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Windows 7 Taskbar Not So Similar To OS X Dock After All
cremou brulee writes "Redmond's photocopiers have been unusually busy for the last couple of years, with the result that Windows 7 copies a lots of Mac OS X features. First and foremost among these is the Dock, which has been unceremoniously ripped off in Windows 7's new Taskbar. Or has it? Ars Technica has taken an in-depth look at the history and evolution of the Taskbar, and shows just how MS arrived at the Windows 7 'Superbar.' The differences between the Superbar and the Dock are analyzed in detail. The surprising conclusion? 'Ultimately, the new Taskbar is not Mac-like in any important way, and only the most facile of analyses would claim that it is.'"
Normally Ars stuff is pretty good, but that article is *very* ordinary, with a lot of conceptual, functional and historical errors.
The main thrust is correct, however, the Windows 7 Taskbar is clearly a descendant of its Windows 95 Great-great-grandfather, not the bastard child of NeXT and MacOS.
It's called "nextstep". Look into it.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Not that one should take at face value what Microsoft or Apple announce at their conferences, but in their developer conference the MS guys explained this evolutionary path. I saw several videos about it around the time.
The underlying tech is quite different between the Dock and the Taskbar, also they have similar but not equal philosopies behind them. I have been using XP's toolbars in pretty much the way Microsoft has done with the Taskbar.
+Raider of the lost BBS
Actually no, you're wrong--OS X displays a button every application that you decided to put in the Dock, whether they are running or not. Additionally, there is a document shortcut area of the dock which also shows minimized document/application windows (if document, independent of which app they are part of).
Yes, the fundamental philosophy each inherited is different, but in effect at the 'dock' or 'taskbar' representation, Windows 7 and OSX end up presenting things similarly.
He makes the point that the OSX dock is for applications and that Windows is for each window, though Microsoft is heavily encouraging grouping that makes it seem as much like the dock as possible. True, in Windows this can be turned off, but that doesn't do anything to disprove the intent is to acheive the model the Dock presents. He says that when you close the last application window, it dissapears from the taskbar. The issue there is it behaves the same on Windows 7 and OSX, if an application exits, then the dock icon or taskbar presennce will disappear unless persistantly set.
He mentions things like the presence of the notification area as proof of difference, but all it really proves is that MS had a few different design ideas as they went and they must support all of them as a consequence.
Just like WindowMaker largely deals with non-GNUstep applications and makes them seem NeXT like through some of the best window group identifying methods in an X system, Windows is trying to fight clutter by removing quicklaunch and taskbar redundancy, and enabling the taskbar presence to be manipulated to replace system tray presence.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Ok, let me clarify that I posted like that to mock the guy above. Figuring out who invented what is obviously a useful UI paradigm and then pointing fingers at everyone else for copying is childish, immature, adolescent, etc.
How is it vaporware if it exists in beta form? I think you need to look up what that word means.
All your base are belong to Wii.
That's no moon! Err... I mean, that's no dock. Those are just the minimised Icons on the desktop from other applications. That was the way up to and including Windows 3.11. The taskbar was introduced in Windoes 95.
[--- PGP key and more on http://www.root42.de ---]
I'm assuming you're one of those kids who think you're "old school" because you used to play Half-life on daddy's computer in 1999. Because honestly, those are (as others have pointed out) minimized applications, Windows didn't have a task bar until Windows 95.
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Mac OS X used to be called NeXTstep, and NeXTstep had a dock which Windows 95 copied to create the task bar.
If you had actually used NeXTSTEP, you would know that its Dock and the Windows 95 Taskbar behave very differently. Much like the taskbar and the OS X Dock behave differently.
The Windows 95 look which came to be called the Windows classic look which was in fact a shameless but inferior copy of the NeXTstep look from 1988.
Rubbish. Application launching, task switching, menu interaction, window management - all these things were quite different in NeXT compared to Windows 95. Indeed, you'd struggle to find ways they were similar, that weren't also shared by every other GUI.