Cover Flow

Cover Flow is a revolutionary way to view files in multiple applications. It's first major appearance was in iTunes 7 in 2006.

History
Cover Flow is the idea though of by artist Andrew Coulter Enright. It was implemented by Jonathan del Strother (Website). It was actually called CoverFlow at this point in time.

Then in 2006, Apple bought all the rights and code to the software and later appeared in iTunes 7. Then it appeared in the iPhone then the Finder. It was then seen in all of the 2008 line of iPods.

On February 29th Safari 4 beta was released using a similar looking technology for "Top Sites" and the actual Cover Flow in the History View.

Nock-offs
Since iTunes included this, there has been a buzz about putting this into other applications. Some implementations are naff and slow, others look similar and work. Here are the major ones:
 * Compiz Fusion (effects manager for X11 based systems) uses a good implementation for a live-preview alt-tab plugin
 * Open-source media player SongBird has a plugin available which does a rough implementation
 * Search Engine SearchMe uses a implementation (can be slow).
 * Alternative iPod firmware Rockbox has a demo of something called "PictureFlow"