographs in front of the traditional desktop. like the entire bottom portion of your screen becomes an extended dock.

This would work really well on larger screens like the 30" monitor, but I can see this being something you'd need to turn off on the 13" macbook or air.

I would hope that apps (especially pro apps with many palettes and tools) would be able to continue to access all of the screen real estate.

How cool would it be if the 3d part of the finder/desktop was activated like expose and your desktop zoomed back in 3d at the touch of a button to reveal the 3d interface elements.

Mmmm. Eye Candy. *drool*

Maybe this is why the newer Keyboards have only one expose key and F8 for spaces has Play/Pause on it.

This would allow expose, spaces functions all in one view. so only need one key. Although Agree with others did does seem more geared to Touchscreen than Mouse