On Sep 23, 2010, at 8:31 PM, Ashgrove wrote:
On Sep 23, 10:53 pm, Joshua Juran <jju...@gmail.com> wrote:
Ooh, don't get me started on the Dock. :-)
As a late switcher from the other side, I find the Dock useful,
elegant, and hard to live without. Far from perfect, of course, but
better than any Windows alternative I know. As far as I can tell,
though, most of the people vexed by it tend to be veteran Mac users.
Just anecdotic evidence, I guess, but food for thought...
I've also used the original NeXTStep dock. The upper right tile was
for the Workspace Manager (the file viewer app) and couldn't be
moved. Below it typically was Preferences, which displayed the date
in its icon the way iCal does now (except it had to be running, which
as of Leopard is not true of iCal). By default, the bottom right tile
was the recycler (aka trash). The slots in between were free for you
to add apps of your choosing. App tiles contained an ellipsis (i.e.
three dots) if the app wasn't running. *Double-clicking* would launch
the app, lightening the tile until the launch completed (and removing
the ellipsis). The dock only contained tiles that were placed there.
When you launched an app that wasn't in the dock, a tile for it was
created and placed on the bottom of the display, starting at the
left. Windows minimized to tiles that were placed in the same way.
You could drag dock tiles to other slots in the dock, you could drag
non-dock app and minimized window tiles anywhere on the screen, and
you could drag a running app's tile into the dock. Tiles were
activated by double-click, which either launched an app, brought the
app's windows forward, or unminimized the window.
At no time did tiles move on their own or respond to a single-click
(except for dragging).
The OS X dock is a classic case both of Apple trying to make something
appear more simple than it really is, to (I argue) the detriment of
users, as well as shipping a technology inferior to the state of the
art *that they themselves set in the past*. Other examples are iTunes
and accidental Caps Lock prevention, respectively.
(Apparently the recycler can be moved to the other corner in OPENSTEP
(i.e. NeXTStep 4), but this page shows the NeXTStep dock:)
OPENSTEP 4.2, Intel version, screen shots
http://toastytech.com/guis/openstep.html
You can see examples of apps in the dock running and not running, non-
dock apps running, minimized window tiles, and holes in the dock (last
image).
You can see that aside from the icons, the UI was designed for 2-bit
grayscale -- black, white, and 2 shades of gray. That's it.
NeXTStep's idea of eye candy was the beautiful gray gradient
background for dock tiles and the animated arrows of the recycler when
you held a file over it.
The NeXTStep GUI was naturally beautiful. Aqua applies gloss.
Josh
P.S. Oops, looks like you got me started. :-)
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