A long time ago, before the Internet, you could only run one application at a time, usually with one window.

Eventually you could run several applications at the same time. You still only needed one window per application most of the time, because you were creating things like pictures and documents, and you were focusing on your creations.

Then the Internet arrived. As you surfed and talked to others, you opened more browser windows, more e-mail windows, more IM windows.

After a while windows started getting out of hand, so tabs were introduced in browsers and IM apps to help organize things.

This worked great! Soon tabs started appearing in more applications.

Now tabs are getting out of hand. But who will help organize the tabs? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

(Oh, you don’t have a problem with tabs? Try getting to the fourth tab in your third open browser window. Now try it from the keyboard.)

In addition to the growing problem of navigation, there’s the issue of increased complexity, of information overload. You’re managing more and more applications and windows and tabs to see ever more information. Usually, complexity like this rises until overload threatens, at which time something changes to accommodate even more complexity gracefully.

It’s reasonably safe to assume that Apple is aware that tabs have a problem: they break the window paradigm. Tabs don’t appear in Exposé. You can’t minimize them. And so on.

We already know Leopard will be adding more tabs to iChat and Terminal, so we know Apple is aware of the growing complexity and is working to combat it.

Chances seem good that Leopard will try to fix the broken window paradigm too, perhaps by something as simple as enhancing Exposé to support tabs, but perhaps something more sweeping.

When you buy online, the receipt is online too, as a web page, an e-mail, or both. This is handy, but now your receipts are scattered in different places: some are in e-mails, some are printed, and some might even be lost because you neglected to print that web receipt when you were told to.

It gets worse when you try to correlate them with your offline receipts. And if you need those receipts for itemized deductions come tax time, it can get a lot worse.

Here are 3 time-tested ways to help keep things organized:

1. In Safari, mail all web receipts to yourself. When you’re shown a web receipt, choose Mail Contents of This Page from Safari’s File menu. This automatically copies that web page into a new e-mail in Mail which you can then send to yourself. This directs both web and e-mail receipts into one place: your Inbox. And speaking of your Inbox…

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Leopard may arrive with better window handling if doesn’t eliminate windows altogether. Here are four ways to improve the user experience:

You should be able to unminimize a window using the keyboard.

Mac OS X minimizes the frontmost window to the Dock when you type Command-M, but to unminimize that window—maybe you minimized it by accident—you’re forced to use the mouse.

You should be able to cycle through minimized windows using the keyboard.

In Mac OS X, Command-Tab cycles through applications, including hidden applications. Command-` cycles through the current application’s open windows, but doesn’t include hidden windows (minimized). There’s no good reason for this inconsistency.

Exposé doesn’t include minimized windows, either. A reasonable improvement to Exposé might be to add an option to the F10 view (show all windows for the current application) allowing you to see minimized windows for that application as well.

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For Apple to create a true digital home, devices like your computer and Apple TV need to communicate with each other. To communicate, they must first be able to discover each other. And before even that, they must be able to sense each other.

Sensing requires configuration, and consumers don’t like configuration. Quick, what’s an extended service set identifier? Should you use WPA on your wireless network? WEP-40, or WEP-128?

Most people don’t know, and they shouldn’t have to.

Conquering configuration will be a crucial step. As more devices appear in the home, the headache of making them work together threatens to spoil everything. It’s bad enough tweaking settings on a computer screen, but what do you do when devices are too small to have a screen?

According to Apple, you use RFID. And configuration just goes away.

In a patent application filed in 2006 Apple provided a glimpse of how devices might use RFID tags to connect with your wireless home network without requiring any configuration at all. RFID tags are tiny chips, tiny ID tags that announce what a device is and what it can do. Stores are already using them to track inventory, but they can be used for many other purposes, such as authenticating passports.

Here’s how using RFID for network configuration might work according to that patent, beginning with your new iPhone as an example:
 

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Finding Home in Mac OS X listed five Home icons appearing in Mac OS X.

Someone pointed out two more. Can you identify where they appear?

BlackFriars’ Marketing raised an interesting idea: Leopard might do away with windows. A radical idea with a daunting list of complications…but interesting. Afterwards, others commented about whether it makes sense, and whether it’s really possible, even using Core Animation.

Read Core Animation Indeed for examples of existing animation in Mac OS X.

Whether doing away with windows makes sense is impossible to say until you know the particulars of what would replace them. Windows have been around a long time, like forever, but they’re not perfect. Something someday will replace them.

New products like Apple TV and iPhone don’t use windows at all, so it’s not a stretch to think they might disappear eventually on the desktop as well. True, you don’t multitask on those products in the same way—AppleTV does one thing at a time, and even if iPhone let’s you take a call while looking at photos, you can only do one visual thing at a time, and it’s the visual multitasking that windows really enable.

Windows have their limits. Open enough of them, and multitasking can get harder. Then, windows can get in the way, which Exposé was introduced to work around. Still, it’s hard to say whether it’s actually time to replace windows.

But it is possible. And existing applications would never have to know.

In Tiger, when Preview displays a picture and Safari displays a web page, they draw into a simple rectangle of a certain width and height. They own the rectangle they draw into, and barely know windows even exist.

Mac OS X owns the windows. It wraps windows around what Preview and Safari draw. The applications remain unaware of the details of the window.

Leopard could eliminate windows to display the applications in an entirely different way, and the applications would never know.

It would be backwards-compatible too.

Leopard introduces huge improvements to iChat, the largest since Panther in 2004:

Features in Leopard like screen sharing and iChat Theater let you video chat in new ways, while backdrops and Photo Booth effects improve how you look while you chat.

But there’s a problem.

In real-life, we rely on visual cues during conversation to help us interpret what others are saying. We watch for eye contact in particular to be sure others are listening and interested. Breaking eye contact when others are speaking can offend.

Look at our language. People who don’t see eye-to-eye can’t agree. Someone who won’t look you straight in the eye is lying, ashamed, or embarrassed—all subliminal and negative qualities associated with avoiding eye contact, including during a video chat.

But in a video chat it’s nearly impossible to maintain eye contact. To watch each other onscreen you have to look away from the camera, making it appear as though you’re looking somewhere else. When you see others looking away, it’s confusing on a fundamental level. Logic says they’re interested, instinct says they’re not. They’re not looking you in the eye.

Even Apple’s marketing materials admit there’s a problem. Look at this photo on the left from Apple’s Leopard website demonstrating the new video backdrop feature.

She’s looking down at your keyboard, not you! This happens because while she is watching you on her screen, her camera sits higher up, maybe an iSight attached to the top of a large monitor.

Putting the built-in cameras close to the screen on newer Macs helps, but the broken eye contact is still noticeable. And it’s even more noticeable in HD.

Then Apple had an idea.

What if the screen is the camera? What if you could look right at the screen during a video chat? Wouldn’t that solve the problem? Wouldn’t people then think you were looking right at them? Wouldn’t that make video chats even more personal and emotional?

We may soon find out. Apple filed a patent application in 2006 for placing sensing elements between the pixels of an LCD monitor. Each sensor only sees a tiny part of the whole, but software merges those tiny parts into a complete picture. With fast Intel processors and H.264 encoders, possibly in hardware, this could all happen in real-time.

Leopard may introduce new Macs and monitors with these remarkable new cameras-in-the-screen.

Small PDF documents display nicely in Safari, but larger documents are more comfortable to read in Preview.

But how do you get the document from Safari to Preview? If the url ends in .pdf like http://www.botanybay.com/creatures.pdf, you can save the file somewhere then open the saved file in Preview, but it’s an effort. And you can’t even do that if the url doesn’t end in .pdf.

It’s easy: just Control-click, and choose Open with Preview.

You probably already know that Mac OS X’s Home improves the home directory found in Unix and Linux systems to convey identity, ownership, privacy, security, and privilege.

But can you identify where these five Home icons appear in Mac OS X?