According to my web server stats, my previous post was pretty popular. It turns out that Iljitsch van Beijnum, an Ars Technica blogger read it and used it as an inspiration to speculate that Leopard will include a revolutionary new 3D user interface.
I totally disagree with his reasoning. I think that Iljitsch completely misunderstood my original post. What I said (among other things) was that the delay in releasing iWork/iLife was probably due to the fact that these application suites would use the new APIs available in Leopard (in order to bootstrap their use by other OS X software developers) and that the new “secret” features would probably not be new unannounced APIs but instead new end-user oriented “applications” like time machine, iChat or iSync that have no impact whatsoever on third party applications.
That does not mean that Apple could not use the release of Leopard to solve the many visual inconsistencies that have plagued Mac OS X for the last few years or add some nifty animations and special effects, but do not expect a total revolution. Rolling out a radically new user interface without impacting third party applications is not a reasonable expectation, even if we incorrectly assumed that all developers use the Cocoa framework properly.