I'm looking forward to the new dock. I think it'll be easier on the eyes exactly because it's 3D. As some of the screenshots in this article make clear, to me at least, a hard 2D interface is a bit awkward and too 'in your face', if you get my drift.
I'm still trusting Apple when it comes to UI, but I sometimes wonder if the designers continue to study human interfaces and applying internal standards as much as they appeared to do in the past. Some of 10.4 has some glaring inconsistencies and omissions. Leopard will be a test of their UI leadership.
On a side note, I've found that the biggest problem the switchers in my company have is adjusting to the dock. Some still don't get it. After that they have the most trouble with the difference between closing and quiting a program.
Anyone who has had the opportunity to play with Sun's Project Looking Glass for a few years now will appreciate how useful the 3D dock is (http://www.sun.com/software/looking_glass/). What Apple has produced here isn't new but it does have the Apple flair.
I hope they fix the alternative view option for those who like their dock on the side - even if only as a 2D one though.
I'm just wondering if I would be able to teach my very computer illiterate grandma all of this new fancy Leopard stuff. I hope that all of these extra features like stacks and spaces are passive enough to ignore on a new Mac. My grandmother has a hard enough time knowing to click on the Send & Receive Outlook Express button on her old OS 9 iMac in order to check her email. How would she ever understand stacks, or spaces? She wouldn't. So I just hope that it remains invisible if you don't intend to use it. Apple must be careful not to alienate those users who use Macs because they are easier to use than the alternative.
Nope. They've completely removed this functionality including the ability to do hierarchical folder browsing. For users that used this often, stacks are a step backwards.
Are you kidding me? So, let's say I've got a folder full of 100 various image folders. I want to quickly browse through those folders (by name, because I've named the folders using the date on which the photos were taken. Yes I believe in keeping my real world organized AS WELL AS my computer world..). So in Leopard I'm not going to be able to right-click on a folder in the dock and see a simple list of the enclosed folders? Hmm, well that would suck pretty bad I say.
The most important dock feature that I need is still missing: the ability to turn the stupid thing OFF. The thing is useless eye candy. I never liked it from day one, and after all these years, the more I use it, the more I hate it. I just want to be able to completely disable it so that it never even accidentally appears, and move all of it's functionality back into the Apple menu where it belongs.
Under the hood system enhancements have been great under OS X, but functionality and productivity are still several step behind OS 9. Stop going for the wow factor, and start thinking about usability. Get rid of the Dock, and give me back a real Apple Menu, tabbed folders, and Window Shade. And no, not with third party haxies that my IT guy isn't going to install on the workstations anyway.
No it doesn't. Launch Activity Monitor and look at all the other apps running that do not show up in the dock. This function in the task bar is one thing that Windows definitely does do better than Mac OS X. Every process shows up as it starts in the task bar. I'm not a fan of Windows at all (or the task bar in particular), but if you have to have a dock-like thingy, Windows task bar beats OS X's dock hands down. Task bar still sucks, just not as hard as the dock.
Try downloading the tools like Onyx. I seem to remember looking at one that had the ability to turn the dock off. Either that or write an apple script that will open activity monitor and force quite the dock, and add it to the start-up items.
Personally, I really don't see how you can have such a negative impression of the dock. At the very worst it appears when you accidentally go too close to the edge of the screen, in which case it will show you the bin and finder icons. Even if you do choose to switch it off, you need it to some extent for the bin.
if you want hierarchical folders, click the desktop, and press apple-N.
as for the dock, put your top used apps in there and hide it. i don't care if it's got care-bears jumping around crapping flowers on my photoshop icon, i don't care if it's black and white enlarged 16x16 icons, it's ALWAYS hidden.
i only take a look at it when i want to open apps in the morning, and for about 3 seconds to click six times. then they stay open all day.
hell, here at work they stay open until i restart once a week or so, and when i restart, suitcase, itunes, firefox, photoshop, indesign, illustrator, and entourage all open on startup - while i get a coffee in the break room, so yeah, the only "dock" i ever see is the alt-tab [oops, sorry] apple-tab menu [where'd apple steal THAT one from, huh?].
Anyone who has had the opportunity to play with Sun's Project Looking Glass for a few years now will appreciate how useful the 3D dock is (http://www.sun.com/software/looking_glass/). What Apple has produced here isn't new but it does have the Apple flair.
I hope they fix the alternative view option for those who like their dock on the side - even if only as a 2D one though.
Just been watching the project looking glass video, and I'm not so keen on it. I haven't used it but initial impressions are that it's a lot of wasted space. I do like, however, the idea of flipping a document around to write some notes on its back.
if you want hierarchical folders, click the desktop, and press apple-N.
as for the dock, put your top used apps in there and hide it. i don't care if it's got care-bears jumping around crapping flowers on my photoshop icon, i don't care if it's black and white enlarged 16x16 icons, it's ALWAYS hidden.
i only take a look at it when i want to open apps in the morning, and for about 3 seconds to click six times. then they stay open all day.
hell, here at work they stay open until i restart once a week or so, and when i restart, suitcase, itunes, firefox, photoshop, indesign, illustrator, and entourage all open on startup - while i get a coffee in the break room, so yeah, the only "dock" i ever see is the alt-tab [oops, sorry] apple-tab menu [where'd apple steal THAT one from, huh?].
Heirarchical folders are great on the dock, and replace some of the missing functionality lost when Apple took away the Apple menu (without having to have 3rd party apps running in the background and cluttering up the toolbar). Also, my computer takes an age the first time I want to open a finder window, no idea why, running a 1.8GHz G5 iMac, but the folders in the dock don't as long as I don't open a new window.
..."Directory Opus", a file manager for the Amiga that was completely dock based.
DirOpus was not "dock-based" in any sense; it wasn't even dock-like ToolManager was a wonderful little thing, too & I loved & used them both for years - but they were both launchers (DirOpus less so, as it was primarily a file manager that could also launch).
The dock is among other things a launcher, but not primarily, I think. Seems like more of a task manager to me - that can also launch - and, with Leopard, it can do other, newer things.
if you want hierarchical folders, click the desktop, and press apple-N.
as for the dock, put your top used apps in there and hide it. i don't care if it's got care-bears jumping around crapping flowers on my photoshop icon, i don't care if it's black and white enlarged 16x16 icons, it's ALWAYS hidden.
i only take a look at it when i want to open apps in the morning, and for about 3 seconds to click six times. then they stay open all day.
hell, here at work they stay open until i restart once a week or so, and when i restart, suitcase, itunes, firefox, photoshop, indesign, illustrator, and entourage all open on startup - while i get a coffee in the break room, so yeah, the only "dock" i ever see is the alt-tab [oops, sorry] apple-tab menu [where'd apple steal THAT one from, huh?].
I'm always perplexed by people who brusquely dismiss other people's concerns about UI design by describing their workflow, as if that were the final say in the matter.
At any rate, Apple apparently thought the Dock was an OK place for hierarchical folders up till now, so you can't act like wanting that to remain is some kind of outlandish, off-base notion. And if the Dock isn't the place for hierarchical folders, why is it the place for any kind of folder action? Stacks just makes the folder contents harder to navigate and identify, past a dozen items or so.
Of course, for your purposes, the Dock is an app launcher and that's it, so I guess that doesn't matter.
And the Windows Taskbar does NOT show all background processes and non-GUI system tasks either. Unless you have made some change I have not, in which case I shudder to think of your cluttered Taskbar
You're right, it's not all of them, but it is a more useful selection than what the OS X Dock shows. Most "main processes" directly related to the apps I'm running show up in the task bar, so that I actually know that they are operating at a glance.
Here's an example of how OS X does not give me useful info in that regard: The other day I noticed while looking at the Activity Viewer that an app called "ffmpeg" was not only running in the background unbeknownst to me, but that it was actually the biggest system hog I had running, using more RAM and CPU capacity than everything else combined, including the OS. I had to do some investigating for find out that is was iSquint that was using ffmpeg for video conversion. When iSquint launched ffmpeg, it should have shown up in the dock. Processes this significant certainly show up in the task bar in Windows.
Don't get me wrong, I HATE Windows. I just hate the Dock even more than I hate the WindowsTask bar.
Functionality aside, I don't really like the look of the new dock. Next to Leopard's otherwise clean and simple interface, the dock is full of shadows, reflections and looks a bit gaudy. In screenshots it looks fine, but after spending a few months using it, it's become an eyesore. At least I can still hide it!
As far as stacks go, I really haven't found them all that useful. There's always room for improvement though.
I find the new dock quite attractive. Because of the shadows and reflections, the dock looks aesthetically more natural and less distracting because it meshes all the icons together with the dock as one unit, whereas before you had a solid dock with many different icons. Icons are made to stand out, but if you have, let's say, 10 icons, they would all fight for attention, which is very distracting.
You could have illustrated RISC OS bit of the article with a later screen shot as well. That one makes it look like the OS wasn't sexy. It was very sexy by the time of the RISCPC, ah acorn I miss you - many happy memories.
I'm sure someone could hack in black triangles, unofficially.
But I have the feeling if there were blue lights before, and Apple switched to black triangles, people would say "the new black triangles are too hard to see"
I understand the desire to have the dock be all things in the world - but its just the dock. As a designer I obsess about design but I'm FAR more interested in menus and toolbars that are independent of resolution. If I want to fill a second screen with 1920x1200 pixels worth of indesign pallettes, it would be infinitely more important to me that I can scale the text size in those windows than it would be to see two shadows on one icon in the dock. Man i cant read a bit of what i've writen on this phone.
Vista puts bling above functionality. The Live Preview from the task bar looks great in demos, but not when you actually try to use it. You only get a live preview if you only have one document open in the application. For example, if you have one spreadsheet open in each of two instances of Excel, you get two live previews; if you have two spreadsheets open in a single instance of Excel, you get a blank live preview.
OS X ages like wine: "I thought I'd hate that feature, but now that I'm using it, I love it."
Windows ages like whine: "I thought I'd love that feature, but now that I'm using it, I hate it."
I prefer the mac and in general I think Vista is junk, but I would say that there are a few advantages to the windows UI. One is that compared to OSX, there is much less surface area to learn to the full-time OS.
OSX:
Menubar
Apple Menu
MenuBar Items (volume, wifi)
Dock
Vista:
Taskbar
Startmenu
Windows has less stuff to the OS, I give them credit for that. Mac has a lot of areas to learn. For me as a long time user, I am ok with it, but teaching someone new, I soon realize that there are just a lot of pockets where things are happening. Seems like too many.
Like logging out, you go to the Apple menu but switching to another user, you use the account menu on the other side of the screen. Stuff like that takes time to learn.
Also, as displays get bigger, the UI of OSX is breaking. The menu bar can be very far away from the rest of the UI, that can be inconvenient and confusing. I think the fixed menu is much better for muscle memory, but how to use menu's in larger displays is an issue.
Don't get me wrong, I don't like a lot of stuff on Windows, on the whole the Mac is better, things just work better on the Mac, but from a UI strategy perspective, there are benefits to the Windows approach.
Comments
I'm looking forward to the new dock. I think it'll be easier on the eyes exactly because it's 3D. As some of the screenshots in this article make clear, to me at least, a hard 2D interface is a bit awkward and too 'in your face', if you get my drift.
I'm still trusting Apple when it comes to UI, but I sometimes wonder if the designers continue to study human interfaces and applying internal standards as much as they appeared to do in the past. Some of 10.4 has some glaring inconsistencies and omissions. Leopard will be a test of their UI leadership.
On a side note, I've found that the biggest problem the switchers in my company have is adjusting to the dock. Some still don't get it. After that they have the most trouble with the difference between closing and quiting a program.
Anyone who has had the opportunity to play with Sun's Project Looking Glass for a few years now will appreciate how useful the 3D dock is (http://www.sun.com/software/looking_glass/). What Apple has produced here isn't new but it does have the Apple flair.
I hope they fix the alternative view option for those who like their dock on the side - even if only as a 2D one though.
Nope. They've completely removed this functionality including the ability to do hierarchical folder browsing. For users that used this often, stacks are a step backwards.
Are you kidding me? So, let's say I've got a folder full of 100 various image folders. I want to quickly browse through those folders (by name, because I've named the folders using the date on which the photos were taken. Yes I believe in keeping my real world organized AS WELL AS my computer world..). So in Leopard I'm not going to be able to right-click on a folder in the dock and see a simple list of the enclosed folders? Hmm, well that would suck pretty bad I say.
The most important dock feature that I need is still missing: the ability to turn the stupid thing OFF. The thing is useless eye candy. I never liked it from day one, and after all these years, the more I use it, the more I hate it. I just want to be able to completely disable it so that it never even accidentally appears, and move all of it's functionality back into the Apple menu where it belongs.
Under the hood system enhancements have been great under OS X, but functionality and productivity are still several step behind OS 9. Stop going for the wow factor, and start thinking about usability. Get rid of the Dock, and give me back a real Apple Menu, tabbed folders, and Window Shade. And no, not with third party haxies that my IT guy isn't going to install on the workstations anyway.
No it doesn't. Launch Activity Monitor and look at all the other apps running that do not show up in the dock. This function in the task bar is one thing that Windows definitely does do better than Mac OS X. Every process shows up as it starts in the task bar. I'm not a fan of Windows at all (or the task bar in particular), but if you have to have a dock-like thingy, Windows task bar beats OS X's dock hands down. Task bar still sucks, just not as hard as the dock.
Try downloading the tools like Onyx. I seem to remember looking at one that had the ability to turn the dock off. Either that or write an apple script that will open activity monitor and force quite the dock, and add it to the start-up items.
Personally, I really don't see how you can have such a negative impression of the dock. At the very worst it appears when you accidentally go too close to the edge of the screen, in which case it will show you the bin and finder icons. Even if you do choose to switch it off, you need it to some extent for the bin.
if you want hierarchical folders, click the desktop, and press apple-N.
as for the dock, put your top used apps in there and hide it. i don't care if it's got care-bears jumping around crapping flowers on my photoshop icon, i don't care if it's black and white enlarged 16x16 icons, it's ALWAYS hidden.
i only take a look at it when i want to open apps in the morning, and for about 3 seconds to click six times. then they stay open all day.
hell, here at work they stay open until i restart once a week or so, and when i restart, suitcase, itunes, firefox, photoshop, indesign, illustrator, and entourage all open on startup - while i get a coffee in the break room, so yeah, the only "dock" i ever see is the alt-tab [oops, sorry] apple-tab menu [where'd apple steal THAT one from, huh?].
Anyone who has had the opportunity to play with Sun's Project Looking Glass for a few years now will appreciate how useful the 3D dock is (http://www.sun.com/software/looking_glass/). What Apple has produced here isn't new but it does have the Apple flair.
I hope they fix the alternative view option for those who like their dock on the side - even if only as a 2D one though.
Just been watching the project looking glass video, and I'm not so keen on it. I haven't used it but initial impressions are that it's a lot of wasted space. I do like, however, the idea of flipping a document around to write some notes on its back.
ffs, it's the DOCK.
if you want hierarchical folders, click the desktop, and press apple-N.
as for the dock, put your top used apps in there and hide it. i don't care if it's got care-bears jumping around crapping flowers on my photoshop icon, i don't care if it's black and white enlarged 16x16 icons, it's ALWAYS hidden.
i only take a look at it when i want to open apps in the morning, and for about 3 seconds to click six times. then they stay open all day.
hell, here at work they stay open until i restart once a week or so, and when i restart, suitcase, itunes, firefox, photoshop, indesign, illustrator, and entourage all open on startup - while i get a coffee in the break room, so yeah, the only "dock" i ever see is the alt-tab [oops, sorry] apple-tab menu [where'd apple steal THAT one from, huh?].
Heirarchical folders are great on the dock, and replace some of the missing functionality lost when Apple took away the Apple menu (without having to have 3rd party apps running in the background and cluttering up the toolbar). Also, my computer takes an age the first time I want to open a finder window, no idea why, running a 1.8GHz G5 iMac, but the folders in the dock don't as long as I don't open a new window.
..."Directory Opus", a file manager for the Amiga that was completely dock based.
DirOpus was not "dock-based" in any sense; it wasn't even dock-like ToolManager was a wonderful little thing, too & I loved & used them both for years - but they were both launchers (DirOpus less so, as it was primarily a file manager that could also launch).
The dock is among other things a launcher, but not primarily, I think. Seems like more of a task manager to me - that can also launch - and, with Leopard, it can do other, newer things.
ffs, it's the DOCK.
if you want hierarchical folders, click the desktop, and press apple-N.
as for the dock, put your top used apps in there and hide it. i don't care if it's got care-bears jumping around crapping flowers on my photoshop icon, i don't care if it's black and white enlarged 16x16 icons, it's ALWAYS hidden.
i only take a look at it when i want to open apps in the morning, and for about 3 seconds to click six times. then they stay open all day.
hell, here at work they stay open until i restart once a week or so, and when i restart, suitcase, itunes, firefox, photoshop, indesign, illustrator, and entourage all open on startup - while i get a coffee in the break room, so yeah, the only "dock" i ever see is the alt-tab [oops, sorry] apple-tab menu [where'd apple steal THAT one from, huh?].
I'm always perplexed by people who brusquely dismiss other people's concerns about UI design by describing their workflow, as if that were the final say in the matter.
At any rate, Apple apparently thought the Dock was an OK place for hierarchical folders up till now, so you can't act like wanting that to remain is some kind of outlandish, off-base notion. And if the Dock isn't the place for hierarchical folders, why is it the place for any kind of folder action? Stacks just makes the folder contents harder to navigate and identify, past a dozen items or so.
Of course, for your purposes, the Dock is an app launcher and that's it, so I guess that doesn't matter.
And the Windows Taskbar does NOT show all background processes and non-GUI system tasks either. Unless you have made some change I have not, in which case I shudder to think of your cluttered Taskbar
You're right, it's not all of them, but it is a more useful selection than what the OS X Dock shows. Most "main processes" directly related to the apps I'm running show up in the task bar, so that I actually know that they are operating at a glance.
Here's an example of how OS X does not give me useful info in that regard: The other day I noticed while looking at the Activity Viewer that an app called "ffmpeg" was not only running in the background unbeknownst to me, but that it was actually the biggest system hog I had running, using more RAM and CPU capacity than everything else combined, including the OS. I had to do some investigating for find out that is was iSquint that was using ffmpeg for video conversion. When iSquint launched ffmpeg, it should have shown up in the dock. Processes this significant certainly show up in the task bar in Windows.
Don't get me wrong, I HATE Windows. I just hate the Dock even more than I hate the WindowsTask bar.
Great article, thank you.
Agreed, thanx Ai
Functionality aside, I don't really like the look of the new dock. Next to Leopard's otherwise clean and simple interface, the dock is full of shadows, reflections and looks a bit gaudy. In screenshots it looks fine, but after spending a few months using it, it's become an eyesore. At least I can still hide it!
As far as stacks go, I really haven't found them all that useful. There's always room for improvement though.
I find the new dock quite attractive. Because of the shadows and reflections, the dock looks aesthetically more natural and less distracting because it meshes all the icons together with the dock as one unit, whereas before you had a solid dock with many different icons. Icons are made to stand out, but if you have, let's say, 10 icons, they would all fight for attention, which is very distracting.
i.e.
or
bad illustration, but I just love the smileys
But I have the feeling if there were blue lights before, and Apple switched to black triangles, people would say "the new black triangles are too hard to see"
Vista puts bling above functionality. The Live Preview from the task bar looks great in demos, but not when you actually try to use it. You only get a live preview if you only have one document open in the application. For example, if you have one spreadsheet open in each of two instances of Excel, you get two live previews; if you have two spreadsheets open in a single instance of Excel, you get a blank live preview.
OS X ages like wine: "I thought I'd hate that feature, but now that I'm using it, I love it."
Windows ages like whine: "I thought I'd love that feature, but now that I'm using it, I hate it."
Bingo!
I'd really love that.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...56134658&hl=en
OSX:
Menubar
Apple Menu
MenuBar Items (volume, wifi)
Dock
Vista:
Taskbar
Startmenu
Windows has less stuff to the OS, I give them credit for that. Mac has a lot of areas to learn. For me as a long time user, I am ok with it, but teaching someone new, I soon realize that there are just a lot of pockets where things are happening. Seems like too many.
Like logging out, you go to the Apple menu but switching to another user, you use the account menu on the other side of the screen. Stuff like that takes time to learn.
Also, as displays get bigger, the UI of OSX is breaking. The menu bar can be very far away from the rest of the UI, that can be inconvenient and confusing. I think the fixed menu is much better for muscle memory, but how to use menu's in larger displays is an issue.
Don't get me wrong, I don't like a lot of stuff on Windows, on the whole the Mac is better, things just work better on the Mac, but from a UI strategy perspective, there are benefits to the Windows approach.