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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
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 ~
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.
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.
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!
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.
How is it vaporware if it exists in beta form? I think you need to look up what that word means.
All your base are belong to Wii.
Is your monitor really that reflective, AC?