Supercore

[jeff_duntemann]

In stories circulating widely around the Web, Apple's new all-animation, all the time user interface is just the hottest thing. How hot? Well, it introduces a brand new UI element: smoke. In the item I link to above, launching a window to burn a CD or DVD also launches a plume of smoke curling

Comments

[otheronetruegod]

Keep in mind that the video effects are not being rendered by the OS using the CPU, but rather it's being done using the video card's CPU. So really, it's not using any cycles (or very, very few) on the CPU.

I agree with you that substance needs to come before style, but you can have both and make something gorgeous on the eyes *and* highly functional *and* highly usable. It's harder, and takes longer to write, but it's both possible and desirable.

[regek]

One of the comments to the Wired article bears repeating.

"gedalia, The aero interface added chrome, but had little in it that made the developer's lives easier, nor did it let them add functionality easily. Leopard is adding chrome, but it also adds new controls, new tools, and new technology that should make the developers more able to deliver a product that meets the needs of the targeted user. In other words, while there is quite a bit of sizzle, there is also some steak. As long as the developers spend some of the time they would have spent rewriting the sizzle themselves on adding steak to their apps, you should come out ahead. Scott"

Basically, the new eye-candy features should let people code their apps to be "pretty" in much less time

[jeff_duntemann]

True enough, but real beauty is rooted in simplicity, and sublime beauty proceeds from elegance. More animation will not necessarily give us more beauty and will almost certainly not give us anything like elegance.

Moving things in a UI are terrible distractions and usually not especially functional. Most such animations, in fact, are just geeks showing off. (Think about Clippy, or that irritating little help system dog that MS uses in some versions of Windows. How do those help the user?) None of them make the software the least bit more usable.

I'm a minimalist when it comes to UIs of any stripe. Simple structure, muted colors, nothing moving unless it's telling me that something important is happening that I need to be aware of.

And smoke--heh. Smoke is an emblem of death. Bad choice for a demo of anything.

[otheronetruegod]

Simplicity is remarkably difficult to achieve. :-) I remember watching some early videos out of Microsoft about Windows Vista, and one of the things they talked about was the use of fading -- windows fading in and out, highlights fading in, that kind of things -- and they said that they were trying to reduce all the "jarring" things. The end effect is very smooth, very simple, but feels better to use

[regek]

Wired is flat-out wrong on a lot of that. First of all, Disco isn't an example of Core Animation at all. Secondly, the elements behind Core Animation have existed on Mac OS for years. They've largely grown out of Motion and Quartz Composer (formerly PixelShox Studio). This is just a way of creating the animations programatically

[regek]

Okay. Now that the WWDC keynote is done, Apple has updated the Leopard previews on their site. Take a look. Specifically, look at Time Machine and Spaces. The visuals in both are courtesy Core Animation. Admittedly, there is more flash (not Adobe's) in them than is strictly needed, but they provide important visual cues. I specifically like how Spaces switches between multiple desktops. Makes it really clear where you are relative to all of your other windows. The ambient atmosphere in Time Machine is also quite nice.

On a completely different note, I love how easy it's going to be to set up a single repository for all of my household backups. I've got three Macs and I'd love to be able to keep versioning backups of all of them on a single gigantic hard drive rather than a different drive for each. If it works as advertised, that's definitely going to get me to purchase one of Apple's wireless base stations.

[baron_waste]

a master core with special powers and its own entirely independent memory system. It should be able to inspect and change memory belonging to other cores, and among its other tasks it should load OS files into the memory belonging to the other cores from a storage device inaccessible to subsidiary cores and main memory any other way. The idea is to create a boss process in a privileged core that simply can't be subverted by programs running in the main portion of the machine.

Hey, I remember that - it was called the Master Control Program! Gosh, that turned out rather badly, as I recall...

- Though they, of course, had simply borrowed the concept from Burroughs.

[unkbar]

The CDC 6000 series did this too, back in the 1970's. They had a blazingly fast (for the day) 60-bit central processor and several (eight?) twelve-bit peripheral processors. The CP had no access to anything but its own memory. That CP memory was allso accessible to the PPS, but they had their own memory, too. The OS resided in and all I/O was done through the PPs. The PP's program memory could only be loaded by the "PPloader", which had to be run from the operator console. These machines were famous for resisting hacking attempts by undergrad and graduate CS students. Of course, if you had access to the machine room and the operators console . . .

[regek]

Turns out I was wrong about some things and right about some others when it came to Core Animation. Ars Technica's review of Leopard is worth a read, and the author has a full section dedicated to Core Animation. One of the more interesting tidbits from it is this:

Apple's also created several new Cocoa views and controls that provide functionality that would have required many thousands of lines of complex code before the advent of Core Animation. The best example is the extremely flexible NSGridView. This one view can be used to create something that looks and behaves like the iChat buddy list or the Dock, all with extremely minimal code. Items fading in and out as they're removed, squirming out of the way to accept a drag, flying all over to re-sort themselves, even text-base searching and visual filtering-it's all basically "free" with NSGridView and Core Animation.
iChat's buddy list view is a highly usable way of showing a list of things that can potentially rearrange themselves (as people sign on and off, they go into