{"id":10,"date":"2006-11-26T06:59:46","date_gmt":"2006-11-26T14:59:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/oroup.com\/blog\/2006\/11\/26\/google-maps-style-ux-comes-to-leopard\/"},"modified":"2006-11-26T06:59:46","modified_gmt":"2006-11-26T14:59:46","slug":"google-maps-style-ux-comes-to-leopard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oroup.com\/blog\/2006\/11\/google-maps-style-ux-comes-to-leopard\/","title":{"rendered":"Google Maps style UX comes to Leopard"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the WWDC\u00a0last summer,\u00a0Steve Jobs made a big\u00a0deal about how he was keeping a few features in the next release of OS X (Leopard) secret because he didn’t want the\u00a0folks in Redmond (ahem) to\u00a0“start their photocopiers too early”. Although\u00a0the whole photocopiers angle is an obvious\u00a0jab (and not even plausibly realistic) I do think there are some interesting features\u00a0that still haven’t been announced in Leopard.\u00a0 There’s\u00a0been a\u00a0fair bit of speculation<\/a>\u00a0as to what Steve Jobs still has up his sleeves, but to my eye, nobody has quite nailed it.<\/p>\n

I think the well\u00a0known work to make OS X resolution independent will be applied to creating a “google maps style” interface for the desktop UX. Imagine a desktop that is a variable number of pixels across. Dragging a window so that it\u00a0sits partially offscreen causes the viewport to smoothly\u00a0zoom out and everything is visible, just scaled down. In this context, Expose is just a zoom out, instead of tiling\u00a0programs in a flat\u00a0grid with no relation to how they were laid out on screen. Naturally you can zoom in too or do the google-eque “drag” which is really just panning the viewport across a large area.<\/p>\n

What’s my reasoning?<\/p>\n