It’s that time again, and if you’re an Apple user you know how it is. You wait around for a while, a new OS is announced, you wait some more and then when it is finally released, you know (again) how you’ve made the right choice in sticking with the guys from Cupertino.

A lot of ink is going to be spilled about Leopard and just how great it is in the next few days, so I’ll just give you the rundown on some of the tiny bits of Leopard that I’ve enjoyed. This was basically written in the first hour with the operating system, so bare with me when it comes to the excitement.

Spaces, stacks and the new UI

Stacks: Stacks are much more useful than I imagined. And they’re beautiful. Just noticed how stacks react when there are new files on the monitored folder (it just changed the stack icon when I saved this file into my Documents folder/stack).

Interface: A unified interface, finally. The new drop shadows are heavy, but I like them. I have mixed feelings about the new dock - it’s good to have a change every once in a while, but things like the new running application marks are somewhat annoying and not easily seen. Also, I personally don’t care much about it being like a shelf now - but it’s a minor change, I’ll cope.

One other thing I have mixed feelings about is the fact that they brought down the opacity of the top bar. It doesn’t look that bad, but I kinda liked the consistency it had across wallpapers (right now mine is a shade of purple because of the default Leopard wallpaper).

Spaces: Finally, proper virtual desktops on a Mac. I had been waiting for this one for a very long time after battling with releases of Virtue Desktops and earlier applications. If you run several things at once (applications that you might easily group together in different “spaces”), you’ll love it too. Each project in its own space, IM and email on another - it’s productivity bliss.

System preferences: I love the redesigns on some of the preference panes - particularly the new Bluetooth and Network panes, that were in dire need of a change. These actually make sense now - which is great.

Terminal, Utilities: The terminal being tabbed is sweet because it saves me from having to install iTerm. But more important than tabs and the terminal itself is how ruby, rails and quite a lot of ruby gems are installed by default. I knew rails was going to be one of the additions already, but some of the gems (capistrano, mongrel, redcloth, hpricot, ruby-openid, etc) they packed were a surprise. And the new Terminal has themes, too - What?

Finder: The new finder - wow, have we longed for this one. I love the new sidebar and I like how they integrate some smart searches by default to give you a sense of the possibilities. Honestly, I couldn’t care much about coverflow everywhere (in fact, it does sound a little bit like bloat), but it may be useful in a couple of cases, so we’ll see how often I use it. I guess it doesn’t really hurt to have an extra bit of eye candy if it doesn’t get in the way of work.

One small detail, not really about the Finder but Leopard itself is how there are now icons for Front Row, Exposé, the Dashboard and Spaces in your Applications folder. Makes it much easier to script interface behavior when there’s actually an icon that can be clicked.

iCal, Address Book: Took a bit of a revamp, good ol’ iCal, and it looks pretty good. I like how it packs some of the interface details we’ve seen on recent iPods and the iPhone - Apple is going for consistency and there’s definitely nothing wrong with that. Address Book looks the same, but I’m still to restore my contacts from my Tiger installation so I have nothing to look at there at this point.

Conclusions, if there are any

As with a lot of what Apple does these days, Leopard looks (and feels) great. I had almost forgotten the feeling of how snappy a fresh installation of an Apple OS is, but now I have been reminded. These guys aren’t playing around, and I definitely agree with the Wall Street Journal when they say that this thing kicks Vista in the butt. Still a fan. Sign me up for OSX 10.6 “LOLCAT”, Steve.

For those of you looking for larger screenshots of Leopard, I uploaded a few to this Flickr set. Have fun!

Remember the old days when we were promised jetpacks, flying skateboards and the mobile web? Well we still haven’t got the Back to the Future gear but some would argue that devices like the iPhone do bring us closer to the internet, anywhere.

The iPhone gives you the best experience browsing the web on a mobile phone although contrarily to what some people seem to believe, that’s because it doesn’t need iPhone-specific pages to feel right. Apple did a terrific job at crafting a device that gives you the web (as it is today) in your hands. And that takes me to my main point: which is that designing pages exclusively for the iPhone is a dumb idea.

Dumb? But it’s the iPhone!

Here’s a hypothesis: Google launches their own mobile device, say, tomorrow - and it’s so beautiful you need to have it. In fact, it’s so amazing you’ll be throwing that iPhone out the window. Suddenly you get it, all those iPhone-crafted pages are suddenly useless, because they are built specifically with one device in mind.

The mobile web never really took up because designers tend to design for what’s closest to their hearts - and right now that’s the glassy phone with the Apple logo. As most people will tell you, being “closed” is a lousy way to get wide adoption - and this is just about as closed as you can get. Think about it, you’re designing pages specifically for a $599 device and expect huge visits? Oh, come on.

Design for the experience, not the device

A better idea is to design for an experience, not a specific device like the iPhone. Just like you design for desktop browsers by assessing constraints (like window size) and building an experience based on those constraints, why not do it for mobile devices in general? Truth is carefully crafted pages can actually display perfectly both on the desktop and the mobile web (iPhone or not).

The iPhone actually goes a very long way in making sure pages today work great. Instead of building a page specifically for the phone, why not one that gracefully scales to fit the device’s screen? It guarantees you’re not spending resources building for a specific device and effectively means you can focus on building one experience that’s maintained across all platforms. Give it a try.

PS: Have you also noticed how most of these iPhone-specific pages are trying hard to mimic Apple’s design too? Sacrificing resources and a brand just to make something blend in on one device is a lot worse than spending those resources on maintaining quality across the board.

Back in June I wrote an article on designing web applications through ethnography - by seeing real people in the real world, engaged in actual activities and solving real problems. That post got quite a lot feedback both in comments as well as emails, so I thought an update was due with examples of how other companies use ethnography in their experience designs.

Lets recap what ethnography means and what it allows first - and then look at examples of how it is being used by large organizations like Nokia, Intel and IBM.

From the June article: Ethnography - a method to look at user needs through observing people in their naturally setting rather than through research or, like we usually see in this space, guessing work. Ethnography allows you to design (in the broad sense of the word) products that are more in touch with your audience - to solve real problems, and not those you think people have.

Ethnography at Nokia

Business Week has the inside view on how Nokia uses ethnography to deliver richer products that solve real needs. Here’s what Nokia’s Design Director Antti Kujala has to say about their method:

Our process starts with a team of anthropologists and psychologists working in our design group. They spend time with specific types of people around the world to understand how they behave and communicate. This helps us to understand better and to spot early signals of new patterns of behavior that could be harnessed into mobile communication. Our designers often go out into the field to understand the world they are designing for. All of these observations are brought into the design process to inspire and inform our ideas.

We have an advanced design team that is looking 5 to 15 years out, working on spotting and predicting megatrends in society and coming up with thought-provoking ideas on what mobile design could do to influence and react to these.

Ethnography at Intel and IBM

Hemispheres Magazine (from United Airlines) has also a very good article on how corporations like Intel and IBM use ethnography to look ahead and enter (or create) markets ahead of competition. Make sure you read this article as well.

In addition to helping with the development of products, ethnography also can be used to direct corporate strategy, says Ken Anderson of the people and practices research group at Intel Corporation. Anderson oversees the innovation team within the digital health group at Intel. “It’s not about developing a particular product, but opening a space that had been untapped,” he says.

Inspired? Act on it.

Ethnography isn’t just for huge market cap corporations - it can and should be used in any product-oriented or service-oriented business. Chances are if you are reading this blog, you are either an entrepreneur or someone who’s passionate about the web and design. You should be acting upon these examples.

How can observation help you launch a successful product or service? What would do you differently if you looked at your target audience more deeply? Quite a lot, most likely. Here’s how you get started if you don’t have the budget or a product: carry a notebook, note down problems you have in your daily life, or problems you see other people have. You’ll likely come across solutions to these problems, and you know what that means.

Like our project management product (Goplan) came out of our necessities and problems dealing with the people we do consulting for - and by looking at how people manage their projects poorly -, you’ll likely succeed in solving real problems if you just sit down, observe and listen.

Lets get straight to the point: there’s a big problem with social networks - the fact that there’s a new one every day. Now this would be all fine if people didn’t care, but that brings me to the second problem: people do care, and generally love to be a part of these things. The social network for music (wait, two), the one for contacts, the one with photos, the one for 43 random things - the list goes on (heck, there’s Ning packing over 80.000 of these). Crazy. But within the chaos, something in common - you and your friends.

If you’re like me, you’re tired of having to add friends or accept friend requests in all of these networks. It makes sense to connect to people in these services (that’s how you get the value out of them), but it’s really tricky to control it. It’s a huge burden to manage all this network structure - this needs a fix.

A potential fix to the problem

I’ve been thinking about how OpenId and Microformats could play into this, and apparently, I’m not alone. We already have the identification through OpenID, there’s hCard+XFN that can provide the necessary bits of information about ourselves (and our friends) to the network, why not create a mechanism allowing networks to save us the trouble of adding friends, accepting requests and setting up preferences?

Process: I want networks to ask me, right off the bat when signing up, if I already have a profile that can be imported in (through hCard+XFN). I type in the URL for my OpenID and the network gets my information (gets OpenID page, downloads hCard formatted information, builds my user information based on that). Then it can grab my list of friends from XFN formatted data. With one textfield (the URL for either my OpenID or a profile on a different network), it would pre-populate both my information and the information for friends I want to add. Sweet.

A good start: A few social networks already have microformatted data on user profiles (Last.FM, Dopplr, Twitter and Cork’d), meaning any other network could easily consume this data when you sign-up, saving you a load of trouble - which is exactly what Dopplr (being smart as it is) does. Now if other networks would tag along, that would be superb.

Because, really, we do love participating in these sites, and we love having fancy profiles with all our friends on there, but actually going through the trouble of setting that up every single time is crazy. Social network developers, help us out here, we’re going bankrupt. Thoughts? Notes of frustration? Suggestions? Feel free to leave a comment on this story.

Update: Seems like Wired picked up on the need for open social networking platforms and published an article by Scott Gilbertson called “Slap in the Facebook”. Nothing you haven’t read in the blogosphere in the last couple of days, but still a good read. Go have a look if you will.