Given Apple's secrecy, patent applications have long been a valuable source of insight into what the company has been doing in its labs. This time, it appears that they have been looking at how to incorporate variable sized icons into the interface.

OS interfaces currently let users change the size of icons, with OS X giving you quite a wide range of sizes to accommodate all tastes.

"However, such difference in size does not indicate the relative importance of the files or program represented by the icon, since the change in icon size is performed universally for all icons in a container, such as a folder or window," the company wrote. "Accordingly, in order to present a more informative and personalized user interface, a manner of describing to a user relative importance of an icon in relation to other icons in a system is desirable."

The idea is to be able to have icons of variable sizes within the same folder or window or list, thus letting the user quickly find out the relevant ones, at a glance, while still keeping the others around in case they are needed. This could either be done manually by the user, according to their tastes, or automatically by the system, according to set rules. You could thus have application icons larger than those of other files, or have folders containing more items to be bigger than those containing fewer items.

It is uncertain whether we could be expecting something like this in Leopard, and the illustrations in the patent application give no hints. This new way of displaying icons, combined with other enhancements in the upcoming OS could make for a truly revolutionary user interface.

The filing, titled "Graphical user interface for computers having variable size icons," is credited to Apple User Interface Design Team members Arnaud Gourdol and Donald Lindsay.