Leopard’s Preview application animates the transition while rotating and resizing images—a relatively small amount of work thanks to Core Animation, but you appreciate the difference when you see it.

And it’s useful as well as attractive because the brief visual cues link the old and new visual states so you don’t have to. You notice immediately if you accidentally rotate left instead of right, for instance.

Here’s how rotating an image in Tiger looks:

And here’s how it looks in Leopard:

Image resizing is abrupt in Tiger:

But in Leopard it smoothly transitions to the new size:

Another graceful improvement to the user experience. Look around in Leopard and you’ll notice plenty of other examples of Core Animation at work.

Tuesday, January 8th, 2008, 3:17 am    Trackback.