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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!
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.
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.
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!
We arrived at the pretty much same place after starting somewhere else, so that makes it very, very, very, very different. Very.
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.
Windows has a recycling bin but Apple still has trash.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
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.
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.
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