The Dock "floor" is the worst UI idea Apple has ever had - Page 4

What apple is doing by making the desktop space 3D is rectifying a current inconsistency, further action by apple isn't really what is required. (Please correct me if I've completely misunderstood)

What I'm talking about is the, if you like, philosophy of the current UI (sounds very grand doesn't it ) The desktop should be 3D, it makes sense considering the current 3D nature of windows being on top of one another. Even with tabs in a tabbed browser. The tab protrudes out in front. All of the buttons protrude out, or try to give that illusion, and all the shading and effects point to the desktop being a 3D space. Why then is it illogical and inconsistent to have a 3D dock, to fit in with that.

I like the new Dock. We are never going to go back to the simplicity and consistency of the early Mac OS; things are too complicated and diverse now.

I just noticed that the windows are still right at the back of this new 3D space. I think it kinda defeats the purpose of a 3D space if you're only going to use two dimensions of it.

Perhaps the new 3D space is being used to clearly delineate desktop windows from system alerts and the miscellaneous HUD controls.

While I agree that Apple doesn't seem to be caring about simplicity and consistency, the rest of your statement is just bunk. Where things are complicated and diverse, the last thing you need is more complication and inconsistency from the interface. In fact, the only way you can truly remain in control of a complicated system is if it's consistent.

you've obviouly never heard of rhetorical questions then. go look it up

The dock is 1000 times better in your pictures, taking up less space and actually appearing more dimensional. I like the white rather than the black. Just a little polish on you dock and perfection--see if you can't send that idea to apple in any way. I don't care for your menu bar over the original.

I would like an option to revert the UI to the original 1984 one, in appearance and functionality.

I know that there has been much talk of this sorta 3D Dock implying a greater move to a 3D UI in the future. However noone has given any ideas on what this just might be. It may be impotant to note that Apple has been dropped a small cue to possible further intentions. I don't know if this was first brought to my attention on this webpage or somewhere else but I think it is best to quote apple itself:

"Apple Computer is seeking software engineers to help us build the next generation of iWork.
For this position, we are seeking an engineer to work on 3D specific features"

No this is not directly related to the UI of MAC OS X as a whole but it implies that 3D will be moving more and more into the MAC platform. The job page also says that they are looking for this position to pertain to the user interface. To read the entire apple job posting visit go here: http://jobs.apple.com/index.ajs?BID=...&CurrentPage=1

Just thought I would add my two cents.

Brief take on/summary of the thinking above:

Cool. I actually like the idea of the Leopard desktop paradigm being a kind of 1 inch deep pool. Apps live on/near to the bottom except WHILE ACTIVE, dashboard floats on the surface (the ripple-effect makes sense in this light, doesn't it?!) and the dock extends from the surface down to the bottom of the pool (irrespective whether it's on the bottom or side), thereby delineating the depth of the pool.

Conceptually it all really makes sense to me:

Previously, we had a 'desktop' ON TOP of which we could put stuff, extending 'out of' the screen, as it were. Now apple has apparently decided that our screens should be 'the top' of the working space and users should be able to put stuff BEHIND the frontmost surface. So with this new UI move apple has achieved two things:

1. They clarified the already present third dimension of the desktop methaphor in the sense of things being ON TOP of eachother by turning the dock into a very clear indicator of both the presence as well as the size of the 3rd dimension of your workspace.

2. They changed the relative position of your screen/monitor in this third dimension: The screen used to be THE BOTTOM of your workspace, ON TOP OF which you could put stuff. By having the dock STICK INTO your workspace (instead of protruding outwards), your screen has now become THE TOP layer of your workspace, BEHIND which you can put stuff.

So now we just have to stop thinking about a DESKTOP and start living with the new LEOPARD POOL WORKSPACE paradigm in which active stuff floats on the surface and inactive stuff sinks to the bottom.

PS come to think of it, with spaces, the bottom surface of the pool is actually bigger than the surface and we can move the bottom of the pool around.

This makes sense, but the demos they have up show the active windows on the bottom of the pool.

Took a good look at the demos and see what you mean.

OK, here is what I see in the demos:

Normal windows are confined in the third dimension to a space in between the bottom (desktop pic) and the surface. While active windows appear to rise to just beneath the surface, the actual surface layer can only be reached by specific UI elements such as the 'spaces chooser' and dashboard or frontrow-like interfaces. Stacks and dock icons live in a layer between the apps and surface.

Anyhow, regardless of the details, I actually more and more get the idea from looking at the new desktop and finder demos that Apple actually thought long and hard about the way they use the two real and the more pronouncely simulated third dimension and really do have a well thought-out plan for how and where various UI elements will live and behave in this newly defined desktop "pool". (side note: and boy, how this plan hints at more multi-touch goodness in future hardware updates...)

Obviously, choices have been made about the function and places of certain elements that might seem awkward to many at first (see the previous part of this thread), but I, for one, am pretty optimistic that apple can and will pull this one off and arrive at a UI that in practice will both make more sense and be even more usable and fun to use than tiger is now

I'm going to have to disagree with this statement. It really has to do with the skill and familiarity of the user. A good user with experience can be the master of a system no matter how inconsistent it's interface is.

Just for reference, I've taken a couple of snapshots from the WWDC keynote.

Firstly, there's a close-up on a couple of stacks placed in the dock. This quite nicely shows why Apple made the Dock 3-dimensional.

Secondly, a slightly blurry image of the Dock being shown on the left-hand side.

Although I personally do not have any problem whatsoever with the new dock, it does look a little odd on the left. But then, I've always thought it looked rather odd placed vertically anyway.

(I know it sounds silly, but when it's vertical, my brain wonders how come the Mail icon manages to stay at an angle )

It looks like we're in Stage 2 of the 5-step Programme of UII Changes:

1) Anger
2) Critique (bonus points for invoking Fitts' Law incorrectly)
3) Resignation
4) Acceptance

Then...

5a) Realising it's actually Quite Nice (tm)
-OR-
5b) Applying an APE or other tweak to calm the nerves.

Oh, and I think the transparent menu bar is rather silly. Even Steve sounded a bit hesitant. It sounds very much like there may be the same kind of internal arguments at Apple as back when they were trying to decide how many times a selected menu item should flash back in the OldWorld era. I imagine there'll be a preference, possibly under the guise of an 'Accessibility' setting in System Prefs.

Sorry to post consecutively... but.

Although that's true, even masters don't want to be grating their teeth whenever they use an inconsistent interface, complete with internal cries of GAAAAAAH!

I also think there's a slight difference between behavioural and visual consistency. One is not more important per se than the other, but there's certainly more licence in visual consistency than with behavioural.

I remember the shrieks and wails when GarageBand appeared with its cherry-wood windows. I honestly didn't see the issue there. Applications have a right to create their own workplace within the OS. As long as the cherry-wood window behaved the same as all other windows, there's no problem (as far as I'm concerned).

Personally, I hate the idea of strict uniformity between all applications, each looking and behaving exactly the way the OS prescribes. I've used systems like that and it actually greatly hinders discoverability of features, not to mention it's just plain bland. Imagine the uniformity of an old GUI system such as GEM, Workbench or Windows 95 and below. Now imagine that sort of appearance applied to the capabilities of a modern OS, such as OS X with Exposé, live Dock thumbnails, Spaces, etc. It'd be horrible to use.

I couldn't agree more! I suggest that none of the whiners should buy Leopard. Go ahead and punish Apple!

Meanwhile, the world is undergoing major climate change, a war is out of control, the Middle East is about to erupt into a massive conflagration, none of our politicians has any clue or desire to make things better, AND---- we finally have taxation without representation--- AGAIN!!!

Now, THESE are issues!

I was thinking that too. It kinda throws the whole theorizing going on here about Apple moving to some 3D space out the window. If they don't use it for anything then it's meaningless.

The only metaphor I could have seen is that the dock encompasses the depth of the desktop and those application windows run within the desktop but for that to make sense, the application windows would have to cut through the dock (and possibly create a dashboard style ripple doing so).


I think I know why they made the dock so steep actually. Look at the trash icon. It fits the perspective of Apple's Dock but not mine. The same goes for the Keynote icon. If they used a flatter dock, they'd have to redesign all their icons.

I'm not sure how to improve the menu. Just the whole idea of using transparency is wrong IMO and I prefer the original too (by which I mean the Tiger one - not sure if you meant the original Leopard one). The biggest issue I saw with the menu is that it's hard to make out. With the current menu, it's black text on white until selected and then it's white text on a darker backdrop, which I think is an ideal system. I can't think what possessed them to change this because now in full screen apps, you will see your desktop image.

Null.

Yeah that's a fairly good summary of what I was trying to say earlier. I see where the original worry and disturbance was coming from about the look and consistency of the new dock. But I feel it does make sense and that it is more of a first step towards what might happen in the future. I feel there are still major steps to made into making the desktop space fully 3D.

Has anyone come across Open croquet? It's well worth googling. It's a linux variant attempt to try to do exactly this. I found it amazing as a concept. I wouldn't want that version to use but having seen it it i am starting to see the merits of the 3D desktop and UI world. It just serves as a reminder of the extremes that can actually be achieved with a desktop space. It is one of the more exciting and imaginative linux distributions out there.

I would be interested to know what people think of the new iTunes-esque finder. Is it a way of broadening the mac appeal and converting more misguided windows users (joking!!--I really do not want this to turn into another fiery mac vs pc debate, I honestly ? love windows) . Or do you people think it will be a general improvement. To be truly honest Mac OS X before leopard has a rather annoying, and quirky finder that is good at heart but has its flaws. I would still use Mac OS9 if it weren't for compatibility, spotlight and exposé, oh and screen capture. I can't quite place my finger on it but there is something that feels slightly wrong about the finder. One example is that the type of view (like column or list or icon view) that finder uses never stays the same consistently with each folder. It won't let me only use icon view for applications, list view for one folder and column view for another. Or at least it tries to, I can see that it is trying, but it never manages to stay consistently how I want. That really gets to me. Anyway enough of a personal rant, I'm sure plenty of people know where I'm getting at with the whole moan about the current finder. My point is that do you think it could solve some of these issues. It is the new finder that will make or break the OS



OK whatever you want, there are other places to deal with these things. Can you let us whine in peace? It is genuinely quite an interesting issue we are discussing, about the OS that we will all be using in about a year's time. Again I can't really be bothered to get into an angry debate with you, this is merely a half-hearted plea not to criticise what we are talking about. Its simply just getting in the way of our discussion, without making any of us in the thread any more likely to have any sudden great inspiring desire to run out there into the world and fix something big. And this isn't a cue for a reply, just a general request to you not to say it.

Dock is too solid? Perhaps they are going to have customizable transparency like objectdock.
Menubar is too transparent. You will probably be able to customize the transparency just like menushade.

admin please remove duplicate post

You can achieve that look (and tons more) with Vista and a $20 program called objectdock by stardock software. And yes, they do have oogly shelf docks as well (without reflections).

Taken from a MacWorld article:

If you drag a folder to the Dock, a new icon called a Stackwhich looks, cleverly enough, like a stack of iconsis added to the Dock; click on this icon and the contents of the folder appear as a fanned-out column of high-resolution thumbnail icons and file names. (If there are 10 or more items in the folder, the files appear on a translucent grid instead.) Click on any item to open it.

it's pretty obvious that the 3D interface Apple is moving towards is found in the Looking Glass paradigm. LG is basically a 3D UI space and the background image is actually meant to be perceived as a distant thing with the windows existing as objects suspended in space. LG windows roll on all axis. even the Leopard drop shadows are more feathered to indicate greater depth. believe this is why the Leopard menu bar is now a translucent, ethereal bar, making it better fit into the new depth environment. i suspect that the menu bar may eventually become a thing of the past and become replaced with something else.

Okay, so I was going to post a link to some great screenshots Thinksecret posted of the Leopard release, but the site now seems to be down in a serious way. Makes me wonder if they were smitten by Uncle "you did WHAT to your NDA?!" steve's RDF beam of righteous anger®.

Anyway, the impression that I got from those screenshots matches the idea that Apple is trying to create a more 3D UI paradigm, which is actually more consistent with the metaphor the desktop creates with more than one window/ app open on top of one another. It's clear from TS's screen shots of the new drop shadows that the perceived depth of the desktop has indeed been increased considerably.

Addabox, I've thought about some of your reservations and also about some of the dock mockups that have been posted, and I'm wondering if the problem is not actually the dock, but the icons. Except for the trash, the icons sitting on the dock are glaringly 2D and they seriously clash with the 3D shelf design. I'm thinking Apple's next step (possibly under way right now will be redesigned, 3D icons and some kind of basic 3D-ifier for 3rd party icons that haven't been corrected yet.

Also, I see someone beat me to linking to that iWork employee story, which I saw over at MacRumors yesterday and found extremely incongruous until I read through this thread and some of these ideas clicked. Given that interesting ad, I would say that the concerns about Apple's lack of direction on this issue may well be unfounded.

P.S. I'm reserving judgement on the transparent menu bar until I see how it reacts to different backgrounds- S.J. mentioned something in the keynote about it changing based on the picture in the back so I think this may be something more than just a Vista-esque effect.

P.P.S. The more I think about this stuff, the more I get the feeling that Apple is really not advertising all the real features of Leopard. Simple things that will probably make a big difference in usability seem to abound.

Excellent point.

i got thinking about the menu bar the other day because, i have to admit, it looks like the 'odd man out' of the new interface/desktop. it's the only transparent thing on it! so i began wondering whether i was understanding it the wrong way, so i started thinking about it within the 3D paradigm instead. essentially the menu bar no longer fits and making it semi-apparent/chameleoned/sorta-there was the compromise. i don't think this has anything to do with Vistaization at all - they had to solve the problem and make it fit somehow. technically it's Apples achilles heel in the 3D transition. historically the menu bar has been totally tied to Apple's interface design philosphy from the get go. changing that is gonna be a difficult one. we still have the Macintosh HD icon due to popular demand even though it was not really intended on OsX. so it stays there, a remnant of the past.

Looking Glass, by the way, has no such bar across the top of the UI. instead it adopts the Windows style of menu controls placed upon the UI windows themselves. ironically this better suits the 3D paradigm... will this become the way of the future for OsX also? makes me wonder once again... they did create a dock after all.

as for 3D icons, i agree totally. it's reasonable that icons need some sort of perspective added to them. CoreAnimation utilizes skew transformations to enhance the illusion of depth. i'm sure in future it will be applied to everything.

All this panic over a 2.5D environment simulating 3D space.

Imagine the frustration when the screen goes holographic.

Null.

nice try at covering up.. well poor try tbh.. but no, you weren't being sarcastic, you were being a smartass..

That idea crossed my mind too but I can't see it happening. The only way it could is by putting the menus inside each application window but one of the defining interface features of the Mac is that they don't do that because it doesn't adhere to Fitt's law. It basically forces you to need a maximize function.

I would love it if we could just have one item - either a dock or a menu bar - but I can't see any way to combine them besides embedding the application icons inside the menu, which cuts down the space you have for menu items dramatically. It then ends up like the Windows taskbar but worse because you'd have application-specific menu items.

The transparent menu bar looks incomplete. Some of the menu icons such as the battery indicator and airport signal indicator have opaque white filling it in, and it looks pretty bad. The spotlight icon doesn't suffer from this, but even that icon is less functional than the Tiger version with the blue circle behind it. At lease when it had that blue behind it, it was an easy target for your mouse and stood out from the other items up there. Now, not only do we have to contend with the degraded visibility of menu items, but it's that much harder to hit with the cursor.

It would be cool if the menu bar could be made to disappear like the Dock can. Voila, a pristine desktop (if you have all icons in Stacks instead of scattered all over the desktop).

Or keep the transparency but when you move the cursor to the top of the screen, it becomes opaque.

Null.

No frustration at all, that would be a 3D space where a 3D UI is appropriate.

Mmm...I'm not sure that the top menu bar really fullfills the intent of designing to Fitt's law anymore. When D becomes large and you end up with multiple submovements (even with mouse acceleration*) to get to the menu bar the effects of an infinite W are lessened wrt to time T vs one where interaction occurs as part of only one movement.

Of course sticking the menu at the top of a window that could be equally far away as the top menubar is not better because it exhibits both small target area and large distance.

Perhaps RMB should now activate the menubar as a popup with the first menu item as the context sensitive menu for whatever actions are most relevant to the task at hand (i.e. the current menu that appears when you hit RMB) and the remaining columns are the usual menus from the main menu bar at top of the screen. The location is optimal under Fitts because its zero distance and effectively infinite width.

Then time to menu item is then soley under Accot/Zhai's steering law. You can also replicate infinite W by setting the top of the floating menubar impassable while the context menu is active (deactivate by clicking RMB again...or if I recall correctly releasing RMB under windows which is sub-optimal if RMB must be held down. Can't check at the moment...I'm running OSX ) to decrease hit time by making in effect the topmost tunnel of near infinite width (i.e. traversal errors in the up direction do not affect outcome).

That implementation must be tested somewhere but no paper pops to mind...maybe in the original Accot's paper? It seems fairly obvious.

Did that make sense or did I just get Bonus Points in Step 2?

Vinea

* On a 30" ACD I can't get to the menubar in one gesture with my current mouse acceleration. I can't always get that on a 20" display either. When the menubar is on the wrong monitor...

Yeah the current menu system isn't ideal at all these days. We have too many options and it takes way too long to scroll down lists. There needs to be more of a random access system where we can reach the command that we already know we want.


That would probably work as long as the contextual menu was placed in between menus otherwise it would need to wrap around. They could use a grid system like they do in Maya's hotbox but I think people are better at remembering where things are in a linear menu and a hotbox wouldn't block the vertical movement but it decreases D. When the mouse was near the bottom of the screen in both cases, the menus would go up though. But I think that there's a way round this.

What if instead of a menubar, it popped up a grid of scroll boxes like in itunes. This way you don't even have to open the menus to see what's in them and you can jump straight to the item you want very quickly. The height would be adjustable to what you preferred and if the mouse was at the bottom, it still fits the grid as close to the bottom as the height allows. If you hit save as, it wouldn't even have to open another box as it could turn into a Finder view.

As you say, put the contextual menu as close to the mouse position, block the movement vertically (actually you wouldn't have to as the menus are open) and use RMB to close. You wouldn't even need nested menus with a scrollbar because they are long enough to accommodate as many options as you need (possibly indented). To get round items being cramped, the menu your mouse was hovering over could expand.


Dual and large displays completely kill the current menu system for sure. I wish Apple would give an option to mirror their menus on second displays.