Wait! Don’t leave! I know, I know, you read the title and you’re thinking “here goes Pete, off on another anti-Microsoft, anti-Windows, anti-Gates, anti-PC rant”. No. That’s not what this article is going to be about. I’m turning over a new leaf. I’m specifically not going to mention that none (as in zero, zilch, nada) of the viruses or other malware “available” on a Windows PC affect the Mac operating system. And I certainly wouldn’t dream of pointing out that most of the “innovative” features in Microsoft’s coming “Vista” operating system are available right now in Mac OS X “Tiger”.

Nope. Not gonna do it. Wouldn’t be prudent. Instead, this week we’re going to talk about a coming major paradigm shift affecting how we use computers. What in the world is a paradigm? No, Virginia, it’s not twenty cents in your pocket.

A paradigm is, according to Webster, “a world view underlying the theories and methodology of a particular scientific subject”. Think of it as “conventional wisdom” in science. The funny thing about paradigms is, they change with the times. The earth was flat until it was discovered to be round. A decade ago the globe was cooling, now it’s warming. The command line paradigm of DOS computing has been replaced by the graphical user interface (GUI) of the Mac OS and Windows.

Indications are that another paradigm shift is looming for us computer users - computing without windows (notice the small “w”). To illustrate, let’s look at how we currently use the popular image-editing application Adobe Photoshop. Opening a photo in a standard Photoshop workspace presents us with a group of separate “windows” that can be placed anywhere on our screen. Somewhere in there amongst the menu bars and tool palettes you can actually find the window containing the photo you want to edit. Less-advanced, poorly designed applications and the screen size constraints of laptop computing exacerbate this problem.

Ideally, with image-editing software, you want the window containing the image you’re working on to be as big as possible. You don’t want to be constantly zooming in and out or, even worse, scrolling horizontally or vertically to view the entire image. However, if you’re dealing with high-resolution photos and don’t have a biggie-sized high-definition screen, you may not have much of a choice.

Or might you? What if you could fill your entire computer screen with the photo you’re working on? What if you could then “invoke” opaque tool palettes with mouse movements or keystrokes, the palettes hovering above the photo only long enough to serve their purposes? What if you could open multiple photos at once, right next to each other, to compare them and choose the best one, like the light tables of yore?

You can. Today. A few months ago Apple introduced Aperture, a professional photo management and editing application. Aperture leverages Mac OS X’s powerful graphics engine and today’s advanced GPUs (graphics processing units - we used to call them “video cards”) to provide the experience I’ve described above.

Sure enough, as I predicted, this “windowless” experience has found its way into Apple’s consumer-level iPhoto application in the new iLife ’06 upgrade. iPhoto’s implementation is on a smaller scale, befitting its consumer status, but on the plus side its system requirements don’t match the lofty needs of the RAM-and-GPU-hungry Aperture.

Other software developers are following suit. Adobe’s new photo management application, called “Lightroom” (currently available as a public beta only on the Mac), offers a similar full-screen experience, although not on the scale of either Aperture or iPhoto. Chances are Photoshop will someday lose its windows as well.

© 2006 Peter F. Zimowski