Leopard could introduce a radical change
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.
You nailed the concept that we were trying to describe. Windowing is simply a method of organizing multiple running applications. There are many ways to do that, some of which do not require having multiple rectangles overlapping on the screen at once. And given Core Animation’s predilection for 3D effects and transparency, it’s completely within the realm of possibility that Apple may have decided that there are better ways of organizing applications that users would find more intuitive and flexible.
Thanks for providing some much-needed detail on how it might work!
Carl
I think this is an intriguing concept, but am skeptical of the practical value of such a change. Guess I need to see some conceptual examples. For better or for worse, I’ve adapted to a multi-window, multi-display approach that has become as habitual as how I brush my teeth or tie my shoes. I think for me the change would have to be pretty compelling for me to consider it a real benefit and not just a change.
That said, I hope to be proven wrong.
Yes it’s an interesting concept, and I agree that eventually (someday) windows will probably go out of style. But as a full-time application developer, I believe the assertion that “existing applications would never have to know” is simply wrong. That may be true for some small portion of existing applications — ones where every application window can be freely resized to be any size and aspect ratio, and still look good. But many (indeed most) existing applications have at least some windows that are designed and laid out for a specific aspect ratio, if not pixel size. In existing applications, such windows and dialogs cannot be resized by the user. As such, the operating system would have a tough time displaying them in any context but a rectangular box with the same size & aspect ratio at which they were designed. Doing this without the window metaphor would be quite a trick.
In short, if Apple were going to make a switch like this (and indeed someday they might), they would have to give developers a whole lot more time than from June to October to adapt their software. We’re talking a major paradigm shift, and trust me, that takes time to design and code.
I think the “windowless look” works great for certain classes of application, and those applications can and often already are planning such enhancements. But to suggest that Apple could magically flip a switch and make all applications designed around the window paradigm suddenly work correctly and look good without windows, is (again, from this software developer’s perspective) very naive.
Norvile, I agree that there are bound to be issues with some applications if Apple made a dramatic change like this to the way windows are rendered, but I don’t agree that those issues would be all that widespread. In fact, they would likely concentrate on those applications that “broke the rules” by tinkering with system-level details they shouldn’t, or by making faulty assumptions they shouldn’t have.
Even the issues with non-resizeable window and dialogs you cite shouldn’t present problems once resolution-independence is available and widely adopted by applications developers such as yourself. When it is, the OS can alternatively shrink or grow even fixed-sized panes as needed to fit them into whatever windowing scheme it uses. Special-layer panes such as alerts could be shown with dramatic animation when necessary to catch the users’ attention appropriately, and the application would still not need to know.
I’d be interested to hear more details about what you believe to be obstacles here.
[Received in a private email and reposted here with permission]
Windowing is simply a method of organizing multiple running applications. There are many ways to do that, some of which do not require having multiple rectangles overlapping on the screen at once”
In essence this is available on the Mac right now using virtual desktop (VirtueDesktop) or using any of the multiple desktop distros for *nix, if you keep one desktop per application. This is also one of the OS based features touted in the upcoming 10.5 update.
This is basically how I am currently operating and it works well.
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