The WWDC keynote starts in 20 minutes. Here’s a prediction regarding the Leopard user interface:

• System-wide Dark Gray appearance, darker even than currently seen in iLife 06.
• Transparent dark-gray “smoky” utility panels.
• Limited use of resolution independence, possibly for the menu bar.
• Reworked Time Machine, without the stars but keeping the essential 3D appearance.
• Pervasive use of Core Animation, especially in Expose, user switching, logging in and out, and presentations.
• Keynote will use Core Animation everywhere.
• New Core Animation screensavers, and an animated desktop background.

Regarding resolution independence, third-party developers won’t yet have upgraded their applications properly to support resolution independence, and Apple won’t want the users to see awkward transitions between “pretty” and “pixelated” windows. so we won’t see a complete adoption of resolution independence yet, but that may still allow the system itself to use it for certain things, like an easier-to-read menu bar and cursor on 30″ monitors.

At the very least, let’s hope Apple shows us the real and complete Leopard at last, with no more delayed surprises.

Apple’s been thinking about remote controls for years now, about their current problems, and how they need to balance usability against a broad and growing feature set.

From a patent application Apple filed in 2002:

Remote controls for complex appliances such as home stereo systems or video disk players have myriad buttons and switches to control the many functions of the appliance. While all of these buttons and switches are necessary for complete control of the appliance, users typically use only a small subset of the total controls on the remote control. The controls that are not normally used clutter the remote control and can cause confusion to the user when trying to locate a seldom-used feature.
[...]

While universal remote controls attempt to address the problem of multiple remote controls, these devices are even more complex to operate, further confusing the user. [Emphasis added]
— Background, U.S. Patent 6,914,551, July 5, 2005

So Apple’s saying that the static arrangement of controls on a remote control forces manufacturers to include more keys and buttons than users typically need, making remotes hard to use and unable to adapt as needs change.

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When you unlock the iPhone, a subtle three-act choreography plays out in under three-quarters of a second, an example of the remarkable new Core Animation and playful spirit powering the device.

Prelude

Apple hasn’t said so yet, but your iPhone will probably auto-lock after a while to display your desktop picture with the date and time, then eventually fade to black to conserve battery power if at rest. When you nudge or move the iPhone, your desktop picture and date and time will reappear, along with the shimmering words, “slide to unlock”.

Slide that lock to begin the choreography.

If you want to follow along at full-size, watch Apple’s iPhone ad online. When the movie starts playing, pause it, rewind to the beginning, then move frame-by-frame using the left and right arrow keys on your keyboard.

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We need new sounds in Mac OS X. You’ve probably heard every one of the current sounds listed on the right, and you might even cringe a little when thinking of some of them. Bottle is too strident, too high-frequency. Morse and Purr aren’t cleanly recorded—listen and you’ll hear noise in there. Others like Sosumi, Basso, and Frog are so low-fidelity they’re sad.

They’re all too old, too simple, too unsubtle. And we need all the subtlety we can get these days.

My car beeps at me immediately as soon as I start the car without having yet fastened my seat belt. Though the beeping is premature and might have waited three seconds or so longer, it’s not the quickness that is most annoying, but the actual sound the car makes when it beeps, a sound so grating that you have to respond at once whether you want to or not, simply to shut the thing off. It just cannot be ignored. You might argue that this was the designer’s intention, to get me to fasten that seat belt, but the reality is that the sound is so maddeningly bad that it sometimes has the opposite effect of making me forget what it is I need to do. Like a bone-shakingly loud klaxon during a fire drill, it makes it hard to think or respond.

In other words, using a sound to get your attention is counter-productive if the sound annoys you, because your own annoyance can distract you from the alert itself.

Sounds designed with care and used with restraint can be powerful and quite useful.

My coffee pot makes a faint beep-beep-beep when it’s done brewing, three little tones so subtle you wouldn’t hear them if you weren’t listening for them, yet so clear you can hear them from across the house if you are listening for them. Great sound choice: unobtrusively polite and respectful of my environment.

Mac OS X doesn’t have sounds like these. It has old clunky sounds, unsubtle sounds that grate. You get fond of them from long familiarity, but they’re pretty bad.

It’s not like Apple doesn’t know how to do great sound. Look at the wonderful sounds in Front Row, not just the banner sounds like the orchestral riff as you choose Music to descend from the main window, but even the little click sounds themselves. Compared to the system sounds in Mac OS X, these Front Row sounds are subtle and complex, and so delightful you probably went back and forth a few times when you first tried Front Row, just to hear those sounds again. That’s the kind of sounds we need in the OS.

Go back and listen to Sosumi in /System/Library/Sounds and notice how low-fidelity it sounds. Now imagine if Apple’s Finder icons looked as bad as that sounds. Why does a sound as poor as that still ship with Mac OS X? It can’t be the hardware. The old limitations are gone: we now have great audio and plenty of memory, CPU, and disk space.

It must just be time and focus. Apple’s been busy since rolling out Mac OS X and just hasn’t gotten around to upgrading the system sounds. Maybe in Leopard.