Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Software, Leopard, Developer
Leopard's Dock doesn't work on the side
Rogue Ameoba's got a legit complaint with the Dock in Leopard: it looks horrible sitting on the side. Personally, it's not really a concern for me, because I've never moved my Dock from the bottom of the screen (seems weird to have it on the side, like the workspace is off balance). But they're exactly right-- Leopard's "perspective Dock" just looks strange in the vertical. The icons seem to float in space, and the whole perspective looks weird.Of course, they have other problems with the Dock as well-- the reflections of the Desktop and the Windows happen in Leopard no matter where the Dock is, right? But yeah the angles that normally look like a shelf for the icons to sit on when the Dock is on the bottom of the screen look literally "off the wall" when the Dock is on the side.
With something like Cleardock, this is easily fixed. And we're still looking at a dev build of Leopard, so maybe Apple has a trick up its sleeve to fix it before release. But would you put the Dock on the side of your screen if it looked like this?
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 2 of 2)
Reg Muffet said 10:08PM on 8-30-2007
Maybe Apple could solve all differences of opinion with:
System Preference, Dock
. Dock Size: Small ------|------ Large
. Transparency: Faint ------|------ Opaque
. [√] Magnification:
. Position on screen: () Left (•) Bottom () Right
. Dock appearance: (•) 3D () Flat
. Minimize using: Genie Effect \/
. [√] Animate opening applications
. [ ] Automatically hide and show the Dock
Or something.
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Chris said 10:30PM on 8-30-2007
i keep my dock at the bottom, just cause i think it balances my macbook's screen well. it does take up a small portion of the vertical resolution, but i just think the dock belongs at the bottom. i have no problem with the apps i use either (camino, office, and cs3) they all fit pretty nicely.
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Marc Edwards said 10:55PM on 8-30-2007
I don't mind the icons being half on, half off. I don't mind the angle and reflection (kind nice actually). I don't mind the way it looks on the side of the screen. However... open apps are hard to see and there's 3 very out of place shadows. Nasty.
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iGO said 11:30PM on 8-30-2007
ALWAYS...Has been on the side in Tiger and will be on the side in Leopard. Set to the right and pinned to the lower right hand corner. My Garbage can is, in fact, at the very bottom right corner. Tiny dock (can't be but a half inch thick), no genie effect, no scaling effect. Perfect for me.
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Jon H said 12:45AM on 8-31-2007
The Dock doesn't bother me. What bothers me are the piles and the transparent menubar which makes the text and icons disappear if the desktop image is dark.
The thing about the piles I don't like is that it's impossible to distinguish them. You just see a pile of icons. Two folders of documents would be indistinguishable. And they just look sloppy. The pile representation gives me no useful information other than 'it's a folder', whereas actual folder icons can at least be customized. Also, when you pop the pile out, you apparently can't dig into folders that are there. You just get a Finder window for the folder.
On Tiger I have two Application folders (the main one and one in my home directory) in the Dock, along with /Developer and ~/Documents. I can right-click on the Developer folder icon, then work down the menus to the application I want. Leopard doesn't seem to do that. I'd much rather have a regular icon in the Dock, and a hierarchical menu view instead of a non-hierarchical grid of icons.
But a Vertical Dock doesn't bother me at all.
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jim said 1:18AM on 8-31-2007
@chewbee
cmd+opt+d
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skinny said 1:25AM on 8-31-2007
The tilted dock in Leopard looks like ass. So does the semitransparent menubar.
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Peter Koritschan said 4:26AM on 8-31-2007
I always put my dock on the side (left), as the widescreen display on my MPB17 offers more real estate on the side than on the bottom of the screen.
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Michel said 4:55AM on 8-31-2007
it's outrageously alienly ugly whackamoly ... hu.. no :)
seriously, it's not pretty
and yes, as others, I use my dock on the side of the screen (right for me, as nextstep of yore)
on a widescreen it's great. Vertical space is more precious than horizontal space.
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Michael said 5:35AM on 8-31-2007
I use clear dock and have set the back to clear and the pointer that shows open apps to red. As far as where I have my dock, it is generally at the bottom unless I am running an app that has controls near the bottom of the screen then I move the dock to the side. os 10.5 dock on the side does look out of place some what. Hopefully this will be addressed before the final version. Time will tell.
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Alex Speed said 5:29AM on 8-31-2007
"But would you put the Dock on the side of your screen if it looked like this"
Er, you are joking right. Of course - it's about getting things done. If it's the best place for it, then it's the best place for it.
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Ollivier Robert said 5:35AM on 8-31-2007
To be honest, I don't care much about the Dock,, I don't use it, being a Quicksilver fan... I'll look at Leopard's Dock when it is released but I don't expect to really change my way.
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Tim said 8:54AM on 8-31-2007
Give me a break! Somebody shoots out their opinion on how the dock looks and it gets posted as fact? And as big of an issue as it's made out to be, you'd think the world was off balance! Now I'm all about aesthetics and the overall experience, but this really doesn't bother me a bit. Let's keep in mind that for every 10 of us that thinks it's the worst catastrophe since the dogcow disappeared, there are, seriously, 10 of us who think it's awesome. Ok?
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The Jones Boy said 12:26PM on 8-31-2007
Left aligned for me - has been since OSX allowed it. Out of the way on my 30" display.
Apple's GUI tricks without sense are a mark of what they get wrong these days... ie not paying attention.
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Catt said 12:29PM on 8-31-2007
# 20 (Reg) is on to a good solution to the perceived problem. Apple should give the user a bit more customization options for the dock. You should be able to make it clear and flat if you want hide it if you want and move it wherever you want. I would add color and skinning too while we're on the subject.
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hoosiemama said 1:51PM on 8-31-2007
I'm really confused by the screen in general.
1) My Macintosh HD icon is hovering in the top right of the screen. It's just ... levitating there! Nothing supporting it. It freaks me out, why doesn't it have any supports under it? At least some scaffolding would ease my mind.
2) When I launch an application in the doc, it jumps! But what is it jumping off of? There's no ground there! It's just this gray little void. Definitely we need some kind of support for the icons.
3) The menu bar is stuck to the top of my screen despite no apparent use of glue, nails, or duct tape. It should come crashing down on top of the icons.
Clearly what we need is some kind of physically consistent layout where everything is just piled on top of each other. Let's put the menu bar on the bottom, the icons strewn appropriately on top of the menu bar, and the dock can delicately balance and simultaneously squeeze the icons (which to be physically correct, would crush ever so slightly due to their obviously light and floating properties).
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Mark Benson said 4:15PM on 8-31-2007
Well if like me you think it's horrible anyway I guess having it on the side, or the bottom of the screen makes little difference to just how horrible it really is. I'm gonna go on a 1 man mission to overhaul the Dock and Menu Bar in Leopard as soon as I get my hands on 10.5.0. I think given that the rest of Leopard looks so good they made a total mess of those two small but highly important parts - it's real shame - it stinks of change for the sake of change to me :(
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chewbee said 8:10PM on 8-31-2007
@jim: that hides it, but it still pops up with the mouse. I want to turn off the mouse activation. I want to mouse around my screen, using Pro Apps full screen, without the dock reappearing.
I can't believe you can't turn off the dock. annoying.
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MacLemon said 9:05AM on 9-01-2007
I've also had my dock positioned on the right hand side forever, pinned to the "end" position, so it locked in the lower right corner growing upwards. So the trash is in the place where it truly belongs to. I've set the size to the absolute minimum. I use a keyboard launcher to launch my apps and not the dock.
The Leopard Dock looks weird under any circumstance. The most annoying thing beeing it's own inconsistency within itself. It behaves differently when on the bottom and on the sides. It also takes up more pixel space on the bottom since the icons float higher than they do on the sides.
At least they have fixed the totally awkwardly wrong perspective of the Dock in the latest Leopard beta. Big improvement to it's overall appearance! Now Icons look "almost right" again. I hope I can turn it back into the Dock we're used to by now and get rid of the ridiculous and 100% CPU cycle wasting reflections as they server ab-so-lutely no purpose other than creating pixel gibberish containing no information to the user.
MacLemon
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joey Delli Gatti said 1:36AM on 10-12-2007
Here is a nice alternative I mocked up with PS: http://photobase.apn.gr/photobase/data/tmp_media/LeopardDockProposal_2.jpg
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