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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.'"
every Mac application is an MDI application, only the outer "application" window is always maximized and always transparent, with its menu always at the top of the screen.
The crux of the issue is that the Mac UI (and the NEXTSTEP UI) has always been application-centric from day 1. All multi-document Mac applications work in the same way: Alt+Tab to switch applications, Alt+` to switch documents.
Document-centric UIs, on the other hand, don't scale well, and that has led both the Windows OS and its applications to try to fake it one way or another, by grouping task bar icons, staying alive in the sys-tray, etc.
This game will waste your life. Don't clicky!
..the article in one sentence:
Mac OSX displays a button for each application open, and Win7 displays a button for each document that is open and then groups them by application.
nah! that's not the same at all!
By 'astroturfing', do you mean 'having a differing opinion to the groupthink'?
I'm still yet to see a single mote of evidence that Microsoft bothers to astroturf Slashdot. Can you honestly think of a community of individuals (save, say, BoycottNovell) that are less likely to either:
a) Switch to Windows, or
b) Do anything at all on the whim of a commenter?
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
Whatever, dweeb. Is every ridiculous "ra ra Linux" article "astroturfing"?
less likely
Yeah, we're all Linux zealots here. *rolls eyes* Seriously, might have been true 10 years ago, but today? Not so much.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
We arrived at the pretty much same place after starting somewhere else, so that makes it very, very, very, very different. Very.
If it looks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, and it flies like a duck... then it must be a rare Mongolian tsetsefloofle birdmolester! No way it could possibly be any kind of, you know, DUCK...
Did they copy it? Did they not? Do I care?
Is it useful? Does it do what it should? Does it make my work easier? That's what I care about. There are things that are clever. And, bluntly, I'd rather have them copy a good concept than come up with a completely moronic one (Office 2007, I'm looking your way!) just to be "different", just to have nobody claim they "Xeroxed something else".
Honestly, why should I care whether Windows, Mac, KDE, Gnome or whoever else copies anything from whoever? Ain't the damn patent lawyers not busy enough already, do we have to start with the same crap? What I care about is whether the system is reliable, fast and easy to use. Where they got the idea for it, I do not care.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Windows never had an "application switcher". It was always a window switcher. It just seemed like an application switcher when the processes all consistently only put up one top level window.
Software Inventor
You would care if those three movies that were all similar if those were the only three movies that year.
The obvious change in the new Windows Taskbar is that there are icons for non-running-applications. I don't care how you try to word it, that is the major difference between the OSX Dock and the Windows Taskbar. So Damn right it is copying it.
But is that really bad? Yes they copied good ideas, and perhaps made their own improvements to it. But that is how we get better software! Is this somehow wrong when Microsoft does it? You mean you really want Look & Feel Patents and Lawsuits? Don't be idiotic!
And the Microsoft astroturfers should not be showing such knee-jerk stupid reactions. Why not say *proudly* "we copied good ideas and improved on them even more!" instead of convoluted arguments that somehow they did not copy it.
Maybe that's the way you think, but its not the way I think. I usually think "It's time for some tunes" (not even caring which one just start playing randomly from all of my music), "What's new on ", "I need to find ", "It's time write some code for project ". The applications are just the means to those ends. Personally I don't want document centric, application centric, or window centric. I want task and result centric. By result centric I mean I get the result of music being played, as that doesn't fall into a the category of at task for me, since I'm not the one playing the music. It is just something I want the computer to start doing (and stop again later when I don't want it any more). To bad for me though, as that's now any of the OSes do it at present.
Software Inventor
I've no doubt that it's a major improvement over the old Taskbar, but nearly every feature is cloned from the dock.
That includes mixing running/pinned applications, application-specific context menus, active application switching, integration with Spaces, nearly everything except the rollover thumbnails.
But the OS X dock allows multiple docked folders, stacks, and documents. Plus the dock supports additional functionality like the numbered icon badges for Mail's inbox counts, in-progress status bars for apps like Handbrake, snapshot icons for minimized documents and movies and even minimized windows (icons) for things like the Activity Monitor's CPU usage graph.
As such, I fail to see how, as the article suggests, that "superbar" is markedly superior.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
I'm just the opposite: I love how Mac OS separates window and application. It's just LOGICAL!
There is an application running; but not handling any document right now. Therefore, it does not have to show a window.
There is an application running; and it is handling a document right now. Therefore, it displays the document in a window.
Because the window is the document.
Circumcision is child abuse.
"Copied" from KHTML? Not really. It was a fork and WebKit is still open source. You might as well claim that every Linux distro out there is a copy of the original.
And gee, what holds a lot of people up from buying a Mac? That's right, software compatibility! Now, what could you do with a modern Mac that could circumvent that issue? Hmmmm, I wonder? Seriously, rub two braincells together for two seconds and figure it out.
"didn't Apple swipe their docks from NeXT OS"
Actually, Apple purchased NeXT in 1997 for $427 million. OS X was released in 2001.
And the Xerox Alto. Sure, it didn't have a fancy taskbar, or many of the features of todays GUIs, but it is still the paradigm from which nearly every current GUI has spawned from thus far.
Yes, the "Superbar" and the OSX Dock aren't terribly original, but they are quite useful evolutions of the idea. I'm pretty sure I remember that many pundits were saying that the Dock was ripping off Windows when it first turned up on the OSX Public Beta in late 2000.
Now, it seems that the Mouse, Icon and Window GUI is approaching it's logical conclusion, that there isn't much else you can add without making things more complicated than they need to be. The Big Two aren't really innovating so much anymore, rather they're fine-tuning and optimizing their existing products as much as possible rather than adding feature bloat. Both have evolved into very similar products with regards to "look & feel", functionality and performance.
Who will really create a completely new way of interacting with data that really works? Multi-touch looks promising, but needs new ideas and refinement. Voice recognition is still pretty weak, it has improved steadily with increase in computing power. With todays processing power and connectivity, isn't it time for something as radical as graphics and a mouse were in the times of text based computing?
Isn't Windows 7 coming out earlier than originally planned? I think that's pretty as non-vaporware as you can get.
every Mac application is an MDI application, only the outer "application" window is always maximized and always transparent, with its menu always at the top of the screen.
Why do you think so? The Mac always - since Macintosh 128k - supported window independent menu bars. Certainly I never created any transparent windows.
Document-centric UIs, on the other hand, don't scale well, and that has led both the Windows OS and its applications to try to fake it one way or another, by grouping task bar icons, staying alive in the sys-tray, etc.
Document-centric is the natural way for humans to work. Everything else has been trained upon us like you can train a left handed person to write with the right hand.
Don't believe me? Well have you ever started Acrobat-Reader just for the fun of it? No - you want to read a PDF! Apart from system tools everything out there is about documents of one type or another.
So you start iTunes just for the fun of it? Interesting. I usually want to play some Music and iTunes is just the means to do it.
Note that I once used OS/2 which had a different approach: You would not launch applications at all. You would double click documents and the application would launch for you.
Ok, you can do that any OS these days. But there was a difference here. The reason why you would not do that with i.E. music is that Finder does not browse music folders all that well. In OS/2 an application could/should provide a plug in for the Workplace Shell (the Finder equivalent) to make browsing easy.
And then you have true document centric interface where applications are just there in the background. But this won't happen ever - and for vanity reasons. Vanity? - Yes: Have you ever noticed how many icons the Acrobat-Reader installs on a Windows system? And have you ever used one of these? I don't - I double click PDF files. Vanity - there are just there for Adobe to show off.
Like gnome/kde/xfce/etc virtual workspaces which have been around for rather a long time? I'm surprised it took so many years for apple to implement what has been around in unix for so long.
I find the OS X interface counter-intuitive compared to Gnome, which I switched to from windows about 3 years ago. OS X is on a par with windows though for intuitivity.
IMHO.
Best of the two maybe, but not best overall.
Grouping by application isn't quite as helpful as grouping by task, as often an application is in use for more than one task simultaneously. I've found a good solution to this to be virtual desktops. I prefer Gnome's implementation of this, particularly the thumbnails always being visible on the panel, and the ability to make the window list only show the windows on the current desktop - preventing things unrelated to my task from distracting me.
For example:
I might have an IDE open with a browser window viewing API documentation, and a couple of terminal windows. At the same time I've got some messenger windows and IRC open, some browser windows of articles being discussed on IRC, or screenshots of games. I might also have another chat window open with my boss and and another browser logged into our FTP server, and a few local folder windows open.
I use the virtual desktops to group things by task, letting me first choose the task, then cycle through its associated windows with Alt-Tab (or whatever key combination I bind it to).
Unfortunately, the Creative Zen had a side scroll wheel years earlier that you'd scroll up and down to scroll through songs and click in to select etc. etc. The wheel on the iPod is different only in that you move your finger round the wheel straight on rather than having a physical wheel you scroll up and down- the concept is identical, only the implementation is different.
Yes, the "concept" of a wheel to scroll through lists is the same. But the physical experience of the interface is actually quite different. On an edge-contact scroll wheel, you can only move the list as far as the length of your thumb (or finger) pad before you have to pick up and reposition. This limits how fast you can move through the list. On a flat-contact scroll wheel, you can scroll through an infinite list continuously, which is faster. And (crucial detail) the iPod software actually scrolls the list faster the faster you move your finger (the relationship between fingertip speed and scroll speed is not linear).
The real predecessors to the iPod scroll wheel, at least physically, are the scroll wheels used in the video industry for fine frame scrolling. Like the iPod these were flat-contact wheels that allowed continuous smooth scrolling for as long as you wanted. They just were physically moving parts as opposed to a touch-sensitive surface like the iPod.
I won't claim that Apple is an amazing inventor for what they did with the iPod. I will say that they did a very good job tweaking and combining existing ideas to produce a very compelling product. Yvon Chouinard draws a difference between invention (the creation of new ideas) and innovation (the application of inventions to create a good product). By that definition I would say that Apple is an innovator.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.