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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 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.