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.'"

Comments

The real difference is that

[gravos]

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.

Re:The real difference is that

[BrokenHalo]

every Mac application is an MDI application, only the outer "application" window is always maximized and always transparent

I don't know how clear that is to some of us, but regardless of how one switches windows or applications using hotkeys, the Mac windowing system (as the article makes clear) is essentially document-centric - each window corresponds (with some exceptions) to a document, which is sort of why closing the last document window doesn't terminate the application - i.e. it doesn't make this assumption, since your next action might be to open a new document.

This can be a bit counter-intuitive to those of us more familiar with X11 or Windows, but I can see where Apple is coming from. It does at least make for a more compact menu than that huge thing we see in recent MSOffice versions, which has obvious advantages if you are using a laptop.

Re:so, to summarize...

[spoco2]

And Windows never had a TASKBAR with BUTTONS for APPLICATIONS before Mac even had a dock.

Noooo.

For god's sake, grow up, OSX is not some holy friggen grail of OSes that everyone copies you know.

Re:Astroturfing

[Captain Splendid]

less likely

Yeah, we're all Linux zealots here. *rolls eyes* Seriously, might have been true 10 years ago, but today? Not so much.

Translation

[Anonymous Coward]

We arrived at the pretty much same place after starting somewhere else, so that makes it very, very, very, very different. Very.

Re:Look carefully at "Application"...

[JoshHeitzman]

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.