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Tog Takes on Mac OS X 10.3
Rick Zeman writes "Bruce 'Tog' Tognazzini, founder of Apple's Human Interface Group years ago, has finally pointed his electrons to Mac OS X 10.3. He's been dormant for while, and hasn't said anything since the early days of Mac OS X. His new articles include 'Panther: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly' and 'The Top Nine Reasons why the Dock Sucks,' all coming from A Guy Who Knows."
I agree with him on the Dock issues on almost all of them. Some may be too nit picky.
:)
But for the most part he is right. All documents look the same, no tagging, trash can in the dock, dragging from the dock erases what you drag. It's dangerous.
I don't agree with the dock taking too much space. If you make it the smallest you can still make out what programs are which.
Plus, if the dock bothers you so much, HIDE it
Most of TOG's suggestions weren't my cup of tea ( I like the Dock, but hey, I used to be a NEXTSTEP developer), but WindowShade is a wonderful program.
http://www.unsanity.com/haxies/wsx/
Actually, these guys make a lot of cool, useful little app's, but WindowShade's "minimize in place" is wonderful. When you click on the 'minimize' control for a window, it's minimized down to an icon. But unlike the dock it's minimized right where the window was, so you can arrange the icons yourself. Also, the icon is a live version of the document's contents (so you can see a progress bar's progress, differentiate between two different Photoshop images, etc.) and has the application icon superimposed (so you know what kind of window it is). Apple should at least use these icons in the Dock.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
I have used every single Mac OS since system 7.1 in 1993 and I think that Torg does have several good points.
1. I have to agree that the open and save dialogs are a bit obstrusive, I remember being able to move around the open and save dialog to see what was going on behind it at times. Now when I get an ICQ add request I can't see the request because the dialog box is sticking in the way. Perhaps Apple needs to implent ment a "Rip" button that gives you the option of ripping the dialog box off the window on a case by case basis.
2. I disagree with the trash can issue. I like it in the Dock and find it pretty usefull there. Not to mention the fact that I just rather hit apple+delete to trash things anyway.
3. Ok, so the UI is differant, but honestly I think it is the best one that apple has designed since I have used the mac. They removed a lot of the issues that plagued it in it's infancy. I love the single window option and I have not had an issue with screen density at all. Quite frankly I think the new finder is the most functional they have had since 7.5 (yeah it's flame bait but II loved 7.5). It provides everything that you would want to access quickly right there for you with minimal problems. Yeah things may be bigger, but I like that.
"If you notice in Windows XP, you can't change the size of the taskbar"
When items get added to it... something's got to give. You either need to make the items smaller or show less image data. Apple chose the wiser of the two options before it. The ability to lock the dock would be a step backwards IMHO.
"For the OS X dock this would be a good feature beacuse it is easy to accidentally remove programs from the dock by slightly dragging the mouse when you double click"
You don't double click items in the dock to launch/activate them. Its all single-click. Second, you have to drag an item relatively far outside the dock to remove it. If you slightly move it... (as per your analogy) the item snaps back to its origional position.
"and it is easy to change the size of the dock by accidentally dragging the mouse on the border."
You don't resize the dock by dragging the mouse on its border. You have to command-click the line-seperator and drag... (a combination you wouldn't be using otherwise when at the dock and so it makes the chance of accidentally re-sizing the dock almost impossible.
Apple Sales is in love with the Dock. You can't go into an Apple store without seeing it splayed across the bottom of the screen, in the very configuration least conducive to computing on a Macintosh. Why? Because it's sexy and it sells. It makes that bright, shiny new Apple look simple, approachable, and beautiful. It makes for a great demo.
The problem does not lie with the Dock itself?if it makes a great demo, leave it in?but with Apple's apparent belief that it is a complete solution. The Dock is akin to a brightly-colored set of children's blocks, ideal for your first words?dog, cat, run, Spot, run?but not too effective for displaying the contents of War and Peace.
Contrary to my previously-held position, I no longer believe Apple should get rid of the Dock. It's just too pretty there in the store, and it does help set Mac apart from the more utilitarian appearance of Windows (although Windows grows more attractive with every release). You want that in sales. You want a visibly-apparent manifestation of the personality of the underlying technology. That's why automakers spend milliions making the outside of the car project an image of what's underneath the skin.
A certain class of Apple users?those who check their email once or twice a week and sometimes need to print an attached photo?may need nothing more than the Dock.
The rest of us need more powerful tools, so, Apple, leave the Dock as the smashing demo it is, but also supply some serious, information-dense tools. You have the talent and wherewithal to make such tools as attractive as the Dock if only you will cease seeing this one single object as a complete solution.
Apple has made a few improvements to the Dock in the last three years. Items no longer jump around seemingly at random, although the size of the Dock continues to "wheeze" in and out without user control.. Items alsoi act like buttons, so clicking anywhere within their confines will open them. Apple also quickly gave us the ability to turn off magnification, a major improvement in day-to-day usability.
The other good news is that independent solutions now exist for getting around every limitation of the Dock. Read Make Your Mac a Monster Machine to learn how to turn your Mac into a high-productivity, but still fun workhorse. Meanwhile, here are eight continuing problems with the Dock, plus a new one, a decided lack of color. Most of these are inherent, and the solution is more and varied tools. A few can be directly addressed by design tweaks.
9. The Dock is big and clumsy
The Dock by default sucks up around 70 pixels square minimum, more than four times as much vertical space as either the Windows task bar or the Macintosh menu bar. (Yes, you can set it much smaller, but then you make it progressively more difficult to identify an icon without "scrubbing" the screen with your mouse to reveal its label.) Couple that with Apple's move to 16:9 wide screens (read: short screens), and you have a real problem. For good measure, add in the Dock's habit of floating on top of working windows, and you have little choice but to hide it.
8. Identical icons look identical
This was originally entitled "Identical pictures look identical." I pointed out that the Dock's use of thumnails in small sizes made all normal text documents look pretty much alike. Apple has now dumped thumbnails in return for identical icons. My original advice still holds: "We need information on data types, file sizes (as represented by the thickness of the icon), age, etc." They've now given us data type. We need more?any attribute that can help differentiate one object from another.
The better solution to this and many of these other limitations is to supplant the Dock with additional objects that are designed for representing groups of non-application objects, so that people aren't even attempting to put folders and documents in this already overloaded single object.
Predictive text is shiv!
If the sidebar is too wide for your taste, you can make it smaller by dragging the separator bar, down to the size of the icons. If you hover over them the names will popup immediately. (This handy tip came from http://www.macosxhints.com)
To be pedantic, while XP's 'resizing' is worse than OS X's IMO, OS X icons are not vector based. They simply have multiple sizes of graphics and choose the next-largest size and scale it down. It's still bitmaps.
SGI's IRIX is vector based. OS X is not.
Enter in Terminal:
defaults write com.apple.dock pinning end
defaults write com.apple.dock orientation right
Then restart the Dock. Enjoy!
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
You don't resize the dock by dragging the mouse on its border. You have to command-click the line-seperator and drag... (a combination you wouldn't be using otherwise when at the dock and so it makes the chance of accidentally re-sizing the dock almost impossible.
Just to be picky, a regular click and drag on the line-seperator is enough to resize the dock. At least that's the way it works for me...
I run Windows XP, and almost everything I do is done via a command. Create a folder called c:\shortcuts. Copy shortcuts to your favorite apps, vbscripts, whatever to this folder and name them whatever you want. Add C:\shortcuts to your PATH env variable. Now all I do is hit Windows+R (Same as start run), type in my new command, and hit enter. What used to take many seconds of menus, right mouse clicks, and options, now takes less than 2 seconds. I want to start Microsoft Word, I type "word". If I want to start iTunes, I type "itunes". If I want to start device manager and connect to a remote machine, I type "mg computername".
Not all Windows users are GUI freaks...some of us are pretty proficient with our workstations without the pretty pictures.
Public use of any portable music system is a virtually guaranteed indicator of sociopathic tendencies. -- Zoso
Correct. They are simply very very large TIFFs. The UI in general is based on display PDF, so parts of it could very well be vector based (fonts, of course.) but the icons are not.
My sig is blank, I typed this by hand.
[panther] Try dragging docs or apps off the dock using the command key as a modifier. That moves the original item to the target window (including the desktop). You retain your dock icon that way, then you can drag it off to see the cool 'poof' effect (which justifies the whole thing if you ask me) :-) Pretty consistent, actually (the command key is a forceful modifier).
The trash stays where it is, need a haxie for getting it on the desktop.
Damn those pesky terrorists
Middle-button text editing, a popular staple of Linux geeks, is not present, but the drag & drop features are powerful enough that you will never miss it, once you get used to the new OS.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Tog writes "The same problem is plaguing the Safari browser. You can't elect to import bookmarks into Safari, and there's no way to get them back out. No corporation would support a single-source supplier, and no individual should either"
...
...
...
There's a hidden Safari feature which allows you to import bookmarks
Type the following command in Terminal (while Safari is NOT running):
Quit Safari. Enter the following command in Terminal
defaults write com.apple.safari IncludeDebugMenu 1
Launch Safari -- you'll have a Debug menu added to the application's bar. Amongst the Debug menu options are two ways to import bookmarks.
To get rid of Debug, quit Safari and enter the following command in Terminal
defaults write com.apple.safari IncludeDebugMenu 0