“The Dock in Mac OS X is unique in comparison to the user interface of Windows, most Linux distros that emulate the Windows desktop, and previous versions of the Classic Mac OS. Apple has significantly updated the Dock in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Here’s a look at what’s new and different in our 3-page report.”
Keeps on progressing. Now, the question becomes (and this is highly subjective) is whether it is onward and upward, or just towards more bling?
What works great for one person often sucks for another, simply because not everyone thinks and works in the same way.
It appears the Leopard Dock is undergoing a very interesting evolution. I wonder if Apple will ever stop making changes to that? Nah, it’s Apple
As soon as people start incorporating whatever new things Apple has come up with in other app launchers, Apple is likely to change, if only to be different, and (hopefully) better.
I dislike the new Dock. It might grow on me, however, so we’ll see.
I agree, this is a highly subjective issue but I feel that this is the direction the Mac OS X GUI is taking in Leopard:
“We Must Move Forward… Not Backwards, Not to The Side, Not Forwards, But Always Whirling, Whirling, Whirling Towards Freedom!” (Kodos… or was it Kang?)
For instance, I like quicklook and the unified theme, the new possibilities for app interaction with Core Animation but… I really don’t understand the point of the 3D dock and semi-transparent menubar. They seem like completely arbitrary changes.
Got my first Mac, a MBP just last month. By the end of the first week, Quicksilver made Dock, and to some extent Finder, irrelevant. But introduction of stacks in the new Dock sounds like something that’ll make me use Dock again.
What works great for one person often sucks for another, simply because not everyone thinks and works in the same way.
Which is _exactly_ why the ISO definition of usability has the wording specified users.
(Usability: The extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use.)
It really looks a lot like lsun’s ooking glass
but nonetheless, I’ll never really got used to the old dock, so why should I like this one… the dock is a good idea for tracking running apps, but it’s terrible as a launcher… you’ll never fit all the apps you need in it, and you have to keep it hidden anyway, otherwise it will always be in your way.
I really miss the start menu and the taskbar sometimes.
probably combining the dock and the taskbar you get something really useful.
The Applications Stack may be an attempt to address your concern. It operates like an expandable application launcher residing in the dock. Based on the article, and the video on Apple’s website, I feel that Stacks might be quite helpful.
I have to disagree with you that the dock is a good idea for tracking apps but is terrible as a launcher. I personally find it the other way around. I use the dock to launch commonly used apps and I use Command-Tab to quickly keep track of or switch between apps.
Of course, it’s all individual preference.
And the Sun looking glass dock really looks a lot like the Mac OS X dock.
yeah yeah, we know, everyone copies from one another.
I really hate the taskbar since it gets filled with windows and “plotter”/bloat, I’m not a friend of start menues either compared to running apps from a keyboard combination or in worst cases terminal.
Just remove all application shortcuts from the dock and use it as something which shows which apps are running them, it’s what I have done.
Anyway I don’t like that it takes space and the old Apple menu where you could switch tasks where perfect (even thought it needed one more click.)
Hard to take a desktop environment with only one desktop seriously. Its very strange, all this usability guideline stuff, and this odd omission of the most important single factor which makes multiple apps usable. Same for Windows of course. Been going on for years, and its one reason why its very hard to take HIGs and HIG experts seriously. Or Apple usability claims.
Hard to imagine you’ve missed this:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/features/spaces.html
It comes with a whole load of Apple hyperbole about banishing clutter and the seem very proud of having something that’s been around in other environments for ages, but it’s there (or will be in Leopard). Given that, your complaint is soon to be obsolete
Typical RDF…
It’s just marketing. They have to fill a page somehow. The wow starts now? Every company makes bloated claims on their advertising. This isn’t RDF. RDF is the UK iPhone launch.
My point is that for more years than I recall there has been a simple and effective solution to the user interface problem of running multiple applications on one physical screen. It has been the combination of multiple desktops and paging and the usual dock that you find on Gnome or KDE.
Contrary to what the article suggests, this solution does not derive from Windows or Mac user interface work or innovations.
Now, yes, finally in the Year of Grace 2008, not much more than 5-10 years late, we will finally see at least part of this solution, multiple desktops, appearing in MacOS. It is this delay in implementing a key part of the proven solution, while the superiority of the Mac interface was being trumpeted, which makes one deeply skeptical about HIG and the whole subject of Mac human interface design. Windows is no better of course, just less vocal about having awarded itself the HIG Gold Medal.
It reminds one of the two button mouse. Yes, there is now a right click on Macs, on an overpriced and buggy bit of hardware greatly inferior to the OEM solutions shipping with almost all desktops. However, for years, the superiority of the human interface solution which shipped with a one button mouse as standard, was being trumpeted, despite the fact that it totally lacked what had been proven to be the right answer.
In fact, the solution to the problem was simple and (as another poster remarks) is available for $5-10 from Logitech etc. It is the two button mouse with scrolling wheel. It is better to use than the one button mouse, and it is a more robust and better bit of hardware than the mighty mouse.
What happens is that the market for open interface products evolves a multiplicity of solutions. Gradually a couple of these end up satisfying almost all needs, and there is a long tail that wants and gets varying solutions, such as tab desktops as in some of the minimalist and spartan WMs.
However, the problem for Apple is that it needs not only to be easy to use, it also needs to be different. Sometimes the two needs conflict, and when they do, its difference takes precedence. Then the marketing message takes over, and everyone is told to toe the party line and Think Different.
I have to see this source of yours that says one desktop means a broken HIG. Multiple desktops is not the endall/beall. Its a great concept and its usable but it can be confusing to those who don’t even know what a desktop is to begin with and will probably never use the feature. Apple’s HIG is meant to cater to your average non-technical user as they grow in popularity so will their focus on features for power users, but toting gnome and especially KDE as an example is just plain stupid. BTW, there isn’t just NOW a right click, it’s always been there, there was nothing stopping anyone from buying a decent mouse and using the right click, its been their even before OSX, just because apple didn’t provide a mouse with this functionality doesn’t mean the OS couldn’t support it. Why did Apple go with a one-button mouse for all those years, you say? Well since you seem to know so much about HIG, you should know that apple was using the one button mouse paradigm to force developers to support proper drag and drop support, which frankly gnome/KDe/Windows haven’t gotten right because they rely on the alternate mouse menu way too much. Some do not even implement the right click menu correctly. One-button forces the developers to develop for the lowest common denominator and it forces them to create a proper GUI that supports true drag and drop among oth3er things. Gnome does the same thing in their HIG, they restrict the devs from going crazy in-order to make sure that apps work properly and are consistent, but sadly that is no always the case, not even for apple. There is nothing at all wrong with a one-button, the fact that you can use the whole operating system and all of its programs with only a one-button mouse speaks volumes, imo. I’m a Linux user (though I use a MBP for my music apps. Hooray, I got rid of windows!) but you have to admire Apple sometimes for their audacity.
You forget that there is/was a large base of people who were highly concerned when the old Mac OS was being so dramatically changed with the arrival of Mac OS X. To some people drastic change is not welcomed and I remember all the articles and such flying around about how horrible Jobs was for hacking up their precious operating system… they simply wanted the OS 9 but more robust.
—– mindless rambling warning – don’t read past here —–
So now Jobs/Apple is slowly making some major UI paradigm changes (2 button mouse as an example, multiple desktops as another) while somehow over the years he has managed to cheerlead everyone right along with a some bling and some added functionality here and there, and some minor changes to how the UI is arranged… he got people (well some people) to roll right along with the changes to the point where introducing these “powerful new features” seems like evolution (or revolution to some) and it is just accepted.
Sorry, I ramble… but seriously… I *like* and use Mac OS X. But to me it is still a[n] [arguably bad] fusion of NEXTSTEP and Mac OS. I’ve lost the floating menus and the clean and simple interface of NEXTSTEP, I’ve lost the more functionally consistent Mac OS menubar and UI, and got this hobbled together thing that HAS evolved into something better over time. It is usable and not too bad looking.
PS – I still think the BeOS was the best.
Leopard has support for virtual desktops, third party utilities gives it already and personally now when I actually use OS X I don’t miss them since expose solves the same problem anyway.
This article made me remember how much I used to use tabbed windows in os 8. I quite liked them. … oh well….
try this
http://www.donelleschi.com/stickywindows/
i too miss the tabbed windows, but now i have them
There are a lot of things I like about OS X, but the Dock is not one of them. With a Windows/Linux taskbar, I can quickly glance down and not only easily see which applications are running, but which documents these apps are using as well. So a quick glance down and I can see:
-Okay, ESPN.com is open in Firefox.
-source.html is open in Notepad.
-The open file browser is pointed to my ‘Downloads’ folder.
With the dock you only see the applications, and have to mouseover each application icon to view which document it has opened, and even then, it’s more difficult to quickly discern the open applications (you have to look for a small carat or glowing orb, as your running applications are mixed in with any shortcuts to applications).
This is one of the reasons I just don’t feel efficient on OS X like I do on Windows or Linux with a taskbar and desktop switcher.
That’s because you usually don’t maximize every window when using OS X, so you can tell what documents are open by just looking at the screen rather than a small bar.
That doesn’t work too well when you have a lot of documents opened, but in that case you can use Exposé. IMO it’s at least as useful as the taskbar in that case.
meh, I must agree with parent. I was never able to use the dock as efficiently as a good taskbar+pager like you have in KDE. And I still really hate the lack of a proper maximization in OS X – just maximize the fricking app when I click the maximize button!
Expose is cool, though, but not as efficient as a taskbar which is always there. The docker really lacks the option to keep ALL running apps visible. I’ve tried the “only show minimized apps in the taskbar” in KDE as well, but really, even with kompose (expose clone) it sucks. having to push a button or move to upper-right with the mouse to be able to choose a task instead of just clicking on it immediately can’t possibly be any better, sorry.
And the article author acts rather silly when he first says the windows taskbar sucks because it doesn’t scale, and calls the solution to group tasks bad, and a few paragraphs later he mentions how the Dock doesn’t scale and there isn’t really a good solution (except grouping stuff BY HAND).
The dock does show all running tasks, thats what the little arrow indicators are. If you click on the icon of the app you are running its window will be brought to the front, just like a taskbar would do. In-fact if you minimize the window and click on the launcher it will maximize the window. Basically the dock is almost exactly like a taskbar but it just looks different and does other things as well. So for example if you have safari open and you have it somewhere on you desktop but have like five windows open covering it, clicking on the safari icon will bring it to the front, just like the windows taskbar. It will even group different windows of the same application together just like Windows, holding down the mouse button over the application will let you pick which once you want to bring forward. The benefit in the way Apple does it is that launchers are usually always in the same place so you know automatically where to go when you need to bring you application to the front instead of having to determine the order by looking at the taskbar. There are other benefits, the icon can show you the status of the application, you can do app specific tasks (such as quit, hide, etc) from just one icon without having to go to the actual application to get notification or having efforts duplicated by having every notification in the system tray like windows/gnome/kde do, everything application specific is located in one area and that is where users should look to find out the status of their apps. Now that I think about it, writing this, its pretty damn ingenious if you ask me. The only thing it won’t do, however,is minimize the application when you click on the launcher icon, which would be helpful but not really necessary since minimizing is only useful if you are trying to reach the desktop otherwise its just redundant. OSX is task specific, it is made for having multiple applications and windows open at the same time. Switching between windows should be pretty intuitice and easy to do for the average user. There really is very little difference between the dock and a taskbar if you really look at the fundamentals, they do the exact same thing, except that the dock does a little bit more to simplify the and to consolidate the desktop.
So, to summarize, you could say the dock works like the taskbar, but it is application-centric instead of document-centric, and always groups all windows of one application.
So maybe I should play with it for a longer time. Or maybe it is still that I like the text on the taskbar too much – knowing which document is which isn’t really possible very well with the docker. If you have 5 webpages open, you can use expose, but if it’s about 4 text documents, expose doesn’t help you very well either.
Guess both approaches have up- and downsides…
Well if you want to know which document is which, all you have to do is go the application icon and hold the mouse button doen on that for about half a second at it will give text telling you the name of the documents you have open pertaining to that particular application. Example, if you have 3 different firefox windows open, clicking and holding on the firefox icon will give you a list of what windows are open in firefox, with the titles of each windows displayed in a shortened fashion, very similar to how windows/KDE/Gnome do it when they group tasks per application when things get too busy, the only difference is that the dock always does this even if there is only one document open for each particular app. If you get a chance try to use it a little more and try to forget about the windows taskbar and you will see that the dock is brilliant in its design.
I don’t know what I prefer the most, but in KDE, Gnome and Windows I think that the taskbar gets so filled with various Windows and the text looks so crappy that it’s useless anyway, in the end they will all turn into icons only anyway. And I think it’s distracting.
I guess I would prefer full screen apps with multiple Windows, or a little worse one window for the application and tabs.
In AmigaOS I would probably have pressed amiga-m until I reached the texteditor or browser and then just looked at what windows where open. (Full screen windows or alone screens + tabbed document are probably best combination.)
Well, I use virtual desktops to not have things too cramped… And the KDE taksbar is double sized by default, with 2 rows, so it’s big enough to hold a lot.
Minimizing in the dock is entirely useless, the previews are far to small to be useful if you have 2 or more docs which look approx. the same.
Btw, you can use the dock for documents aswell, just always minimize windows and each one will get a thumbnail in the dock and if you let the mouse pointer go over them you will see what document they are for.
sure, but I don’t always want to minimize one document when I switch to the other one. And the dock doesn’t show text, so it’s rather useless ‘cuz you can’t see which file is which in such a small size. You’ve got to mouse over, an extra and annoying action.
Insanelymac (?) had a competition/uhm-whatever-it’s-called-when-you-get-something-for-doing- something where people was afforded to fix various issues people had with OS X. How the “maximize” work was one of them so you can download the app from them and fix it yourself.
http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?showtopic=26597
http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?showtopic=26669
http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?showtopic=26038
http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?showtopic=26465
neat app
I don’t use Mac OS X anymore, though, KDE all the way
“Oh, I have 60 tasks of IE windows only showing the IE-icon”, yeah, great!
How good works your espn.com when it’s in another tab in firefox?
Thought apple could add a text part of the icon in the dock and let the application set it to whatever.
Remove all shortcuts from the dock and they won’t be a problem because all apps in your dock will be running apps.
Also it seems like one has to right click the icon in the dock to see which documens are open.
You can also left click on a Dock Icon for an half-second to open che contextual menu. There is no need to right click.
“The perpetually cramped TaskBar doesn’t make it clear and obvious which apps are running if more than a few are.”
What?!?!? The running apps are those that are in the taskbar to begin with. Grouping only obfuscates each individual instance of a running app such as Explorer, but not all apps expose each running window as a taskbar item. Microsoft tried this with Office 2000 but people weren’t all that happy with multiple instances of Word or Excel in their taskbar. Also, who cares is the QuickLaunch icons do anything? Also, while not part of a stock Windows install, there’s a great utility called TrueLaunchBar that makes the Quicklaunch bar infinitely more usable for launching and organizing apps, allowing a user to bypasss the start menu altogether if they so desire. So far no OS has really hit on the right mix of exposing useful information in a compact, eye pleasing package.
Even weirder, author first says the windows taskbar sucks because it doesn’t scale, and calls the solution to group tasks bad. Then a few paragraphs later he mentions how the Dock doesn’t scale and there isn’t really a good solution (except grouping stuff BY HAND).
And on widescreen, the taskbar really is more than good enough.
Of course, the windows taskbar sucks if you do real multitasking – but in KDE, a double row and 4 virtual desktops really solve the problem easily.
I’m sure spaces (virtual desktops done poor) is the solution he talks about at the end of his article…
well no? catch this screenie
http://planet-zuriel.de/tmp/kde-pimped.png
and stand corrected…
well no? catch this screenie
http://planet-zuriel.de/tmp/kde-pimped.png
and stand corrected…
What exactly is that screen shot supposed to prove?
that linux is ready for the desktop and rulez at it?
I use FreeLaunchBar (the free version of TrueLaunchBar) so that I can make Windows almost as usable as OSX is *for me*. I highly recommend this for anybody who has to use Windows at work but much prefer OSX.
In Windows, it is sometimes hard to view if an application is running because they don’t always have a window. For example, I need to restart firefox because it’s acting slowly. In windows I can’t just hit a key command to quit the entire application I have to close all the windows and then open up task manager to make sure that the application itself has quit before I can then reopen it. Speaking of which I need to do that right after this post.
Because what OSX needs is a more subtle indicator of what programs are actually running – because that crappy little four pixel triangle was so obvious and in your face…
For the OS touted as the most user friendly, I still say it’s the most counterintuitive pile of crap – ESPECIALLY when it comes to telling what programs are open, what documents are open, etc, etc.
Though the ‘stack’ looks like an improvement, I’d ask if there was a way to leave those open all the time with smaller icons…
But then, I’m the user who turns OFF the stupid ‘condense by application’ nonsense on the Windows taskbar, and runs the taskbar in portrait on the left hand side of my left monitor at about 300 pixels wide – with a large icons quick launch at the bottom. I’d do the same in gnome if it wasn’t restricted to 128 pixels wide as the max.
LOL, yes, even more subtle really sucks imho… the task management always has been behind windows 95, I’m sure it’s just because they don’t want to copy MS. Silly, MS copies them all the time
And try KDE on linux, at least the panels go to 256 pixels
Maybe the kasbar is something for you (see ‘add new panel’ on the kicker, the KDE panel).
Does any one know if things that get downloaded to the Download Stack poof if you drag them to the desktop?
cause that seems like a really dumb idea if it does.
According to the article, files are downloaded to a new directory in the user’s home directory (~/Downloads). The icon in the dock is a representation of that directory. Dragging the icon from the dock will only remove the representation, not the directory or the files within.
It’s nice they show where the dock comes from, especially with the NeXt desktop.
Myself, I’m running linux with Windowmaker (an unfortunately mostly dead project, cursed be kde and gnome). An interesting point is that it’s another derivative of NeXT.
This OSX new dock seems nice and all, but once you take away all the bling, I find its answers to the clutter problem pretty inelegant.
As somebody’s mentioned before, leopard will (finally) see the advent of multiple desktops on the mac. I fail to understand why Apple hasn’t taken advantage of this.
To give an idea of what I mean, in Windowmaker, you have your dock, which pretty much works exactly the same way it did on the NeXT. But, you also have the Clipper, where you can attach icons exactly the same way you do on the dock. The difference is that there’s one clipper for each desktop.
This means that when you have an application which isn’t one of your very primary ones (there aren’t that many of those for most people) but one you still want to be able to access quickly, you put it on the clipper of whichever desktop you like. The primary way to navigate through desktops is using the wheel on the background, and you can have as many of them as you like.
It seems to me very quick, very simple and very easy to implement and use. Why Apple (or any of the other major desktops for that matter – windows, gnome, kde, xfce) hasn’t included this is beyond me.
There were more than one dock extender for NeXTStep.
Fiend being one of the most widely used.
The SUN Icon is Fiend and that’s where The WindowMaker idea originated:
http://windowmaker.info/imageview.php?cat=big&id=41
“It seems to me very quick, very simple and very easy to implement and use. Why Apple (or any of the other major desktops for that matter – windows, gnome, kde, xfce) hasn’t included this is beyond me.”
Probably because, at first sight, it is far from easy to understand how it exactly works.
Edited 2007-10-11 06:43
Probably because, at first sight, it is far from easy to understand how it exactly works.
Yes, but the hype notwithstanding, everybody has to go through a learning phase before being able to properly use any kind of new interface, whatever the system (and I mean that with the widest meaning, not only computers).
I don’t use a mac, but I do have to deal with windows box from time to time. That grouping of apps in the taskbar is one of the most irritating things I can think of.
Even acknowledging that Windowmaker hasn’t the best solution (but you’ll have to go a looong way to show me one I like better) I just can’t fathom why Apple’s GUI designer haven’t tried to somehow take advantage of the multiple desktops.
I tend to hold the whole “users are dumb and will never be able to remember what they did on their computers ten seconds ago” attitude responsible.
Looking through all these screenshots and having been exposed to OS X 10.4 for some time now I can’t help but feel slightly amused by the flame wars surrounding GNOME and KDE and the eternal question of which one of them looks better. Compared to OS X it’s like to warthogs arguing about who looks better.
Like the looks are the reason to use KDE/Gnome…
Sorry, but most of us WORK on our Computers and don’t just watch them.
It is so totally irrelevant how an OS looks. When will this rotten idiocy finally die out?
That may be your opinion, but many people like to work in an environment they find pleasing. It’s why people invest in well-designed offices.
I would go so far to say that many people prefer things they think look nice. Why would it be any different for operating systems?
Edited 2007-10-11 08:08
because the notion that looks only serve as eye candy is completely wrong. usability and design are very important. just as it is best to write code efficiently and in a manner that can be understood, so should the appearance of an OS be efficient and easily understood. Gray text on black would obviously be terrible, and what if the controls for different programs were in different places?
Of course it matters, even in the olden days of text on a screen.. I’m not saying everyone who preaches appearance really understands, and of course different strokes for different folks, nor am I saying which OS looks the best or any of that. Just saying..
Design is a Good ThingTM
Edit: Spelling
Edited 2007-10-11 17:23
This article, while informative in some parts (the historical aspects), is just another Mac fanboi raving about his favorite OS and bashing the rest because they aren’t like apple.
I love Mac’s, but as stated so many other times in so many other different places… the fanboi’s ruin it for me big time. I never understood the Linux vs. Minix vs. BSD wars either… double for GNOME vs. KDE. I think it is just ridiculous to expect everyone to appreciate what you find appealing. It is just stupid. Why should I like carrots just because you do? It really is that basic.
There are strengths and weaknesses to every system, OS X included, but this article just tears shreds through other operating systems and then has the balls to apologize and justify why errors/bugs/broken-features in OS X are legitimate, it’s just a double-standard that no one could live up to. I guess I should have known what I was in for when I saw the link to http://www.appleinsider.com. Naivety on my part I guess…
I don’t pretend to like Windows… but most of the anti-MS cr*p in that article was petty nitpicking. I hope the author doesn’t get paid to spew that garbage… that would be a disgrace to journalism and proper journalists everywhere.
Edited 2007-10-11 07:55
I agree, there is some fanboyism here with the bashing of Windows and so on.
When the writer talks about Apple’s new stacks, he overlooks the fact you’ve always been able to drop a folder onto the Dock and right-click to see its contents. I don’t know anyone who uses that feature, so it’ll be interesting to see what happens now.
He also feels the need to defend Apple against every piece of criticism about the new Dock. For example, users have complained it looks bad vertically.
His argument is something along the lines of “icons are silly anyway” and goes on to say that you can fit more icons on a horizontal Dock thanks to widescreen displays.
A valid counter-argument would be – The is wrong since the icons resize anyway, and why do I want more valuable vertical space taken away from the documents I’m working on? Since there’s no actual text on the Dock, Apple are mad to keep insisting the Dock is at the bottom when it’s impractical and many beginners wouldn’t think to change it.
>> he overlooks the fact you’ve always been able to drop a folder onto the Dock and right-click to see its contents.
I can hear the mac fanboys now – “Right click? What be this right-click of which you speak?”
Unless of course they have the mighty useless breaks every five seconds clicks when you don’t want it to and good luck holding it still while clicking mouse… Which is why my advice to mac buyers is throw the mouse in the trash and go get a logitech.
Welcome to 2007 Mac OSX has done right clicking for years and so have mac users, the old mac users not grasping right clicking is incredibly old now.
As for the mighty mouse, i have used it since it was released and it has worked fine.
As for advice on buying a new mac, to tell you the truth when a user buys a new computer mac or pc they come bundled with a bog standard mouse which most users will replace with their frav.
As for the dock, ive found it more productive than the start menu. I don’t have it cluttered just the apps i use the most. The rest i access through spotlight anyway. Like the active app displaying a black triangle, im not sure about the leopard dock until ive used it for a couple of months.
My background was that ive used windows (and still do) since 2.0, the start menu was a good idea but i found it gets cluttered to easily. the dock + expose + spotlight to me offers a better method of application management. I brought my first mac in 2005 and found i prefered the method more than the start menu. However when i say prefer i don’t mean i hate it and can’t work with windows, it’s just that i work faster the mac way.
I like the gnome+compiz way of doing things, because its a marriage of the two. The ease of access of the start menu and taskbar, and the power of expose (scale). I like the dock in Leopard, when I first saw it I thought about Looking Glass too. Didn’t LG have a rudimentary implementation of stacks too. I haven’t really used it but i thought I had seen something about that once.
I think I should have done that, instead I got the wireless Mighty mouse and I must say its huge disappointment.
Definitely.
I like OS X, and use it every day as my main system, but the Dock can be such a major pain in the ass.
I) There isn’t a method to see, at one glance, what documents you have open. When I’m working on a university report, I can easily have 4 scientific articles open, alongside numerous websites, as well as a bunch of Word documents. I want to easily see which documents I have open, and the Dock simply doesn’t allow you to do that. You need to Expose first, but when you have that many windows open, they become really small in Expose mode (even on my 21″ 1680×1050), and you need to mouseover them before you get a clue as to which document is what.
Windows’ taskbar isn’t exactly bliss either in this case. What I want is the ability to minimise windows to the desktop (iconify), as an icon, with a line of text underneath telling me which doc it is. That would be insanely awesome.
II) There’s no divider between running apps and ‘normal’ dock apps. I launch many apps using Spotlight, but their entries in the dock are not distinguishable from fixed dock items. Really, really annoying.
III) The dock doesn’t appeal to your spatial memory. Since it widens bidirectionally, items are never there where you expect them to be. You can solve this by putting the dock in the bottom left corner, but this just looks plain weird.
The new dock in Leopard doesn’t address any of these issues. It adds a pseudo 3D look to the dock, which not only looks like ass, but is also completely inconsistent from a perspective point of view. In fact, the dock isn’t 3D at all – you just have a trapezoid shaped background now, instead of a square one.
Edited 2007-10-11 11:44 UTC
I so agree with you. I haven’t used the docker for weeks and weeks at a time, sure, but my experience with it have always been kind’a like “wow this looks cool… … … damn, it works like hell!!!”
the new user interface seems a video-game.
Leopard = video game
Linux Compiz Fusion = video game
Vista = the best gui
Edited 2007-10-11 08:28
Sorry, can’t give more than 2/10 for this half-hearted trolling attempt.
Can anybody with a Leopard build tell me if there’s a keyboard shortcut to “restore” a minimized app?
The first thing that annoyed me after the switch (3 yrs. ago) was that it has very easy to “minimize” a “Window” (cmd-m mostly), but NO WAY to bring it back without having to focus the dock with the keyboard (PITA), moving to the window and hitting enter. Unusable.
So in the end I never ever Minimize, but tend to “hide”. Which is nice, but sometimes you just need to minimize a Window, not an entire application.
Being a keyboard user, I try not to use the mouse, but this forfces me to do. :p
In history given of the dock concept I was disappinted that no mention was made of the CDE app launcher, (or its derivatives) which I think shares many more similarities with the dock than the wholly undock-like Windows taskbar. And why cover the Windows task bar but not mention the much more dock-like Windows system tray. The systray has icons which can animate, represent state of running programs, sometimes launch programs, hold menus… very dockish, despite its relative primitiveness.
As far as I can tell, the author mostly wants to put the dock in a positive light, instead of really giving a good overview. He pretends like apple invented it. what you mention sure isn’t the only thing he overlooked…
Yet it is a nice article, so let’s ignore the fanboyism and have fun
The author does speak about RISCOS and NeXTStep and at the end of the day the dock is an amalgam of the two OS’s docks with sugar added on top. I personally like the new dock, because other than stacks all that has changed is the look of it, but I don’t like the whole highway strip seperator. It is just plain corny.
he doesn’t pretend like apple invented it. he explicitly states that it first appeared in risc os and nextstep, both gui’s from the ’80s. iirc, cde was only released in 1994.
but he could have mentioned ms windows 1.0!
is it inovative to click on the application-stack instead of the application-menue?
same shit in green…
is it inovative to click on the application-stack instead of the application-menue?
I don’t know, but that’s an innovative way to spell ‘menu’.
ai has published another article about spaces and the history of multiple desktops/screens since xerox’s “rooms” in 1986:
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/07/10/11/road_to_mac_os_x_leop…