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Leopard Core Animation

handras.hu — Nice new GUI effect in Leopard. Click on the QT Picture.

Who dugg this? Made popular Aug 14, 2006

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  • DaffyDuck, on 10/12/2007, -1/+59Yes, slick describes it pretty well. This a useful use of animation. Not just pointless eye candy. The fact that the bubble pops around the searched term draws your eye to it. And the dimming helps as well. I often find myself having to search around the page in Firefox when I use it's built in search. This kind of stuff is more exciting to me than most of the other features demoed at WWDC.

    I can't wait to see more!
  • OneManArmy, on 11/12/2007, -3/+42One word...Slick
  • lechatron, on 10/12/2007, -4/+30actual youtube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-HxXAsY92M
  • blocguy, on 10/12/2007, -2/+22have you guys notice the fact that this is preview release Operating System????
  • Annon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+14No, XGL does not fit this. Core animation is a set of tools that make it easy for developers to add animations to their apps. XGL just allows for the stuff, doesn't make it easy for developers to use it.
  • DaffyDuck, on 10/12/2007, -4/+17webcrumb: What exactly is extraneous about this? I mean, does the springy window movement in Compiz (http://tinyurl.com/zs3sm) actually have any utility? For that matter, do any of the effects in Compiz have any side benefits besides looking snazzy?

    Both of the animations covered here serve to draw the eye quickly to the information you are looking for. This is the kind of stuff that can increase efficiency. Having windows warp when you move them around doesn't do that.
  • dschep, on 10/12/2007, -2/+15Yea it does actually seem like one of those few examples where apple's GUI effects aren't actually superfluous, I often do find as you type in Firefox and have to search the page for the green highlight each time I hit f3.
  • paulsmerdon, on 10/12/2007, -1/+13I have a feeling that a somewhat new GUI is one of the "top secret" features that wasn't revealed at WWDC. It could be argued that Windows Vista looks more advanced than the current UI in OS X Tiger and I think this will be unacceptable to the Steve.

    Core Animation will most likely play a big part in the future UI designs of OS X.
  • overmann, on 10/12/2007, -0/+12estvir:

    Vista's GUI is over-the-top because Microsoft use their shiny new tech to create shiny new effects, instead of creating new effects that helps the user understand what he/she is doing, or what is happening. I admit that I haven't seen the latest Vista beta in action, but my experience with the earlier versions is that the glass is confusing. It looks nice, sure, but when I overlap several windows, or tile them it becomes hard to see what belongs to what window, which window is active, et cetera. I'm sure you've seen the Media Player examples. OS X had more transparency in their earlier versions, but Apple toned it down because it didn't really help the user. It’s funny though that you name Time Machine as an example. Time Machine visualizes what the user is doing, while not getting in the way, just like the effects shown in the article. It helps, unlike Windows' glass-effect.
  • kodek, on 11/14/2007, -3/+14"is" and "are" are also different things.
  • meatmcguffin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10"The timewarp feature was put in to Windows Server 2003."
    A server release does not equal a desktop release. Has XP or Vista ever had this functionality?

    "Apple barely got the Intels working in good time"
    If your talking about the software, Apple have had an x86 version of OS X in development alongside the PPC version from the very start. If you're talking about the hardware then Apple managed to transition their entire product line in just over a year and beat their time expectation, I'd say that's pretty impressive.

    "if any of you think the animations in OSX are KRAZZZZY lookup WinFx"
    You're missing the point. Apple have never put a visual effect into the OS unless it is to aid HCI or usability, there's little superfluous. Expose and the dock animations show you where your windows move to, the widget ripple shows where a new widget instance has been created, time machine gives a visual representation of time much more than a 2D interface ever could and these search bubbles are designed so you are drawn to the search results. It's power through subtlety.

    "Microsoft is responsible for the Intel chip being what it is, an open market is what they created"

    The Intel chip up until the introduction of the Core series were a mess of legacy operations and bottlenecks. And how exactly did Microsoft end up responsible for Intel's chip designs? Plus you could always say that Apple is responsible for the entire computer market being what it is and Microsoft have taken advantage.
  • vonnie, on 10/12/2007, -1/+11OpenGL is the 'directx' of macs. I'm not sure with what windows library you can compare core animation. I guess the animation stuff in xaml that is coming in vista.
  • RCCollins, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9Sick! Dude, if windows users are bellyaching over how good Mac applications look and function now and how all the new cool new little apps are only being released for OS X imagine how much more green in the face they're gonna be once Leopard is released?

    http://digg.com/apple/iPhoto_for_your_documents_It_s_Free
    http://digg.com/apple/The_10_Best_OS_X_Screensavers
    http://digg.com/apple/Shiira_2_0_Beta_1_now_available_for_download
    http://phillryu.com/2006/07/03/the-top-ten-most-beautiful-os-x-apps/

    Glad I switched last year!
  • jdwest, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8A search that actually finds (OK, more accurately, allows ME to find it).

    I've been wanting something similar for a LONG time. Anyone who uses 23- and 30-inch monitors on a regular basis knows what a pain it is to see the results on a "find on page" Safari search, no matter the highlight color.

    At least FF has the courtesy to place the result on the lowest displayable line. With Safari - currently - you are left to find it after you find it.

    My dream is a narrow-by-key search much like Spotlight in System Preferences.
  • sneeka2, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9OMG, you really have no idea what you're talking about, do you?
    DirectX and OpenGL are for rendering stuff on-screen, they produce/compose the actual images. Core Animation is for *animation*. It's a way to easily tell OpenGL to move something from A to B. It is not in any way comparable to OpenGL or DirectX.
  • omaryak, on 10/12/2007, -3/+11Just another example of how Leopard will be leaps and bounds ahead of Vista.
  • eatrains, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Purple is also the color of the navigation of the Apple Support site.
  • sneeka2, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Well, OS X had had transparency for years, and with Core Image the glass blurring effect could be recreated easily I imagine. I just guess Apple doesn't see any use in employing these over-the-top effects, since they add nothing in terms of usability; more on the contrary. Technically OS X and Vista are on par I'd say. Apple just sticks with the useable GUI, while MS goes all out on the eye-candy front to drive sales.

    Having said that, having a little more animated GUI as shown in the video will be sweet.
  • vonnie, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7That's probably fake. There are no tabbed finder windows in the leopard preview.
  • sneeka2, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Hehe. I agree that Time Machine is a little over the top with the floating stars and the "big bang". But, that all doesn't distract the attention from the actually important thing of the interface, and it really does help to visualise the whole affair of "going back in time", much more so than digging through menu trees. Whereas IMHO the glassy Vista borders do distract somehow (depends on your wallpaper I s'pose), add no value in terms of visualisation or usability and they're really in the way when stacking windows (as overmann pointed out). They just look snazzy.
  • DaffyDuck, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6It will probably be added to your OS of choice in a few years so get used to it. ;)
  • r3zonance, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5@ bar10dr
    "Thats pretty nice feature for 12 year old girls!"

    You should like it then, seeing as you're whining on like a 12-year old girl.
  • coldradio, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6Anything awesome like this for us not fortunate enough to yet own a mac?
  • cosacosa, on 10/12/2007, -3/+8Yes it looks very slick and most importantly you can smell how usefull thge animation angle can actually be. Great!
  • kentk, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Core Animation doesn't replace OpenGL or Quartz, it just makes it easy to use animations and transitions even if the programmer doesn't know anything about advanced graphics.
  • DelMonte, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5It's the screen capture method. The cursor is like the "ultimate" top layer in OS X and it's not possible to directly capture it. The program (I think it's iShowU) tries to simulate the cursor, but there's a bug in their implementation.
  • DaffyDuck, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6Animated backgrounds are already a possibility.

    http://www.gideonsoftworks.com/xback.html

    Any Quartz animation from this site can be used as a background: http://www.quartzcompositions.com/phpBB2/upload/index.php?cmd=top

    Not sure what you mean by aqua bars...
  • DaffyDuck, on 10/12/2007, -4/+9One more thing. Is core animation really needed or for that matter actually used for these effects? I thought it was mostly for third party developers to make integrating animation easier. It seems that the capability was already there before core animation to do these things.
  • geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4"I'm a Mac fan, I mean no insult to the Mac. But honestly speaking, both DirectX and OpenGL exsist on Windows but most developers opt for DirectX since it's just "easier.""
    Neither is more easy than the other, just DirectX is a set of all tools needed to make a game, and OpenGL is just one part of the solution to make a game, thus game developers tend to DirectX on Windows. Oh, and DirectX is mostly object oriented, so the whole C++ craze.. yeah, everyone jumped on DirectX because of it.

    "After seeing the demo of Core Animation at the WWDC, which aims to make creating real-time animations easier and more interactive, isn't it fair to assume that Core Animation would be a big boost and help Mac games?"
    Absolutely. Core Animation couldn't be easier to make certain kinds of games, especially tile-oriented games. "Tile from here goes there in this much time" is basically how Core Animation does animating; it's like story boarding a game instead of writing the individual actions. Combine Core Animation with Core Data and you get a powerful save system. Combine with that Core Audio and you have sound. Combine all of the above with CoreImage and CoreVideo effects for eye-candy, and you have yourself a damned good Mac game.

    "Afterall, the demo they showed sure looked very 3D to me, and with the statement that it takes even less writing then before this was introduced leads me to believe this may be true."
    CoreAnimation is a layer over OpenGL and Core Image/Core Video (which are themselves layers over a specialized image kernel and filter-graph that use OpenGL as a back-end), so yes, CoreAnimation is 3D, and condenses the amount of code you have to write to make something usable, which was the point of inventing the framework. I can't wait to see what comes from it.
  • tuartboy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4hmmm...

    Having developed on both DirectX and OpenGL, I would not say that DirectX is "easier". No, not at all.

    I'll accept "better", but not "easier".
  • DaffyDuck, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5I think the animations will use up a lot of battery no matter what.

    Scroll bar is the term you are looking for. I don't think Apple will do that. If you notice all of the animations that exist in Tiger, (Dashboard is one counter example but it is more like a seperate app) they all have a goal of making an action or event clearer or more obvious. I can't think of any way that a rippling scrollbar would make the interface easier to use.

    The moving shadow thing wouldn't make sense because it doesn't work like that in real lfe. Now, the shadow would change if you moved a window further into the screen or further away from it. They could conceivably use an effect like that with window scaling to give a more realistic appearance of a window moving closer to you when it is magnified.
  • canyonblue, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3The real beauty of this is that Steve didn't show it, not because Microsoft would have time to steal it for Vista, but because Apple didn't feel it was ready for prime time yet. If we are all excited with these movies but a bit concerned by purple highlights and such... remember this is beta, and a beta Apple wouldn't even show us yet... so clearly heavy tuning is in progress.

    I am certain at Macworld in Jan 07 Steve will have a knockout consumer focused keynote that will show the "wow" features of Leopard, which will likely include powerful, and beautiful, new additions to the core GUI and Finder of Mac OS X.
  • geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Like it's that hard to change the COLOR of something sheesh. It's probably user configurable, as Spotlight's default color is a blue color.
  • Vermifax, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Third-party developers are gonna have a field day with this.......
  • mtvkilledusall, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5mirror. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-HxXAsY92M
  • mark1372, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Making the purple pointer "hover" is interesting. At first it was a big WTF, but then I realized that they float it around so you know it's something on the help layer and not part of your screen below. Extremely intuitive and clever.

    A tad fugly, but its utility outweighs that. I can see my mom finally realizing which pulldown menu item to use because of the big purple pointer. This is a much-improved system over Apple's abandoned red-circle method or spotlight highlights.
  • geoffpado, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Yes.
  • r3zonance, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3"Apple barely got the Intels working in good time considering they had intel support from the get go"

    Or, maybe they were waiting to release the machines when Intel released the Core Duo CPUs that fell in line with Apple's own beliefs on performance per watt, did you ever think of that?

    Didn't think so, still got your Windows blinkers on.
  • omaryak, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3And with fewer lines of programming, taking up fewer resources and providing faster performance.
  • M4cb0y, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Why is the mouse transparent?
  • jm1234567890, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3wow, this should have been demonstrated at WWDC! I wonder where else they will put search boxes.
  • Jugalator, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4On the other hand, Windows Presentation Foundation has already been revealed for Vista, which seem to be aimed for a similar goal as this -- easy development of hardware accelerated UI's and effects.
  • meatmcguffin, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Could it be that the user's highlight colour is set to purple?

    System Prefs -> Appearance -> Highlight Colour
  • manfesto, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1As per DaffyDuck's suggestion, here is a free utility - http://freshsqueeze.com/products/freeware/ - called Backlight that also allows you to use a screensaver as your background.
  • mtvkilledusall, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3mirror?
  • jefffm, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3This is very true, but this is actually almost the same thing as Compiz/Xgl. There are some neat plugins that do useful things, like expose-like sorting, that dimming thing someone was talking about, and other things like that. Plus Xgl is extensible through plugins. Not trying to say Xgl is better than apple's quartz compositor thing, but in a few years it will be mature enough to compare them very seriously.
  • sladuuch, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@Hoyaman

    That's just the way OS X scrollbars look. Weird, I know.
  • r3zonance, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1"Core Animation probably won't lessen processor or battery load by itself, and since more apps will use animation because of it, animation and thus processor usage will likely ramp up significantly."

    I think most of the work is going to be actually done by the GPU, and seeing how DMA plays quite a heavy part now, moving the data to the GPU shouldn't require much, if any, CPU time.
  • bkakes, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Purple has been the color of the ? help buttons since at least Panther...
  • cwcheang, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1that's probably among one of the top secret features steve mentioned..
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