Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
but is it better?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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
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 waddles. It quacks. It's a camel!
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Windows 7 - KDE4 for Windows ~
'Ultimately, the new Taskbar is not Mac-like in any important way, and only the most facile of analyses would claim that it is.'
If by that he means to say that "the way it looks, feels and acts" are not important criteria for comparing the Mac OS X dock and Windows 7's Superbar, then I have to agree with him completely and whole-heartedly. I imagine the source code of each are completely different right?
Windows 7 'Superbar.'
I'm going to get rich when I invent a machine that lets me stab people in the face over the internet.
Except there wont be anyone to run my marketing campaign :(
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!
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
We arrived at the pretty much same place after starting somewhere else, so that makes it very, very, very, very different. Very.
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.
I would like to believe an OSS equivalent might be called "Open Bar",
but experience tells me it would be named something impenetrable like
"SpackleMonkey" or a difficult to pronounce word from a long dead language.
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 has a recycling bin but Apple still has trash.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
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
For as long as I remember now, I've wanted a way to do the following with the Windows Taskbar:
1. Reorganize the order of what windows I have open
2. Send windows to background taskbars (desktops), so I could be using different sets of apps at once
Hopefully they could add some minor usability features like this; I feel like I'm regularly working against the taskbar to get things done.
I'm still yet to see a single mote of evidence that Microsoft bothers to astroturf Slashdot.
Nor do I, and I am certainly not going to audit every post to find out. I've got getter things to do.
But in this case it is hardly the point; the article referenced by the OP is actually reasonably balanced, and certainly doesn't qualify as a shill or an attempt to astroturf.
Pretty straightforward, actually. Ignore the 95 - 98 - ME taxonomy entirely. Windows NT 4.0 ("NT4" - at MS) Windows 2000 ("NT5") Windows XP ("NT6") Windows Vista ("Oops1") Windows 7 ("NT7") See how nicely that works? --ckr
Irish by birth, Southern by the Grace of God.
Actually, Windows XP is NT5.1 and Vista is NT6
You would care if those three movies that were all similar if those were the only three movies that year.
Windows 7 Taskbar Not So Similar To OS X Dock After All
C'mon, this has to be flamebait. The article pointed out some differences, and mainly tried to make the window-centric-vs-application-centric distinction we all know about already. It didn't say that they "weren't so similar after all", because that's clearly false.
The new taskbar is nice and it has a couple of features that the dock doesn't have and probably won't ever pick up. Specifically, the window thumbnails and the fact that "jump lists" (aka contextual menus) stay behind even when the app is closed.
I'm not accusing MS of taking ideas. I am accusing them of taking too long to implement what was the optimal solution to a design problem. Having an icon on the desktop, in the start menu, the quick launch bar, and possibly the notification area...none of which correspond to the actual open windows, which are instead listed in the task bar: stupid. Not that anyone these days has a problem with it, but still, from a design standpoint it's wasteful and annoying.
Ars is fishing for objectivity points here, and at best is running this as a dog-bites-man story (that is, "we know the new taskbar acts like the dock, and MS has a history of playing catch-up in this area, but you'll be surprised at what we think is the truth"). The fact that the headline on Slashdot exaggerates this further pisses me off quite a bit.
If it looks like the dock, walks like the dock, and quacks like the dock...you know the rest.
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.
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!
Microsoft copied the recycle icon from NeXTstep which of course became Mac OS X.
http://www.andrewnotarian.com/blog/images/win95nextStep.gif
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.
You needed to use Spaces. Group any number of applications and windows into the same or adjacent spaces, then use control-arrows or control-numbers to immediately jump into the correct space.
See: Confessions of a Space-o-holic
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
"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?
Ok, they're either Linux zealots or daemon worshippers then.
Is your monitor really that reflective, AC?
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.
Okay, the Internet-face-stab machine is quickly becoming a meme around here. Is there a Wikipedia page in place yet? Because if not, there should be. I look forward to tracking the spread of this meme, especially if it should become a reality :)
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.
Twitter is that you? Hasn't there been a court order to stay on the meds yet?
3laws: No freebies, no backsies, GTFO.
If they'd done that properly, i.e. create the blank file, AND auto-opened the application, so you can just work right away, I think it would be a great improvement.
Which is almost what OS/2 did. You could have so called templates - when you double clicked them a new document based on the template would open. When you dragged and dropped them a new document would be created at the destination. A bit like the "New Printer" icon on windows.
Need you own Template. Easy: prepare a document with the desired content and then mark it as template. The mark would be added to the extended attributes of the document - no special extension needed - works with any application as the whole mechanism was provided by the Workplace Shell.
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.
The starting premise is that, even though everyone thinks Windows 7's taskbar is cloning the Dock, it's not. It then goes on for several pages explaining the history of Windows' document management. ...and that's it. Somehow, explaining the history of the taskbar for several pages is supposed to be enough to convince you that the Windows 7 taskbar is not a clone of the Dock, even though it tries to behave the same way as the Dock.
Seriously, there's no real explanation of any differences between the Windows 7 taskbar and the Dock. You're just supposed to accept that they're not the same because of the history of the Windows taskbar that was given over the last several pages.
I don't get it.