Interesting Lepoard UI Speculation

A Digg user by the name of Delmonte posted this in a recent thread about Lepoard, and it’s very intriguing stuff. I’ve thought for months now that Apple was going to do something fairly big with the GUI, and this may be it.

Mark my words, Leopard will feature dynamic live re-coloring of windows, menus and widgets according to parameters like time of the day and/or user settings. For example, during the day you could have your windows and menus with a bluish tint and black text, and they would gradually fade to a white text on black theme as the evening comes. It’s not like Apple has a fundamental philosophy that windows should be gray. The reason why they didn’t implement such re-colorization feature before is that the old OS X UI framework was an archaic mess of bitmaps that was hard to maintain. The two current themes, “blue” and “graphite” each had their own sets of bitmaps, adding new color themes would’ve required creating new sets of bitmaps in that obsolete and messy Extra.rsrc file. Leopard includes an all new XML based UI framework, and all widgets and window parts are being vectorized. Implementing dynamic re-colorization of the main theme will be trivial in Leopard. And while Windows had the ability to have different color themes for years, Leopard will push the envelope further, with a dynamic aspect to it. Don’t you think Apple is aware that moving to a unified theme makes every window look the same, making Exposé harder to use? Colorization could be implemented on an application basis, or even a window basis, as a user choice from a color palette. That would fix the “recognition” problem while keeping a unified theme. Other possible dynamic features could include a window that smoothly pulse red when it needs your attention, or changing color according to its activity, the outside temperature or the passage of time. You guys seriously think that Apple will present a “dull”, gray-themed interface in Leopard to compete with Vista, when the vectorization of the interface at last enables easy color customization in OS X?

So then someone asks him how he knows this, and he answers:

I just know it ;) But just so that Apple doesn’t think I leaked some top-secret info, let’s just say that Apple was recently awarded a patent for a very similar idea. US Patent number 7,184,056 “Method and apparatus for user customized shading of a graphical user interface” http://tinyurl.com/3cayus While the patent was filled in 2002, it was awarded February 27, 2007. Also, OS X simply didn’t have the foundations at the time to make it easy to implement. With a complete overhaul of the UI framework in Leopard, vectorization of the interface and now the unification of the UI, it’s obvious to me that the time has come for Apple to implement this idea into its OS. And while many Apple patents went unused, this one fits a little too well with the current interface situation in Leopard.