Let me make this clear: What I am about to talk about is pure speculation. I don’t have Leopard, I don’t know what the most recent version of Portal looks like, and I don’t know when Martin is going to make any future announcements. Martin is working on his ideas for the UI, and I’m working on mine. There are more pressing issues with the development right now than the interface. You’ll hear about that end of things later on.
Okay then. Today I want to share a few ideas I’ve had about Portal’s user interface. The more I look at Time Machine, the more I like how Apple has managed to make it both accessible and hidden. There is an icon in the Dock and there is a keystroke for quick activation, but for the most part Time Machine just runs quietly in the background. When you do need to make changes to the settings, you interact with Time Machine through the System Preferences, just like for the Dock, Expose, Spaces, etc.
This got me thinking. If Portal is going to work the way it needs to, then it has to be seamlessly integrated into the OS. Logically, that would put its interface into the System Preferences with the rest of OS X’s settings. Also, the user needs to be able to get at Portal quickly and directly, so a Dock icon would be handy. The icon could serve a double purpose as a Drop Icon for adding files to be synced.
I took a few minutes this morning and put together an idea for what I’m talking about:
I intentionally removed the “Sync” button, since I don’t want the user to have to do that sort of thing manually. Syncs will take place periodically in the background whenever possible (again, just like Time Machine). If the user feels the compulsion to force a manual sync, that option can be put in the pop-up over the Dock icon or in the Settings tab . Keeping track of file histories (Time Machine) between two systems may be impossible, but that would be a cool feature to have too.
Leopard is upon us and miraculously I had a brief lull in my workload. If there is anyone left on this site, I’d appreciate your comments!
