CoverFlow Re-Envisioned

The Unoffical Apple Weblog proposes that Apple apply the CoverFlow approach to file organization from iTunes to iPhoto. Is’pose, maybe — but what about representing pools of data in ways even more intuitively familiar?

For instance, back when I looked among my record albums, they never danced and slid the way album covers do in CoverFlow; but I’d be excited to flip through an album selection the way I used to flip through the boxes of albums that lined my walls in college. The Leopard Desktop will feature “stacks,” which pretty accurately replicate the way I organize my desktop. But what about assigning files “spines,” which could be either auto-generated or user-edited, so that we could have bookshelf-like arrangement? A combination of visual (color) and verbal cues, together with persistent location, could make a very space-efficient file storage mechanism, with a model that anyone who’s ever used a bookshelf would recognize.

Let’s have a cup of coffee, Steve.

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