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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.'"
As a Windows user, I found this article very informative. Every time I have used OSX in the past, I have been frustrated with the application/window behavior. Understanding the motivation behind the way the operating system UIs work will probably go a long way to reducing my frustration in the future.
Good luck with that, didn't work for me.
I still use my macbook occassionally and I still hate their separation between window and application switching.
In general, when I "ALT-TAB" (or "CMD-TAB" fwiw) then I want to quickly browse through all windows that are available to me. The UI is invited to provide a smart ordering for me (i.e. show other windows of the current application first) but the mental effort of distinguishing between a "window switch" and an "app switch" never worked for me.
But frankly OSX as a whole just isn't for me - even though I really wanted to like it and literally worked for 2 months straight only on my MacBook in an attempt to learn it. The semantics of the dock are still counter-intuitive to me and showstoppers like mandatory click-to-raise or the absurd "magic titlebar" ultimately made me go back to my linux desktop.
The only problem I can see is if Microsoft copies it too well, that Apple's lawyers would be on them like ugly on a bulldog.
Wasn't the whole "look and feel" thing decided in Microsoft's favor, back in the 90's?
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
The funny thing about this was that the OSX dock concept never worked for me while windows works fine. I was a windows user for years, I'm not even sure if I started before 3.0, but I remember most my grad work being done on 3.1. So Windows is engrained into my skull. When I moved jobs recently they had me use OSX (Leopard). I thought what a great time to check this out. After 1 year I insisted on going back to Windows, and Vista no-less. I'm not saying that OSX was bad, it was in my opinion as unstable as Vista and just as annoying with updates, hibernate, length of time for shut-down/start-up etc. What really did it in for me was the work flow, I was so used to Windows that I could never really jive with the Mac GUI and especially dock. I had lived for years off of the quick launch bar and instant document jumping via the task bar. Now likely I wasn't using OSX effectively, but I can tell you from an empirical 12 month test that clicking on a word tab at the bottom of the screen was more efficient for me than minimizing the document so that I could find it later as it went to the dock or hunting around all tiny images when using the Expose button. In addition the ugliness of having all those application 'listed' along the bottom of the screen by icon was not great either. To me the major space on the dock should have been for very quickly finding the document of choice, and the whole Stacks concept...it was just a fancy short-cut to the desired folder. I suppose that I came to the conclusion that I wasn't "metrosexual" enough to use a Mac. However, there was a bunch of things that Windows should be stealing from the Mac
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
It's called "Windows 1.0." Look into it.
I did for you:
http://blogs.msdn.com/blogfiles/e7/WindowsLiveWriter/HappyAnniversaryWindowsontheEvolutionoft_1365F/clip_image002_2.jpg
See that at the bottom? 1985 called, they want their dock back. (Nextstep "innovated" that in 1989, four years later!)
I was using a dock in WindowMaker before I saw OS X -- WindowMaker was, of course, "inspired" by the same source in NextStep.
The difference is, the dock is not only about running applications, it's meant to just be about applications. So, if I want to go to the Web, I click Firefox (or Safari), and if it's open, I get a window of it. If it's not open, it opens, and I get a window of it. I no longer have to think about whether stuff is open or not.
In fact, Leopard seems to even further de-emphasize the ability to know whether an application is running or not.
This is both good and bad -- good, because we really shouldn't have to care; bad, because there is still a concept of an application "running" or not at the Unix level. I really feel that this should be transparent, even to the application developer.
But I digress...
It's not just grouping windows. After all, you can still minimize a window on OS X, and it will become its own Dock icon. And you can put other things on the Dock.
No, it's all about mirroring the way users actually think, which is "I want to go to iTunes", and then "I want to go to Word", not "I want to launch iTunes" or "I want to find the running iTunes window" or "I want to close iTunes, then open Word". They want to go to iTunes until they want to go to something else.
Once they're in Word, then they can think about which document they want to open or find -- but an intelligent application could even hide that. Autosave with a near-infinite, persistent undo stack, and frequent backups, is much better, I think, than save/revert.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
You're not weird--some of the original MacOS Human Interface Guide (HIG) designers agree with you (e.g. http://www.asktog.com/columns/044top10docksucks.html -- many of your criticisms mirror his).
When I got my first Apple laptop (10.3 powerbook) it took me awhile to get used to OSX. Probably because I was used to FreeBSD/Linux desktops, I adjusted fairly fast, and almost always have a Terminal window open. I remember a lot of frustration initially though, when I couldn't do things the windows way.
Stacks (introduced in 10.5) were one of those things I didn't like at first, but now LOVE for my Downloads folder only. Making the screen corners hook to Expose were another thing that took some getting used to, but I now seriously miss when I'm using Windows/etc.
I would say that OSX and vista re equally STABLE rather than unstable...though to be fair, I haven't had stability problems with windows since Win95/98/ME...
hrmmm... the Ars article gave me the impression that one of the benefits of OS X (and shortcomings of Windows' MDI model) is that you can overlap "documents" from different applications. so, for instance, i should be able to easily drag-and-drop a vector shape from an Adobe Illustrator document into an already open Photoshop document. likewise, i should be able to have multiple Word documents, Firefox windows, and Photoshop documents all on my desktop at the same time (and in any layer order i want). are you saying that this isn't correct, that in OS X i would only be able to view the workspace of a single application at any given time? if so, then i don't see much of an advantage to having windows represent documents.
part of what i don't like about windows representing applications is that there's no easy way to drag-and-drop objects/text from one application to another. so if i have multiple programs running with multiple documents open in each, i have to switch applications, switch documents, copy the object/text, switch applications again, and then paste into the correct document.
it's even more frustrating with Adobe CS3 as all the applications are basically transparent MDI windows like you describe. so i'll have an Illustrator document open with a Photoshop document visible in the background. yet i won't be able to drag-and-drop objects from the Illustrator document to the Photoshop document like i would be between 2 Illustrator documents or 2 Photoshop documents.
There are two basic options for people here, as it pertains to the astroturfing claim:
1. People use Windows, or
2. People use something else.
Obviously #2 can be expanded into a zillion other different options, but #1 is the important one to break out. If somebody already uses your product, you don't need to preach to them about how great your product is. It's the people in #2 that you have potential to change. That brings it back to the grandparent's point: the people here who don't use Windows aren't likely to change their mind about it as the result of some random commenter. Most of them have very specific qualms about Windows (or Microsoft) that drive their decision not to use it, and most of those people also have equally strong like for whatever OS they do use.
In that sense I have to agree with him. This seems like a really bad place to astroturf.
I think he means, as basic functionality of the OS. i.e. without having to download any sketchy third-party apps.
One thing is sorta ok, but if you have to download a special app for every one of your UI niggles, you end up wasting far more resources than ordinary feature bloat wastes. I know because I've tried it.
It's much better to just try and figure out the "windows way" or the "mac way" or the "x way" for your taskload; the taskflow their developers envisioned for your use case, with as few personal modifications as possible.
Plus, using stock OS features means you won't be all used to a specialized way of doing things when you have to use other computers.
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