The Dock "floor" is the worst UI idea Apple has ever had - Page 5

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I agree. However, people are whining about how the 2.5D is bad and we need to look at Looking Glass--another attempt at 3D in a 2.5D paradigm.

People tend to fall into a few camps: 1.) Those that want to be as efficient and highly productive whilst spending less time in front of the screen and 2.) those that enjoy spending excessive hours at their system and will spend most of that time not using their systems for work, but for entertainment.

An over simplification, yes, but a common scenario.

Ok, I just got to try Leopard and I am really not impressed with the GUI.

The menu is horrible, it is distracting because when you have a program open full up, you see the desktop colors. This might seem like a minor thing but the biggest fault is that it totally screws up the idea of interface unification. When you see your nice new shaded windows and then some odd color up top on every program, it just looks completely off.

and no you can't turn it off. You didn't really think Apple would let you did you?

However, if you put solid white behind it, it looks exactly like the Tiger one (except the icons are all black even the apple logo) so it's not a huge problem but it means everyone will have to add a white bar to their desktop images like I said before unless Apple get enough complaints about it and actually add an option.

The dock is horrible, it is too big. Fortunately you can hide it and it slides up just like the current one. However, they've now blocked windows being resized below it. So if you don't hide the dock, your window size will be squished between the dock and the menu bar. If you hide it, it's fine.

Another thing that will force people to hide the dock is that all the icons cast drop shadows onto the windows below. Pointless IMO and distracting again.

The reflection is very cool but you only really notice it when you look for it so it's not really a useful addition. I also think that it affects minimizing performance because it seems to jitter more than Tiger. It also accentuates the slowness of launching applications (which is still there, guess we'll have to wait on more optimization with the new dev tools) as you can see two sets of bouncing now.

They've squared the screen corners and the window corners are like itunes YAY. BUT they've now rounded all the bottom corners of the menus. Why can't they just leave those damn corners alone?

The huge drop shadow is annoying. I never noticed in the demos. It does make front apps stand out more but the transition looks odd. It's like the whole brightness of your desktop changes every time you switch apps. I guess they are trying to make it more 3D-like but Tiger is much better. The very fact that front apps in leopard have dark shading and behind apps have light shading should have been enough to tell which was in front.

Other stuff:

Spaces, meh. I won't use it but it was pretty snappy. Not much to say there really because it works just as you see in the demo.

There is no ZFS option in Disk Utility.

The sharing panel I like. Loads of people wondered why you couldn't just pick a folder to share in Tiger well now you can. You'll have seen this in the screenshots though.

Coverflow is great in the Finder. However, it doesn't behave as intuitively as I'd like. For example if you double click a folder while in coverflow mode, it doesn't open in coverflow but it switches out of coverflow into another view, so you have to switch back again. I'll need to test more but I found that a bit annoying. It's very fast/smooth though even on a machine with GMA graphics and viewing high res images (3000x2000). icon view in the Finder is pretty fast currently so I guess it's not a big deal. I wish it would zoom pictures up a bit more though. On some landscape images, it leaves a big gap at the top. Even if the images to the left and right were smaller.

Quick Look seems pretty handy but again it will depend on your own file browsing habits. I can't say that I ever really felt the need to preview stuff fullscreen before opening it. If I find what I'm looking for then I just open it.

Stacks is nice. One thing I didn't like was that there doesn't seem to be a back button. So if you have a folder inside a stack, I couldn't see how to navigate it. I guess it's meant for root level documents and apps but still. Again, snappy.

Shake is still broken in Leopard for GMA chips, the interface is a bit garbled. No big problem but fixing it would have been nice. I imagine driver updates are likely at the same development in both systems so this might mean the 8600M GT isn't working right in leopard either.

Overall, the additions in leopard make it worth buying (even if some of those things could/should have been in Tiger) but why did they have to bugger up the interface? I hope they don't let it go to release looking like that because it will get absolutely panned by critics.

There's nothing secret in there I could see that you haven't all seen or heard of, I just thought I'd share my experience on trying it out.

The dock isn't really needed in my opinion. I've always hated the way it never fit to the screen edges (unless it was filled) which meant that space was wasted. Of course, there are people who say turn on hiding but then you have to physically move the mouse cursor over to the screen edge and wait for it to pop up. I don't want to have to do this extra work, If there is something in the dock that I need to see, I just want to be able to glance at it (like I do with items in the menubar).

The dock should have been designed so that it fits all the way to the screen edges. Then, Apple should have dedicated about 25% of it for system info apps, stock tickers, an analog clock (that is easy to see) and other useful stuff that I have put in my menubar.

Apple should have also made it so that if you double-clicked on an icon of an opened app in the dock, it brings that app to the front AND hides all other open apps.

The dock should also display the open apps in a way that is much easier to see vs looking for tiny LED lights. I wish I was in charge of the OS X interface team...

All of our worst fears...CONFIRMED!!! Form follows function, my ass! FTW!!!

Some more stuff, most of which has probably been covered here and there:

grammar checking is available on top of the usual spell checking.

new voice Alex sounds really good but there's only one. I thought it would be a whole new speech system but all the usual voices are still there.

the SMS feature in ichat is for US phones only.

Webclip is less useful than I thought as you can only view a website while it updates, the functions don't stay within dashboard. I wanted to use it as a TV guide but if you try to change the day or time you are looking at, the buttons don't work or they jump back to Safari.

the magical movie widget seems to be centered around cinemas not actual movie releases so you have to put in a zip code first and it will show you what's on at a local cinema. I would have preferred a more generic movie listing that only had a cinema component.

the lights below the icons in the dock are harder to see than the usual triangles.

command-up moves backwards in stacks

spotlight in help menus is very quick

the network panel is nicer with options like ethernet in a list instead of a menu like Tiger.

They've moved the firewall from sharing to security, which makes sense and you can limit incoming and outgoing network activity for each app so this gives you functionality similar to Little Snitch. I can't find internet sharing settings though, it looks like they may have been removed.

Stacks is kinda useless for lots of items as it just squashes them together more and the names become unreadable. I'd say you shouldn't keep more than about 50 items in a stack.

Quicklook might be good for looking through a list of images as you can maximize it (not fullscreen it, just resize it big) and then just step through each image as it stays open. However, you can't zoom images in further while in quicklook. Quicklook is very smooth though, very nice to use.

PDF browsing/rendering seems quicker.

icon previews in list view slow it down initially but are useful

You have to be careful with file/folder sharing as it can lock folders and the Finder doesn't give you a way to override this. No matter what you did in Tiger, it had a lock icon where you could override any permissions. Even if you remove the shared folder from the shared panel, the permissions stick on the folder.

Python 2.5 and Ruby 1.8 come installed

script editor has a default language setting but no options for ruby or python yet - I can't find any hooks for those other languages yet

zfs.readonly.kext is present

ZFS on OSX is implemented as a readonly filesystem by default but apparently a full ZFS implementation that allows all subcommands and is read/write is available for download at http://developer.apple.com/.

com.apple.filesystems.zfs.readonly is the readonly kext version.
com.apple.filesystems.zfs is the writable kext version.

tabbed terminal is useful

If the system can't decode stuff like image icons, it seems to show a black image instead of hanging up. I will have to check this out more with files that I know the Finder would have trouble decoding. This always annoyed me in the current Finder as it would just keep looping trying to render a movie clip preview.

I'm pretty sure all that's been covered elsewhere before as well as the new EGL framework. We have OpenGL and AGL as normal but EGL is new. It seems to be for accelerating media decoding:

http://www.khronos.org/egl/

Maybe that's how they get Coverflow and PDF rendering smoother.

Marvin,

Have you played around with time machine? If so, what's your impression.

If a lot of Leopard is devoted to eye candy and apps we don't need or want, where will Apple go next? Has Apple shot its wad. Hopefully, the next iteration will make OS X even more stable, no beachball, no freezes, and no 'junk'. Or is that too much to expect.

BTW Marvin, I tried to look at your post about 7:00 PM. AI told me that I wasn't authorized to see that post and booted my arse out of IA. When I tried to re-enter, AI wouldn't open for me. I don't know if there was an overall problem or if 'someone' didn't want anyone to read your (pre-sales) post. Then again, I'm paranoid.

I wonder if anyone else experienced a problem accessing IA?

Great. I hated the way the triangles worked and now we're going backwards. Who is the idiot in charge of the interface at Apple? Apple should try to re-hire that interface guru that used to work there. I forget his name...

Maybe somebody can make a 3rd party hack to fix this. I'd like to see something that lights up the icons of the opened apps so that they are easy to see. And maybe put a box around the opened app that you are currently in. Whatever, there are lots of ways to do this better than dinky leds or triangles that are hard to see.



I like this...

Unfortunately, I don't have another drive to use as Leopard itself is on an external. I do have a DVD Ram drive so I'll see if I can use that - I'll test out backing up just a folder or two because I'd be limited to 4.4GB.


Thankfully, the eye candy in Leopard doesn't seem to be slower than Tiger. The minimizing slow-down I had didn't happen much at all after using the system for a bit. Also, it's running on an external drive. But there are bits that aren't any faster than Tiger either and you still get a delay doing certain things so I would still like a way to turn some stuff off. Unfortunately, if they won't even give us a way to turn off blatantly stupid interface changes like menu opacity and dock height then I don't see them allowing us much customization at all.


Yeah I wasn't able to get in and I suspected something was up but I didn't get the bit about not being allowed to view the post though, but I'm sure I've had that before. There's nothing in my posts that's revealing anything that people won't know already apart from how it feels to use. Given Apple's record though, AI may just have been over cautious and rightly so. Like I say, I can't actually find anything in the system that hasn't been posted about already. In many ways, I hope this release is actually missing something because although there are some welcome changes, they are pretty underwhelming to me. As someone else said though, the changes should be more under the hood and I haven't seen the beachball yet despite some minor delays. That suggests better threading/multitasking. I'll have to stress it out a bit more.


It looks that way, when I drag a folder in, it turns into a stack. I prefer the hierarchy for some things too because like I say if you have more than about 50 items, you can't read any names in a stack. Also, you don't get the same navigation as you always have to double-click folders to go down and command-up to go back. It's much slower in that respect as it's like icon view in the Finder as opposed to a menu system. I'll check to see if there's a way to get the old hierarchy.


Yes it does but they don't seem to work right yet. For example, I had a stack of applications and when I dragged a document onto the stack, it popped open but I couldn't drop that document onto an app to open it.

This goes against the other Leopard info that is out there. According to several reports, the opacity of the menu bar is adjustable (presumably can be set to opaque). Are you sure your not missing something?

No that's a great idea.

There was only one report - by inkhead on Macrumors - and there were other errors in his report.

I'll have to check the keynote again, but I'm pretty sure that Steve did this on stage. Didn't he click between news, sports, and so on in the Yahoo news webclip?

Maybe when you're changing the day and time, the whole website is update and not just refreshing the page? That would obviously not work for a webclip.

I've looked everywhere I can think of. People are having to resort to hacks already to put it back and they wouldn't if there was a button to change the value:

http://mjtsai.com/blog/2007/06/11/leopards-menu-bar/
http://www.manytricks.com/blog/?id=10

I think a lot of people just find it hard to believe Apple could actually do something like this. This is still beta though so they could add an option later on. I don't think they will because it would be like them admitting a mistake and we all know how Apple hate doing that.


I tried a few. One was like a frame where the web page stays the same but just the TV guide updates and it didn't work. Others refreshed the page and they didn't work.

You keep saying that but it makes little sense to anthropomorphize Apple like that. If they get the proper feedback on this issue, they will make changes to it. As an Select member, once I get access to the beta and install it. one of the first things I will do is to send feedback about this issue. Provided I used it for a bit and agree that it is a bad UI move.

It's possible, I'm sure they'll get lots of feedback so I doubt they can ignore it.

Some more info:

time machine doesn't look like it will make a bootable backup so won't replace superduper. I don't know that for sure but it puts stuff in a folder that is ordered by snapshots. You get an option to not back up system files too.

There is a function that says show only changed files and that didn't look like it worked. I had a folder with 7 files and 1 folder and I deleted 4 of the files. I expected 'show changed' to show just the 4 I deleted but instead it showed just the folder that I hadn't actually changed at all.
With that off, you see all the files and recovery went fine. Maybe it compares file changes between snapshots or something.

The installation is smaller than Tiger. Garageband etc will bring this up but currently it's under 5GB for the whole thing. However, the system folder is a fair bit bigger. It's now nearly 3GB compared to around 2GB for Tiger. Possibly there's a lot of debugging stuff left in there.

the window view options are better. You used to have use 'for this window' and global. Now it just has a button saying if you want to use a set of options by default.

Core graphics and Core Text are in there.

security warnings are more precise:
Warning when opening files:
"Xbench is on the disk image xbench_1.3.dmg. This disk image was downloaded today at 19:52 from xbench.com." and you can visit the website by pushing a button.
This replaces the warning 'you are opening x for the first time'.

Xbench benchmark shows mostly the same except opengl bench is 25% faster. System memory allocation shoots up by 2-3 times.
In practice, 3D feels about the same to me but like I say launch times seem faster and that's when memory allocation will happen.

Textedit feels faster. I can open larger files without the scroller pulling back up when I drag it to the bottom.

new UDF possibly 1.5 - it *finally* supports the DVD-Ram discs from Panasonic DVD recorders so you can record TV shows to DVD-Ram, take the disc and watch it in VLC.

new NTFS - can't check if there's read/write yet but terminal says mount_ntfs implementation first appeared in 10.5 so something's different

some new kernel extensions seem to be geared towards more system stability especially kernel panic-wise but I'm largely guessing here

airport disks, bluetooth and disk images have contextual menu plugins
You can burn to disk straight from a right-click and make a disk image

You can edit PDFs in preview, can remove pages but I can't see how to insert pages except blank ones.
also more image correction like shadow/highlight and auto correction
image resizing at last, profile embedding and rotation

Themes are the same - graphite and aqua

new screensavers, ok but not too impressive. I reckon we'll get some Core Animation ones later on

print utility moved from utilities to system prefs print & fax

Can't change permissions from the Finder at all now. I actually couldn't find where to change permissions. Maybe they've left that to the terminal? the Finder wasn't very good at it but it still kinda worked now and then. I think it might just be locked in the beta though.

help system doesn't work right yet - just spins for ages

bootcamp assistant is just 11MB so it seems to be more integrated

console lists messages by sender and date/time so it's not just one big chunk of text from any app and it can be queried

new office import framework, doesn't seem to offer much better Word compatibility in Textedit though as i still can't open my old .doc files.

I got a beachball & finder crash when showing a movie clip preview in the Finder so it's not perfectly stable yet. I would actually like them to replace the beachball icon just so they can say the beachball is gone.

full screen free in quicktime. Interface looks illuminous somehow
timecode view option in prefs (only shows for supported movies) and you can view time or frames from the start (sort of useless really, I'd have preferred a proper timecode).

DVD player has deinterlacing quality options and you can change aspect ratio
support for HD movies

crash reports have more info and are possibly more readable in that they indent sub processes but are a little more invasive as they list all currently running apps at the time of a crash

can't seem to launch an app by double clicking the preview icon any more in the Finder

X11 launched quickly but inkscape took ages to launch so I force quit it and it opened anyway (weird). But it opened quickly after that. X11 apps might finally be usable

Neooffice doesn't work at all, it's the only app I encountered that didn't launch. So much for Java

iwork apps seem to launch faster
CS3 seems about the same though
PPC apps are just as achingly slow.

It looks like you can shrink the dock smaller than before. I'm actually getting used to it since I don't see it much anyway. Name of the app shows white on a grey box so it's easier to read

trash window has an empty button up top

No matter what I do with the webclips, they just don't work for me. Website buttons just seem non-functional. I tried with about 5 different TV guide sites and none of them work. I'm sure it will be useful on some sites but not the ones i wanted to use it for.

bomarchive utility has been renamed to archive utility. I don't know why they went with BOM in the first place.
crash reporter renamed to problem reporter.

91% downloaded

Uh oh. No NTFS write support.

So no ZFS write and no NTFS write. Hopefully they will resolve that before the final release.

It's been pretty unstable more recently after I'm using it more. Airport hangs up so I can't even use it and the Finder crashes are more frequent using coverflow. It's definitely not at a stage where it's usable day to day so it makes sense that they delayed it.

Stacks I don't like because they're not aliases. So if you drop your apps folder onto it, it puts in all your apps and squishes them. If you try to move any icons out to just keep a select few apps, it moves the apps out the apps folder instead of what I'd expect which would be a little poof cloud.

Be careful using this system if you get it! Turn off Spotlight indexing on your normal drive by putting it in privacy. It seems to be screwing with mine just now. <- possibly too hasty, it seemed to be ok after mds finished. It was probably just the usual mds behaviour.

update
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Quicktime previews in the Finder have no slider or volume controls, just play and stop when you hover over the clip. It encourages you to use Quick Look but QL doesn't have volume controls either.

Page ins and outs are now measured in megabytes

Disk Utility prefs are all in one panel instead of tabbed because there weren't enough prefs anyway.

Not sure about resolution independence: they are still using PNG for icons and ctrl-zoom is still blocky

Fonts show previews in icon view etc, which is handy.

There's a hang reporter as well as a crash reporter. Not really sure how you would use it as it only seems to report how long a program hung up for.

New folder icons. Drive icons are the same. I would have liked one to replace the grey drive, I like the orange firewire one but not the grey one.

Oh, the new screensavers *are* Core Animation based. There are these quartz compositions everywhere which are quite small and can be opened in quicktime. they also play immediately in the preview. Some of these look very cool - like real-time motion graphics.

I wish they'd made the Finder tabbed like Safari 3 so you could drag tabs into windows etc.

Movie icons are rendered - it seems to pick a random frame to use for the image. I don't know if it changes the icon on each redraw of the preview icon. It's very useful though and something I've wanted for a while.

wish there was a separator between documents and trash

Built-in Finder searches are pretty cool. I have often wanted to just see what documents I modified in the last day. trouble is it uses Spotlight so it likely won't track changes made by some installers.

How did the dock ever fit into the "desktop" metaphor"?


No! Stay away from the Dark Side of the Force!



If anything, calling someone a noob only makes you more of a noob... Unless you call them a noob for calling somone else a noob

Actually, YOU need to know what the metaphor is. I'm perfectly content with it as is. You know when people say, "Don't read too much into it."? This is one of those moments. Most of us don't care about any sort of metaphor. In my opinion, if it looks cool and doesn't decrease functionality then bring it on.

You've misunderstood the whole point. It's not a question of actively pondering on the desktop metaphor every time you use the computer; it is the fact that having a consistent metaphor that your mind understands subconsciously goes a long way towards improving the intuitiveness of the interface and the sense of ease of use and consistency. It also makes it easier for developers of the OS to make sure that new items fit into the paradigm consistently.

Yeah, forget the Dock. I'm sticking with XMenu.

For me XMenu is the best since OSX trashed all notions of an easy, stable Finder that had worked consistently up until late OS9.

speaking of docks, i just looked at the Apple preview of the dock again and noticed that it appears designed to give folders and minimized application windows more central space, instead of placing them in the 'trash zone'... right now the dock is primarily an application launcher . interestingly Jobs commented that Stacks could be used as an application launcher with the creation of an application stack... it sorta made me think of the Start menu in Windows!? in fact the whole dock is shaping up to be very much like the Windows Taskbar... albeit a hundred times more glitzy (which makes me think it might be a way of distracting attention from the similarity).

speaking of Stacks, let's face it, Stacks aren't just useful, they're totally necessary in order to keep the desktop clear... if that's actually a desktop anymore. and where's the Macintosh HD?

yip the Dock IS the new desktop...

Wait, there is no Macintosh HD? I completely missed that! So finder is really just another "ordinary" application now? That means that the desktop itself is now not really anything more than a pretty picture with no contribution to the actual UI?

If you are using a program like XMenu still, that suggests you are a bit resistent to change. No offense intended but I bet I can launch any program quite a bit faster with Spotlight than it takes to drill down a menu to find that program. Quicksilver would be even faster but I'm happy with Spotlight for now.

Macintosh HD is found on the Finder. it doesn't appear to be defaulted to the Desktop now... and yes this is my point, the desktop seems to be intended to appear as open space. explains the use of the grassy image, since in this new desktop free paradigm no desktop icon elements are going to be lost or obstructed in the details of the background image.

The transparent menu bar seems to me like an attempt to introduce transparency into Leopard because Vista has a translucent toolbar in Aero. However, the Vista translucent toolbar is more attractive to me and the translucency doesn't reduce the usability of the toolbar. Leopard's transparent menu bar however looks like a cheapish hack to me and makes the menu harder to read. I like some of the other new features in Leopard (e.g., I'm very happy with the unified window UI), but that menu just smacks of a last-minute throw-in that wasn't very well thought out.

Did anyone else notice the lack of a loading bar launching Leopard. I wish they'd keep the aqua loading bar with text saying what it's doing than the spinning dotted line with no feedback. It just goes straight from that into OS X. Again, it could be the beta but I hope the bar isn't gone.

I didn't know that but I had kind of suspected it because especially in 10.4, the loading bar can just disappear before it's finished.


Now that is a cool command. Thanks for posting that.


Exactly and that's why I'd hate to see it go. I think that spinning line with the grey apple looks horrible compared to the flashy loading bar. If anything, I'd have thought they'd just use the loading bar. I mean surely if it knows how many commands it has to execute at startup then it can divide the progress that way and subdivide it the more it finds. People like to see progress happening to give an indication that something hasn't just hung up.

What would be really neat is if the loading bar just transformed into the login window if it was enabled instead of fading out.

Change for the sake of change is pointless, and you're launching apps with Spotlight? That's positively retrograde... my Spotlight takes additional seconds (spinning beachball of death) while waiting for my external drive to spin up before it brings up any results. That's unacceptably slow performance. XMenu is twice as fast. Quicksilver is OK, but wholly dependent on your typing ability or ability to remember whatever obscure app name you are trying to locate. That leaves the Dock and XMenu.