I’m watching the keynote and currently, Chris Espinosa is demoing Xcode, the new Project Builder. He’s showing interface elements that were taken from iTunes, for instance. It’s interesting how some apps come with new UI elements and concepts, which can then be used in other places as well. And in other contexts, those elements create new ideas (I can’t think of any examples right now, though).

Every time I use OmniGraffle Professional I’m stunned. It’s an incredible application, and what’s particularly interesting is all the new UI things they have invented. It’s incredibly intuitive, and most of them are completely new to me. I hope that Apple and other companies are thinking of adopting them.

I’m thinking about how the inspectors behave (they are called “palettes” in apps like Photoshop); not just how they attach to each other, but how they state which keyboard shortcut they use, and how they collapse and expand. And selecting and working with objects in documents is incredibly intuitive. Resize a box and small markers appear alongside of other boxes that are the same size as the one you’re resizing. Or drag them around and markers appear to indicate that “these three boxes are now all 0.24 cm apart”.

These things are like mini-paradigms. Once they appear for the first time, your thinking about user interfaces are slightly transformed. There are new options available, and because of this you get new ideas. The interface is a language for communicating with the user, and those elements are new words to express new things.