Some overlooked Leopard user interface details

My son Robert was watching the Steve Jobs WWDC keynote last night, and he pointed out to me a couple user interface elements I hadn't noticed when I saw the keynote.

The first point was that Leopard eliminates the desktop hard disk icons that have been part of Mac OS X to date. You can see that in the desktop shot below:



To my eye, this actually makes some sense. After all, when was the last time you used that hard disk icon? This may be a little more clumsy when you're looking at CD-ROMs though; we'll have to see.

Robert's second point was that the "Shared Computers" view in the Finder appears to know a lot about the computers being shared. Specifically, it appears to know both the color and shape of the computers connected as shown below:



So if you have a iMac, it shows up as an iMac icon. If you have a black MacBook, it shows up as a black MacBook in shared computers, just as black iPods are similarly shown in iTunes.

Neither is any particularly big deal, but they certainly show that Apple is continuing to rethink the desktop user experience and make it both simpler and smarter. And showing the actual picture of the shared computers is just another one of those marketing details that's nearly impossible to do in the PC world.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Leopard, Desktop, User experience, WWDC