by By Leander Kahney
There’s been a lot of brouhaha about Leopard, but the most exciting thing about Apple’s latest OS upgrade hasn’t even arrived yet — a wave of third-party applications that make use of new technologies under the operating system’s hood.
Core Animation could prove particularly revolutionary. A powerful programmers’ toolkit embedded in Leopard, Core Animation makes it easy to create flashy, animated 3-D interfaces. While some observers dismiss such things as pure eye candy — mere special effects to make the UI pretty — others have said they may herald the most significant advance in computer interfaces since the original Mac shipped 30 years ago.
“The revolution coming with Core Animation is akin to the one that came from the original Mac in 1984,” says Wil Shipley, developer of the personal media-cataloging application Delicious Library. “We’re going to see a whole new world of user-interface metaphors with Core Animation.” more…
