The "gravity" windowshade looks very similar to a solitaire that was bundled on the Macs of yore. I believe it was called Eric's Solitaire. It allowed you to throw the cards onto the appropriate pile rather than having to precisely drag them onto them. It worked pretty well and sped the game up greatly.
I imagine that drag-n-drop onto these windows will come, but one thing at a time, as OS X has proven. Looks like they're trying to get the "magnetic" behavior down pat first.
[quote]Originally posted by Xeo:
<strong>One fun thing to do is to "throw" them at a moderate speed from one side to the other and try to catch it before it reaches the edge. </strong><hr></blockquote>
New bundled app: Catch.? Now if they could make a Breakout and Pong version of minimized windows?
[quote]On the other hand, I can think of lots of reasons why windowshade wasn't (and isn't being) implemented.<hr></blockquote>In total seriousness, please tell me these reasons. Because, for the life of me, I can not figure out ONE reason why OSX minimization to the dock is in any way better or more reasonable than windowshade.
1. I mentioned before that most windows' title bars are at the top of the screen, roughly in the same spot. Windowshading multiple windows often results in stacks of shades that are cumbersome to sift through. Once this is done, if you re-expand the window and you have to move back into place becuase often the bottom or one side is cut off by the edge of the screen.
2. Less problemmatic but still an issue is where the shaded windows are activated but it doesn't provide enopugh feedback to say that it is the frontmost window -- which is why typing isn't doing anything, for example. It can be hard to notive the title bar gray-outs.
3. One you place a full-size window over the shaded one, it can be difficult to find the WindowShaded one unless you go to the Window menu.
4. They can clutter the desktop. Obviously that's by choice more often than not. But a good GUI helps the user be organized with the flexibility to have slop space.
Problem 1 is the worst for me. I only really used window shade to peak behind a window because too many were a huge mess.
Perhaps option clicking the minimize button to classic window shade the window could be an idea (with the option to make that the default behavior)
At present I use option clicking into the desktop to quickly hide a window.. I very very rarely use the dock minimization as it's currently implemented.
In addition to all the reasons mentioned, I'll add another:
Windowshade is a method of minimization that doesn?t work all that well with OS X?s new windowing system.
Apple has moved to a global windowing system with OS X (like many *nixen, and, yes, Windows). Meaning windows aren?t all tied to one another in an invisible layer owned by the application.
You can look at a Eudora window right over your InDesign document -- w/o bringing along any other Eudora windows with it.
In OS X. after you minimize a window to a localized area (be it the Dock, or -- if the mini-windows features comes to be -- the sides of the screen or whereever you throw 'em) you can reach over and zoom it to proper size, no matter what application you're in.
But there's no good reservoir for storing a windowshaded window -- they're just too unwieldy. Windows? Taskbar stacks up minimized windows by their title, but with any number of minimized windows, the names get cut off into gibberish, and/or you have to spend your time resizing the taskbar, or in XP clicking on categories to see what?s there. It?s as a big a nuisance, or more, as scrubbing for windows in the Dock.
(Besides, Apple will let hell freeze over before they?re going do it the Windows way. )
So why not just windowshade and leave them floating in the air, and spend the time arranging them out of each other?s way, and hunting them through layers of other windows each time you need them? Well, you can do it, if you really want to, with Windowshade X -- if you?ve got the patience and energy. But for quickly scooping a window, or several windows, out of the way that you?ll get back to later (no matter which app you?re now in) Windowshade, for all its perks at quick peeks, is pretty clunky.
[edit: added obligatory Apple Thinking Different comment]
I think it's great and I agree with Hobbes that the Dock will become actually an incredibly veratile tool eventually.
I love having QT TV on in the background (when we had the BBC) on the dock. It was great to let it sit there until something cool came on and in one click have it front and center. These cut and paste dock thumbs are EXACTLY what I could use!!
The other thing is that there are alot of contextual menu functions that may be given visual cues instead of just the drop menu of items. I myself have little use for most of what a 2-button mouse does for this intel thing I'm using now.
It probably wasn't as hard to implement as you might think, either. moki was mentioning in another thread that all dock icons are already 128x128 windows stacked at 0,0 that get moved and scaled in Quartz. So putting these miniwindows somewhere other than in the dock is probably not too much of a stretch.
I imagine that they're still windows belonging to Dock.app.
<strong>Problem 1 is the worst for me. I only really used window shade to peak behind a window because too many were a huge mess.
Perhaps option clicking the minimize button to classic window shade the window could be an idea (with the option to make that the default behavior)
At present I use option clicking into the desktop to quickly hide a window.. I very very rarely use the dock minimization as it's currently implemented.
CD</strong><hr></blockquote>
I find that a combination of minimizing windows and hiding applications (along with all their windows) is very useful, and pretty potent.
I love how Apple combined the app-centric philosophy of the classic Mac OS with the more window-centric philosophy of modern OSes. It's a great, unique mix!
Now all I need is that system-defined consistent-across-all-apps window switching key command in Keyboard.... that's currently, teasingly blank.......
[quote]I don?t know though. It would get kind of messy, wouldn?t it? I?m often puzzled why people dislike the idea of combining launching and process areas like the Dock currently does. I think it?s a pretty clever idea.
<hr></blockquote>
i actually don't like having a launcher and a process area in the same dock. i removed everything from my dock except for the only apps that i know i will run all the time, like drop drawers and itunes. here's my reasoning:
when working on specific tasks that require certain apps to be open, i don't like other app icons to be in my way. for instance, doing a web page would require photoshop, imageready, and dreamweaver for me. i also use indesign very often for other tasks but i don't want the indesign icon there while i'm doing a webpage because it makes me pause and skip over the icon when it serves no purpose. if i needed quick access to that app, i'd already have it running.
when i'm web browsing and generally goofing off, i don't want/need to have photoshop, imageready, quark, indesign, dreamweaver, flash, etc all sitting around when i only need to switch between fire and omniweb and maybe itunes. especially since os x relies completely on icon recognition to distinguish one app from another. i have my dock in the smallest position, so that doesn't work as well for me if i have a ton of apps (running/non-running) in the dock. it just gets to be a huge jumbled mess.
to make matters worse, the dock doesn't even prioritize the running apps together. so i can have three of my needed apps for a task interspersed with five or six other non-running apps. then when i switch tasks and need other apps open, it'll have the same problem but with different parameters.
don't get me wrong, i actually love the dock, i just only like it the way i have it. i've made the app switcher on my os 9 machine at work simulate the position and orientation of my dock at home. but that's exactly why i prefer to keep only running apps in the dock because it's so much more efficient to work with the app switcher at work than it is in the default state of the dock.
also, i use drop drawers as my launcher because it's so much more space efficient than the dock for launching and also supports drag-and-drop. there are a lot of apps that i use often enough that i need quick access to them, but not often enough that i want to have their icons just taking up space in my dock all the time.
Main reason I used windowshade was to peek at the stuff behind the window. Now with live dragging I can just drag the top window down, check out what's underneath it, and then pull it back up where it was.
i actually don't like having a launcher and a process area in the same dock. i removed everything from my dock except for the only apps that i know i will run all the time, like drop drawers and itunes. here's my reasoning:
when working on specific tasks that require certain apps to be open, i don't like other app icons to be in my way. for instance, doing a web page would require photoshop, imageready, and dreamweaver for me. i also use indesign very often for other tasks but i don't want the indesign icon there while i'm doing a webpage because it makes me pause and skip over the icon when it serves no purpose. if i needed quick access to that app, i'd already have it running.
when i'm web browsing and generally goofing off, i don't want/need to have photoshop, imageready, quark, indesign, dreamweaver, flash, etc all sitting around when i only need to switch between fire and omniweb and maybe itunes. especially since os x relies completely on icon recognition to distinguish one app from another. i have my dock in the smallest position, so that doesn't work as well for me if i have a ton of apps (running/non-running) in the dock. it just gets to be a huge jumbled mess.
Hey admactanium, you've put your finger on the biggest issue that comes along with combining the process and launcher areas of a dock: the design forbids using tabs to seperate categories (especially to create categories of activity, like you've described) because the Dock has to provide the function of showing you what's running! So you can't tuck away active applications behind a tabbed layer, a la DragThing.
But I'm not sure that the solution is to seperate the two functions... Instead, the biggest question I have for Apple UI: how do you let people have 'sets' of applications in the dock? And quickly collapse sets, or 'suites', of apps that you're not using?
I find that when I'm working on a project which has a suite of apps associated with it (e.g. designing a web site, and using Photoshop, BBEdit, and Dreamweaver) I tend to be working on that same project for a number of days, if not weeks. If I then switch to another project (e.g. working on a short story) another suite will emerge: TexEdit, TextEdit, American Heritage Dictionary, Britannica.
Often I do juggle projects back and forth, though, and there's no handy way to do it, save for Dock Swap. (And yes, I already use several folders stationed in the Dock as a quick launcher for apps and documents, and no, it isn't handy to make one for each 'suite', as they sometimes change, and I always want to quickly launch all of a suite's apps at once, not select each from a menu one by one.)
A suite of general -use apps, on the other hand, are always in my Dock: Eudora, OW, Mozilla, iTunes, TexEdit, TextEdit, BBEdit, System Preferences, Terminal. Things I use every day. Photoshop as well, increasingly. If an apps starts appearing there all the time, it stays in the Dock. If I find an apps isn't being used all that often: poof.
Anyway. Connection to wacky window miniaturization in 10.2...? Um.... not much. Other how to make the Dock more useful and just plain better.
p.s. There's always Dock Swap (http://www.piDog.com/OSX/). It's nice solution for the problem you're describing (though not perfect). DropDrawers isn't my cup of tea personally but it's an interesting solution.
I have yet to use OSX for any length of time...the other customers in the store keep hurrmphing in the background...but can't you make similar "suites" and (my favorite) tabs by adding alias to a folder in the dock? This is probably a really stupid question.
<strong>One fun thing to do is to "throw" them at a moderate speed from one side to the other and try to catch it before it reaches the edge.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Oooh.... what about a networked "Minimized Window" war?
<strong>I have yet to use OSX for any length of time...the other customers in the store keep hurrmphing in the background...but can't you make similar "suites" and (my favorite) tabs by adding alias to a folder in the dock? This is probably a really stupid question.</strong><hr></blockquote>
The only stupid question is the one un-asked. Yes this does exist now (10.1.x) just drag the folder into the dock and the alias will be created.
If you single click on it, a new finder window will open to the alias. If you CNTRL-click / right-click, a folder contents list will pop up and you can drill down from there, which is quite convenient.
<strong>I have yet to use OSX for any length of time...the other customers in the store keep hurrmphing in the background...but can't you make similar "suites" and (my favorite) tabs by adding alias to a folder in the dock? This is probably a really stupid question.</strong><hr></blockquote>
No, not stupid at all. You can place folders in the Dock which then pop up a menu of their contents with a hold- or control-click. It?s a decent replacement for OS 9?s pop-up folders and the old Apple menu. You can then, if you wish, and place ?suites? of apps in those folders.
If you do this, though, you then lose the one-click access of the Dock, can?t launch an entire ?suite? at once, and can?t switch between ?suites? easily. (You can, of course, with a bit of quitting and opening, but not a beautifully easy way, the kind of Apple way which makes one proud to use a Mac.)
So I?m talking about something a little different -- a feature to group apps and hide, expand, or launch these groups, or suites, with a single click.
I may be making a subtle distinction here, but it seems important (to me anyway). I?ll create a mockup this weekend of what I?m talking about, and start a new thread w/ it.
(I?m curious if switching in & out of suites of applications is standard practice among experienced users, or just the quirks of this user's own habits.)
[quote] If you do this, though, you then lose the one-click access of the Dock, can?t launch an entire ?suite? at once, and can?t switch between ?suites? easily. (You can, of course, with a bit of quitting and opening, but not a beautifully easy way, the kind of Apple way which makes one proud to use a Mac.)
<hr></blockquote>
Actually this isn't as hard as you make it sound.
Create a folder, and place aliases of all the apps you want to open at once, your "suite" of apps. Set the folder to icon view.
Place the folder in the dock.
Now, to launch a single app, right click.
To launch all of the apps at once, left click, and a window of the folder in icon view will appear. Hit "Apple-A" to select all of the apps, then double click on one in the group. All of them will launch.
True, it's not as easy as it could be, but it's not hard at all IMO.
Not that I have a whole lot to add to this discussion, but I want to put a plug in for my favorite shareware app of the week (maybe month): LaunchBar. You can access all your apps with a few keystrokes so that you CAN have only running apps in the dock if that's your cup of tea (I know you can without it, but then you have to navigate to find your non-running apps). You should give it a try.
Comments
[quote]Originally posted by Xeo:
<strong>One fun thing to do is to "throw" them at a moderate speed from one side to the other and try to catch it before it reaches the edge.
New bundled app: Catch.?
1. I mentioned before that most windows' title bars are at the top of the screen, roughly in the same spot. Windowshading multiple windows often results in stacks of shades that are cumbersome to sift through. Once this is done, if you re-expand the window and you have to move back into place becuase often the bottom or one side is cut off by the edge of the screen.
2. Less problemmatic but still an issue is where the shaded windows are activated but it doesn't provide enopugh feedback to say that it is the frontmost window -- which is why typing isn't doing anything, for example. It can be hard to notive the title bar gray-outs.
3. One you place a full-size window over the shaded one, it can be difficult to find the WindowShaded one unless you go to the Window menu.
4. They can clutter the desktop. Obviously that's by choice more often than not. But a good GUI helps the user be organized with the flexibility to have slop space.
Perhaps option clicking the minimize button to classic window shade the window could be an idea (with the option to make that the default behavior)
At present I use option clicking into the desktop to quickly hide a window.. I very very rarely use the dock minimization as it's currently implemented.
CD
Windowshade is a method of minimization that doesn?t work all that well with OS X?s new windowing system.
Apple has moved to a global windowing system with OS X (like many *nixen, and, yes, Windows). Meaning windows aren?t all tied to one another in an invisible layer owned by the application.
You can look at a Eudora window right over your InDesign document -- w/o bringing along any other Eudora windows with it.
In OS X. after you minimize a window to a localized area (be it the Dock, or -- if the mini-windows features comes to be -- the sides of the screen or whereever you throw 'em) you can reach over and zoom it to proper size, no matter what application you're in.
But there's no good reservoir for storing a windowshaded window -- they're just too unwieldy. Windows? Taskbar stacks up minimized windows by their title, but with any number of minimized windows, the names get cut off into gibberish, and/or you have to spend your time resizing the taskbar, or in XP clicking on categories to see what?s there. It?s as a big a nuisance, or more, as scrubbing for windows in the Dock.
(Besides, Apple will let hell freeze over before they?re going do it the Windows way.
So why not just windowshade and leave them floating in the air, and spend the time arranging them out of each other?s way, and hunting them through layers of other windows each time you need them? Well, you can do it, if you really want to, with Windowshade X -- if you?ve got the patience and energy. But for quickly scooping a window, or several windows, out of the way that you?ll get back to later (no matter which app you?re now in) Windowshade, for all its perks at quick peeks, is pretty clunky.
[edit: added obligatory Apple Thinking Different comment]
[ 01-30-2002: Message edited by: Hobbes ]</p>
I love having QT TV on in the background (when we had the BBC) on the dock. It was great to let it sit there until something cool came on and in one click have it front and center. These cut and paste dock thumbs are EXACTLY what I could use!!
The other thing is that there are alot of contextual menu functions that may be given visual cues instead of just the drop menu of items. I myself have little use for most of what a 2-button mouse does for this intel thing I'm using now.
It probably wasn't as hard to implement as you might think, either. moki was mentioning in another thread that all dock icons are already 128x128 windows stacked at 0,0 that get moved and scaled in Quartz. So putting these miniwindows somewhere other than in the dock is probably not too much of a stretch.
I imagine that they're still windows belonging to Dock.app.
<strong>Problem 1 is the worst for me. I only really used window shade to peak behind a window because too many were a huge mess.
Perhaps option clicking the minimize button to classic window shade the window could be an idea (with the option to make that the default behavior)
At present I use option clicking into the desktop to quickly hide a window.. I very very rarely use the dock minimization as it's currently implemented.
CD</strong><hr></blockquote>
I find that a combination of minimizing windows and hiding applications (along with all their windows) is very useful, and pretty potent.
I love how Apple combined the app-centric philosophy of the classic Mac OS with the more window-centric philosophy of modern OSes. It's a great, unique mix!
Now all I need is that system-defined consistent-across-all-apps window switching key command in Keyboard.... that's currently, teasingly blank.......
<hr></blockquote>
i actually don't like having a launcher and a process area in the same dock. i removed everything from my dock except for the only apps that i know i will run all the time, like drop drawers and itunes. here's my reasoning:
when working on specific tasks that require certain apps to be open, i don't like other app icons to be in my way. for instance, doing a web page would require photoshop, imageready, and dreamweaver for me. i also use indesign very often for other tasks but i don't want the indesign icon there while i'm doing a webpage because it makes me pause and skip over the icon when it serves no purpose. if i needed quick access to that app, i'd already have it running.
when i'm web browsing and generally goofing off, i don't want/need to have photoshop, imageready, quark, indesign, dreamweaver, flash, etc all sitting around when i only need to switch between fire and omniweb and maybe itunes. especially since os x relies completely on icon recognition to distinguish one app from another. i have my dock in the smallest position, so that doesn't work as well for me if i have a ton of apps (running/non-running) in the dock. it just gets to be a huge jumbled mess.
to make matters worse, the dock doesn't even prioritize the running apps together. so i can have three of my needed apps for a task interspersed with five or six other non-running apps. then when i switch tasks and need other apps open, it'll have the same problem but with different parameters.
don't get me wrong, i actually love the dock, i just only like it the way i have it. i've made the app switcher on my os 9 machine at work simulate the position and orientation of my dock at home. but that's exactly why i prefer to keep only running apps in the dock because it's so much more efficient to work with the app switcher at work than it is in the default state of the dock.
also, i use drop drawers as my launcher because it's so much more space efficient than the dock for launching and also supports drag-and-drop. there are a lot of apps that i use often enough that i need quick access to them, but not often enough that i want to have their icons just taking up space in my dock all the time.
[ 02-02-2002: Message edited by: admactanium ]</p>
<strong>
i actually don't like having a launcher and a process area in the same dock. i removed everything from my dock except for the only apps that i know i will run all the time, like drop drawers and itunes. here's my reasoning:
when working on specific tasks that require certain apps to be open, i don't like other app icons to be in my way. for instance, doing a web page would require photoshop, imageready, and dreamweaver for me. i also use indesign very often for other tasks but i don't want the indesign icon there while i'm doing a webpage because it makes me pause and skip over the icon when it serves no purpose. if i needed quick access to that app, i'd already have it running.
when i'm web browsing and generally goofing off, i don't want/need to have photoshop, imageready, quark, indesign, dreamweaver, flash, etc all sitting around when i only need to switch between fire and omniweb and maybe itunes. especially since os x relies completely on icon recognition to distinguish one app from another. i have my dock in the smallest position, so that doesn't work as well for me if i have a ton of apps (running/non-running) in the dock. it just gets to be a huge jumbled mess.
[ 02-02-2002: Message edited by: admactanium ]</strong><hr></blockquote>
Hey admactanium, you've put your finger on the biggest issue that comes along with combining the process and launcher areas of a dock: the design forbids using tabs to seperate categories (especially to create categories of activity, like you've described) because the Dock has to provide the function of showing you what's running! So you can't tuck away active applications behind a tabbed layer, a la DragThing.
But I'm not sure that the solution is to seperate the two functions... Instead, the biggest question I have for Apple UI: how do you let people have 'sets' of applications in the dock? And quickly collapse sets, or 'suites', of apps that you're not using?
I find that when I'm working on a project which has a suite of apps associated with it (e.g. designing a web site, and using Photoshop, BBEdit, and Dreamweaver) I tend to be working on that same project for a number of days, if not weeks. If I then switch to another project (e.g. working on a short story) another suite will emerge: TexEdit, TextEdit, American Heritage Dictionary, Britannica.
Often I do juggle projects back and forth, though, and there's no handy way to do it, save for Dock Swap. (And yes, I already use several folders stationed in the Dock as a quick launcher for apps and documents, and no, it isn't handy to make one for each 'suite', as they sometimes change, and I always want to quickly launch all of a suite's apps at once, not select each from a menu one by one.)
A suite of general -use apps, on the other hand, are always in my Dock: Eudora, OW, Mozilla, iTunes, TexEdit, TextEdit, BBEdit, System Preferences, Terminal. Things I use every day. Photoshop as well, increasingly. If an apps starts appearing there all the time, it stays in the Dock. If I find an apps isn't being used all that often: poof.
Anyway. Connection to wacky window miniaturization in 10.2...? Um.... not much. Other how to make the Dock more useful and just plain better.
p.s. There's always Dock Swap (http://www.piDog.com/OSX/). It's nice solution for the problem you're describing (though not perfect). DropDrawers isn't my cup of tea personally but it's an interesting solution.
<strong>One fun thing to do is to "throw" them at a moderate speed from one side to the other and try to catch it before it reaches the edge.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Oooh.... what about a networked "Minimized Window" war?
That would be fun.
Like Pong and Joust combined into Window Fun!
<strong>I have yet to use OSX for any length of time...the other customers in the store keep hurrmphing in the background...but can't you make similar "suites" and (my favorite) tabs by adding alias to a folder in the dock? This is probably a really stupid question.</strong><hr></blockquote>
The only stupid question is the one un-asked. Yes this does exist now (10.1.x) just drag the folder into the dock and the alias will be created.
If you single click on it, a new finder window will open to the alias. If you CNTRL-click / right-click, a folder contents list will pop up and you can drill down from there, which is quite convenient.
<strong>I have yet to use OSX for any length of time...the other customers in the store keep hurrmphing in the background...but can't you make similar "suites" and (my favorite) tabs by adding alias to a folder in the dock? This is probably a really stupid question.</strong><hr></blockquote>
No, not stupid at all. You can place folders in the Dock which then pop up a menu of their contents with a hold- or control-click. It?s a decent replacement for OS 9?s pop-up folders and the old Apple menu. You can then, if you wish, and place ?suites? of apps in those folders.
If you do this, though, you then lose the one-click access of the Dock, can?t launch an entire ?suite? at once, and can?t switch between ?suites? easily. (You can, of course, with a bit of quitting and opening, but not a beautifully easy way, the kind of Apple way which makes one proud to use a Mac.)
So I?m talking about something a little different -- a feature to group apps and hide, expand, or launch these groups, or suites, with a single click.
I may be making a subtle distinction here, but it seems important (to me anyway). I?ll create a mockup this weekend of what I?m talking about, and start a new thread w/ it.
(I?m curious if switching in & out of suites of applications is standard practice among experienced users, or just the quirks of this user's own habits.)
-edit: clarified something.
[ 02-07-2002: Message edited by: Hobbes ]</p>
<hr></blockquote>
Actually this isn't as hard as you make it sound.
Create a folder, and place aliases of all the apps you want to open at once, your "suite" of apps. Set the folder to icon view.
Place the folder in the dock.
Now, to launch a single app, right click.
To launch all of the apps at once, left click, and a window of the folder in icon view will appear. Hit "Apple-A" to select all of the apps, then double click on one in the group. All of them will launch.
True, it's not as easy as it could be, but it's not hard at all IMO.
Here's the link <a href="http://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/"; target="_blank">LaunchBar</a>.