Whatever happened to... Mac OS X Leopard? | The Register

Piles is Apple innovation that it first demonstrated 14 years ago. Three years ago it was touted for inclusion in Panther, and we took the opportunity to discuss it with Gitta Salomon, one of the designers.

The researchers described Piles as "a less rigid categorization system" than folders. Testers liked the concept because it gave them more organizational flexibility in two important ways. Piles were used to defer categorizing items into a hard hierarchy - particularly useful for incoming stuff - and were more easily browsable than folders, too.

The increasingly cantankerous [Ed: shurely not possible] Andrew Orlowski, whose sub-Dvorkian shtick consists of bad-mouthing companies with a strong fan base (ie, Google or Apple) has taken on Steve Jobs and his Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) preview keynote at the Apple World Wide Developer Conference.

The essence of Orlowski's complaint is that Apple's innovation with 10.6 doesn't match the "Vista 2.0" and "Hasta la vista, Vista" hype. Ignoring, for now, the fact that clever slogans designed to rally the Mac developer faithful may not actually be a sound measure of software innovation, I think Orlowski undersells some of what we saw of Leopard.

First, there's the blithe dismissal of TimeMachine, Apple's OS-level continuous data protection service. Given how central computers have become to everyday life, most of us are pretty cavalier about protecting our data. For example, if one were to have a drive failure that wiped out hundreds of dollars of iTunes Music Store purchases, without a backup, you'd have no option but to repurchase all that music. A lot of stuff (like pictures of your kids), can't be repurchased. TimeMachine addresses this issue, and does it with a user interface so simple and intuitive, everyone will be able to use it effectively. Seems like a pretty big improvement to me.

That interface, by the way, is enabled by another Leopard improvement: Core Animation. Core Animation lets developers create 3D animated interfaces for their applications easily. With TimeMachine, for example, you can fly through your email inbox or photo collection through time. If one were so inclined, one could even create Andrew's beloved "Piles" as an alternative way to organize and interact with files. I expect a lot of people will be so inclined, in fact, and we'll see a lot of applications try out new and interesting ways to manipulate data and files.

Leopard will be able to support these intensive new interfaces because it's a 64-bit OS (front-to-back, if you will: graphics, frameworks, scripting languages, BSD core). This also means that Leopard will be able to address huge amounts of physical and virtual memory.

That's only a quick look at just three of the features Jobs and company touted yesterday.