Core Animation
Yesterday I attended a session on Core Animation. You would not believe what you can do with this new API. The demos were just amazing and wooed the audience. Most importantly for the developers, the API seems really simple to use, which means that soon after Leopard is released you should start to see many applications using it. This may become a problem.
While I can see many legitimate uses if the API to create screen savers and multimedia applications such as Front Row, I am scared that developers will start using 2D animations everywhere. After all, Apple may be obsessed with multimedia but most of the work we all do daily still revolves around, word processing, e-mail and web-browsing. I really think that Apple needs to update quickly the HIG (Human Interface Guidelines) if they want to avoid losing the GUI consistency that we all Mac users love.
Take for example Time Machine. It is an application that runs on its own animated background, with no menu bar. Even though I understand why you wouldn’t want to interact with other applications while restoring files, this could become a dangerous precedent.
So, while Core Animation is amazing all developers should remember Spider-Man, With great power comes great responsibility.