An interesting idea from a blog called Blackfriar’s Marketing: Leopard’s secret is that it will start doing away with windows. Not Windows, but windows–the interface element itself. In what would have to be the slickest, most ironic blow to Microsoft, Apple could be edging towards a new UI style that would either force Microsoft to rename their OS or stop copying Apple.

The argument is that many of Apple’s products already operate without windows per se. A good example is Apple’s Front Row, which is similar to what is used in Apple TV. Instead of a window, one sees one’s screen fade into an alternate interface. We have already seen that Leopard’s Time Machine software operates in the same way. And the Blackfriar writers point out that most of Apple’s apps already use a single-pane interface, giving iTunes and GarageBand as two examples (actually, virtually all of Apple’s iLife apps are designed that way, as well as some of its high- and low-end apps). The use of new Core animation and resolution independence could assist this new style.

It takes a bit of re-imagining to wrap your head around this idea. It helps to consider what a “window” is. The concept of a window comes from the fact that often times, what you want to look at takes up more space than is visible on your computer monitor. Say you have a ten-page document; clearly, you cannot display the whole thing on your computer while the text remains large enough to read. So instead, the area with the information is imagined as existing as a greater area than visible on your monitor, and the window acts as a frame through which you view the portion that can fit on your screen. This can never be fully done away with, of course. There will always have to be some window-like properties, where you have to scroll this way or that.

However, one can imagine this being done in a different style. For example, do we really need scroll bars? If we enter a word processor, could the entire document be represented in a translucent overlay to one side (similar to what we see in the side “drawer” in Apple’s Preview app when looking at a PDF file, for instance), which could replace the idea of a scroll bar? Maybe it could even pop up and disappear like the Dock so as to save space. Meanwhile, pages in full-size view could float up and down in virtual representation of pieces of paper–this would play right into the Core animation technology Leopard will bring. Things will probably move in the more natural, inertia-based style that we see demonstrated in the iPhone’s interface.

So, could all apps work this way? Potentially, yes, though it would require a thorough redesign for most apps. If this is indeed what is coming, then Leopard certainly would not be able to effect this change overnight. At the very least, it would have to allow the old-style interface to persist and have a place for as long as backwards-compatibility is to last. But that’s not too hard to imagine–a windows-populated screenscape could simply be another environment, something to switch to like one now switches in and out of the Front Row interface. Leopard’s new Spaces feature could even play into it, as the Blackfriar’s bloggers suggest.

One visitor to the Blackfriar blog brought up an excellent point, however: what if you want to view two apps simultaneously? This is a common working style for many people, to split the screen between two apps. The blogger responded to this but did not really answer the question. But I can imagine a solution, one that resolution independence could play into: simply have the apps reshape and share the screen–not overlapping necessarily, but splitting the screen’s real estate. Think about how Expose works, how the windows slide away from each other–but imagine that the parts are sized (or reshaped) so that there’s no dead space between them. Already some apps have toolbars and interface elements that reshape when you resize the window; that could happen if you “pane” two apps to share a screen together. Right now, if I want two apps to appear at the same time and have each one take up optimum space to fill up my screen, I have to carefully resize and place the windows. It would be nice if that could be done automatically, with no part of one app covering up any part of another one, and with no dead, wasted space between them.

Of course, this is all pure speculation. The Blackfriar bloggers point out that they are simply picking up on UI clues that Apple has used in some of its apps that seem to be signaling a sea change. But it is a fascinating idea, and could redefine things in a way that could make Microsoft Windows look like old hat–which could deal a serious blow after MS put five or six years of work into a new version of their OS which merely inched forward, while Apple’s OS takes huge strides. And such a significant UI change would be very hard for MS to copy and yet still claim that they are not completely ripping off Apple’s ideas.