brasicano's Profile

OSX is an primarily an enabling platform and Apple's primary job is to provide new capabilities for developers to do their magic. Apple leverages these developers to enhance the overall platform for us the consumer... a pyramid if you will. And that is mostly what 64bit Leopard is all about. Sure, they've thrown in some eye candy and more than a few consumer level enhancements but the heavy lifting as always will be done by third party developers. And that's where the real magic of Leopard will come from, especially in the form of Core Animation. I believe we will see a real shift in UI in the coming two years. Core Animation is in ways similar to Apple's previous technology, Core Image, which basically allows even novice developers to add hundreds of PhotoShop style image manipulation effects to their applications. Core Animation far surpasses the possibilities of Core Image in ways that will become clear. It will allow novice developers such as myself to create full blown particle based animations (as opposed to Vector based animation like Flash) within their applications and other media. What would normally take a team of highly seasoned developers a week to create can now be done by a newbie in an afternoon. But this is nothing compared to what it means to the end user. First, the produced animations are not post-production video, but rather real-time renderings. Second, they are fully user-interactive (like Flash). Third, they have real 3D physics and particle rendering built in (unlike Flash). Fourth, they can be sequenced from small instruction sets (think bandwidth). Fifth, you are limited only by your imagination (unlike Flash which has many visual limitations) So, what exactly does this all mean to us everyday folk? It means that the operating system can now be 3D animated with whatever optimal interface you can conceive of (Time-Machine was built with Core Animation... and that's just the beginning). it means our applications can be fully 3D animated, providing amazing functionality never before possible. And perhaps in the future, it means that websites, internet entertainment, internet ads, and internet applications can be streamed and rendered to our desktops in full 3D real-time animation at reasonable bandwidth requirements. Of course there is a little thing called Windows, but likewise, there is also a little thing called Quicktime which is fairly ubiquitous and could serve as the parser to Core Animation's rich features. The future implications of this are far reaching and could drastically change the competitive dynamics between Apple and Microsoft, as rich internet applications become more and more common. Finally, being that we're talking real-time rendered 3D animation, this means it would then be possible to implement VR interfaces using stereographic headsets and monitors. And at higher bandwidths, fully immersive VR movies could be streamed into our living rooms (perhaps in 3 to 5 years as that would require higher bandwidth). But it seems to me that Apple is paving the way to make what we've grown accustomed to in Science Fiction for so many years finally become a reality. What does Vista offer... a cheap imitation of Aqua called Aero and a parred down version of Spotlight... after how long? It's laughable! As for future MacOS advancements... - Built in flawless speech recognition - More Natural Speech (Leopard is a significant leap forward already) - Introducing some basic AI (don't think for a minute their not working on it) - Social Networking concepts brought to the desktop level (perhaps through iLife - think iPhoto/Flickr or iMovie/YouTube) - You'll see a greater blurring of desktop and web (beyond widgets) - You'll see consumer level development tools (beyond iCode and Automater) based on a modular platform allowing custom apps to be built from a pool of thousands of community contributed modules as well as Apple's provided modules... think CoreApp. - I'm sure there are more examples of what's to come... just ask a few more geeks like myself.