Well, it’s been a little more than a slow-news day — more like a slow-news year as far as GC is concerned — but this seemed as good a reason as any to make a new GC post.

While I had seen and read the news flashes regarding Apple’s Active Desktop patent on quite a few news sites before this, this one caught my eye on MacOSRumors’ homepage:

MacOsRumors — “…Apple has applied for a patent on an “Active Desktop” style feature for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard — basically, incorporating motion/animation, widget-style information displays, or the use of screensavers as a moving desktop (something that can currently be done with third party software)…”

Up until reading this, all I had seen about Active Desktop was that it was primarily going to be something along the lines of MyDreamApp’s “Atmosphere” — which even Jason Harris observed was “disturbing” — referring to a link to an AppleInsider forum topic describing Apple’s patent. After reading through that too, it might be a bit of a stretch, but along with the more obvious parallels to Atmosphere, there could be the possibility of incorporating something along the lines of Ground Control using this same technology.

AppleInsider — “…Aside from the time of the day, a variety of other types of events may be used to effect a change to the desktop picture. “For example,” Apple continued. “the desktop picture may change upon a user event, such as launching a predetermined application. For instance, a particular desktop picture may be computed when the application iTunes.RTM. is launched; a different desktop picture may be computed when the application QuickTime.RTM. Player is launched.”
…”

I’d love to hear some other thoughts on this development. TBH, while I’m not convinced that Apple is rolling Ground Control-like features into Leopard (although I would be worried for Atmosphere), I wouldn’t be too disappointed if they did. Leopard’s October release will roll around a lot sooner than I’m afraid even the best hopes for Ground Control to be developed will be realized.

While the AppleInsider description was more vague and it would be a stretch to read GC functionality into that, the little blurb mentioned in the MacOsRumors frontpage, “widget-style information displays” definitely piqued my curiosity and has me wondering…