with spaces coming for definite in Leopard, which is another way of dealing with clutter, it would seem extremely strange to have another different option for organising windows in the same release, now that would really be offering choice at the risk of confusion!

Wouldn't this make rather a mockery of Exposé? Apple clearly put a lot of time, effort and R&D into developing it (not to mention everyone else who put just as much effort into copying it) and I don't think they'd be in much of a rush to shove it by the wayside.

Can you really see this happening at WWDC?

Jobs: You know that funny flying window thingy with yet another French name, which we said no-body could live without? Well, forget about that. We don't think you'll want to use that any more; we never really liked it anyway. A much better way is to hide all your application windows' content behind one another in the SAME window, so you can only ever see one at once. Boom. Clutter gone. Just use the mouse to click through each tab in turn and, boom, you can see your content at full size. No more mousing around each miniaturised exposé window to find out what's what; just click, boom there it is. Tabs are the way forward.

Ermm, no. Tabs are an additional mini feature, there's no way Apple would make them so pervasive and important to the UI that developers need an extra four months to adjust their apps.

I read the article in question and it is only suggesting what GUI changes could come with Leopard. Total speculation but well written with thought out reasoning. However I doubt Apple would make a BIG shift in the GUI especially at a time when it is bringing a lot of PC customers over to the Mac. What I agree with in the original article is that Apple has for years now testing design ideas in various apps and hardware I might add with little doses. The look of Dashboard may be a more all over GUI look for Leopard. We have seen apple dabble with the flat black transparent palettes in apps like iPhoto as well as the pro apps like Aperture. Even though I think Vista is some ugly sh*t a lot of PC people think it looks slick, look for Steve J to up the ante once again.

While there may be some new API or something for managing paned interfaces, Apple is not getting rid of overlapping windows in the OS. Not only is this a fundamental piece of the UE, they would not spring this on developers this close to release.

I am going to WWDC for the first time in 6 years and am interested in seeing what is going on :-)

Multiple windows are good for seeing windows in multiple apps simultaneously. If you want to fullscreen teh window just Comman-Tab betwen apps or Command-Tilde between windows of an individual App. This has been around for years and saves a lot of annoying mouserizing.

The truth of the matter is, we already have the best of both worlds - multiple windows (which automatically stack well, btw) can be viewed all at once with just the desktop or exposé option, or you can fullscreen an app (say photoshop or a 3d modeler) to get as much space as you need. While tabbed browsing within applications like photoshop would be nice, its a 3rd party product. Having abs in safari and ichat is good enough for me.

Learn some basic MacOS key shortcuts, and please stop complaining. Thank you.

There's three options here. Either the author's are just blowing smoke that there's a big UI change a-coming that requires app developers to update their code (it would have to be a requirement, wouldn't it, otherwise why the delay, just so its not a feature that no one has up front?)

Or Apple's being their clueless self-important selves who believe their own secrecy is more important then giving developers the changes in advance so the OS can be on schedule AND the apps have been updated.

But that second one doesn't sound like Apple at all!

Third, it could be apple trying to be nice to developers, because if Apple releases a whole new UI construct, and no developers have implemented it, all anyone will do is whine and complain that the app developers haven't updated their programs and to all the whiz-bang new features and they all suck! And Apple likes to be nice to their developers.

Oh, c***, that third one doesn't sound like apple either.

It seems as if this may very well be worth its weight, however, with Leopard its always hard to tell what is what as it is a very crafty cat.

http://Thunkdifferent.com

not to mention that tabs assume that the windows are all the same size, unless changing a tab can also change the shape and placement of a window.. .which would probably make me seasick.

Then again, who knows.

This will not happen. Not in leopard. As people have already said, the developers already have been shown the new APIs. There might be a different interface colourscheme wise, more flashy core animation based stuff etc think time machine. As for tabbed windows, it's already here: Try out the excellent http://www.donelleschi.com/stickywindows/ Sticky Windows application. The betas i've seen of leopard are far from bug free, and in June (not far away) they'll show the feature complete version of the OS, and then there will be a few months of hyperactive bug squishing. Can't wait :)

the author here has no clue at all...

reaching for straws even...

why am I wasting my time reading this bogus excuse for a news story; this aien't any real news at all.

welcome to the macfaux news network

tabs are really a problem sometimes, separate windows means you can put one on each of your two monitors. As other stated, sometimes you just leave a part of the top of a window being displayed and the other part hidden... MDI interfaces, some of them are really horrid, forcing you to hide everything when you really only wanted to hide a part, and to close everything when you were really trying to close only a part....not to say that tabbed browsing isn't cool. new features just have to be used when appropriate, rather than forced.

Makes sense. Apple will also introduce a new 96" screen, and what new feature could make such an expensive screen a necessity?

I wonder if it was referring to something a little different. Maybe not a end to overlapping windows as far as finder goes, but other smaller windows. Like the font and color windows you use in text edit. Things that developers use in their applications. Maybe?

I can't imaging changing the ability to have two finder windows open at once or something similar. That would just piss people off. Maybe adding the ability to have a more robust window system that allowed for things like tabs would be a nice add. Maybe even more advanced features like that in the pathfinder application.

Just my 2¢

yeah - but if you remember with the release of 10.1 OS X

Transition from the Public Beta and 10.0 OSX -- there was enough public outcry to push Apple to bring back certain things they'd done away with from OS 9_

The Finder/Desktop motif was NOT available in the Public Beta_

tehre was no Apple Menu_

And even to this day - each floating "window" you have open on yore desktop is "technically" a Finder Window_

It does however work nothing like the OS 9 version [having to rebuild your desktop] as the system ran thru and relied on the Desktop as a central hub_

The OS X Desktop does not do this [the freedom of UNIX] it is merely another System level App that runs smoothly in th background_