In a long time ago (Has it really been a decade?) in a chip-set far, far away, there lived an operating system. It lacked some advanced things, like memory protection, and preemptive multitasking. But what it lacked in architecture, it made up in user interface.
With each release of Mac OS X, things have gotten faster, better, and at the same time, slowly regaining some of the niceties we lost in going from 9.2 to 10.0. 10.2 had the spring-loaded folders. 10.3 returned more finder preferences. 10.4 resurrected desk accessories in the form of dashboard. And 10.5 has piles.
Piles are a neat concept, where you can take a bunch of files and drag them to the dock, which is typically on the bottom of the screen. From there, clicking that small area causes all the icons to pop up.
Back in MacOS 8.1, internally called Bride of Buster (Thus the entry title), there was a neat concept, where you take a finder window, and drag it to the bottom of the screen. From there, clicking the small tab causes the window and its icons to pop up.
Sure, there's some marked changes, but the functionality is the same. And I think that's a great thing.
Here's to hoping a new feature for 10.6: Being able to move menubar widgets from the the upper right of the screen to a relocatable location. It might even look something like this:
