Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, OS, Leopard, Apple History
Sitting on the Dock every day
AppleInsider has a nice long preview of the new Leopard Dock, along with a short history going all the way back to a company called Acorn Computers, and the NeXT Dock (there's even some good, healthy Windows TaskBar bashing thrown in the mix).There isn't really anything new here, but it is a nice wrap up of everything we've seen about the Dock so far, including the new perspective that folks are so worked up about, and the idea of "stacks," special icons that will expand into a number of different icons. AppleInsider even runs down the default stacks provided with Leopard-- Applications, Documents and Downloads. I'm not sure how long those will last on my Leopard install, however-- I'm much more eager to make my own stacks and reorganize everything myself.
Very exciting. Unfortunately there's no mention of an update to how the vertical Dock looks, but Leopard is right around the corner, so we'll find out for sure very soon if Apple's new Dock lives up to expectations.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
tk2k said 8:44PM on 10-10-2007
It's still as ugly as it was in the early screenshots we saw. Trust me.
http://img65.imageshack.us/my.php?image=screenzh3.png
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tk2k said 8:47PM on 10-10-2007
although it is worth mentioning this, it does look a bit better in stacks
http://img128.imageshack.us/my.php?image=screen2ht9.png
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msd said 8:54PM on 10-10-2007
To be honest, the new Leopard UI seems really lacking. The dock's much more annoying to use now that Stacks has replaced the old folder menu feature, and making it shiny and getting rid of the arrows hasn't helped any either. And can someone please tell me the rationale for a semi-transparent menubar? What does that accomplish?
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Gareth Burleigh said 8:56PM on 10-10-2007
If its the same Acorn, we had Acorn Archimedes at my school. I was featured in the school calendar with Swatch Watch art made on the archimedes. Warm memories flooding back.
Gareth
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blinkcowz182 said 9:04PM on 10-10-2007
Looking at the Newton OS, it is interesting how many things were borrowed for the iPhone. The dock, a main page of icons to launch apps, and even the horizontal volume scroll bar. Cool stuff. And on topic, I'm excited for Leopard's more unified UI.
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Christopher Lloyd said 9:11PM on 10-10-2007
Apple should have thought this one through. There are numerous audio/video professionals who use the vertical dock because it gets out of the way of the transport. That being said I'm sure there will be a 3rd party app such as cleardock along in a couple of months.
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Rachel said 9:43PM on 10-10-2007
Gareth, it is the same Acorn; although for some reason they chose to display a screenshot not from RISC OS but from its precursor, Arthur, as installed on the first Archimedes machines to be released in 1987. (Rumours that "Arthur" stood for "A Risc operating system by THURsday" are entirely scurrilous. :-) )
Slightly fairer and more representative screenshots can be found here: http://www.guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/riscos37 although it could be prettied up better than that. It's really quite astonishing how much of what was in RISC OS (and *not* in Macs of that era) has found its way into Mac OS X - which is why I'm a Mac user now. I never liked Mac OS before X. (Before Panther in fact; the Powerbook my employer supplied me in the days of Jaguar spent most of its time running Gentoo Linux.)
The Dock, in particular, owes an *awful* lot more to the RISC OS Iconbar than is really acknowledged in that article, as you can see from those screenshots. You start an application, its icon appears in the iconbar; you click on the Menu button (middle button on mouse) and you get a menu giving info, quit, preferences and whatever else is appropriate, you click Select on it (left button) and it opens a new document window (if it's a document-type application) and so on...
I still miss a few user interface features, like the really ubiquitous drag and drop, including being able to transfer a file from one application to another literally by going to File->Save (or export if appropriate) and dragging the file icon in the save dialogue directly into the other application - even directly to the location in the destination document where you want it inserted - instead of to the Filer. I also liked the general utility of the Adjust mouse button (right button). For instance, with that you could click on a menu item, and it happens, and the menu stays open; similarly click on a dialogue box action button and the action happens, and the dialogue stays open. Use it to move or resize a window and the window stays in its position in the window stack; ie: doesn't come to the front, which lets you, say, move windows that are holding reference material around where you want them without shifting your keyboard input focus out of the window you're typing into.
And there's still no programmer's editor in the *world* quite like !Zap. :-)
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Jt Hollister said 9:59PM on 10-10-2007
I don't get what everyone's so worked up about...the side dock looks just fine. I don't see anything wrong with it at all...sure, it isn't "logical" in terms of physics, but who the hell cares? Like the article says, your desktop items are "floating" too, and it's not like the current dock is "logical" in terms of physics either. It's an interface. It's logical in terms of usage, and nothing is changing in that department.
Next item on the agenda: the transparent menu bar. Yes, what gives? Why waste precious processor power (or vRAM, or RAM, depending on how it's done) just for that? I don't really care if it's transparent or not.
That said, I love the new menu bar's look (as in the Apple and the design of it, not the transparency). And I also love the overall new UI feel.
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Alan said 10:03PM on 10-10-2007
I love the curved stacks... they're just so natural and organic. It's the little details like this that make me smile when using my computer.
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thirdeyeopen said 10:17PM on 10-10-2007
Stacks are completely useless without right-clickability, which they don't have. Lamest new feature in an otherwise awesome new OS.
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Simon Arch said 10:20PM on 10-10-2007
My only problem with the article is how he injects his personal opinion of the new and "improved" dock's critics into the proceedings. Uncalled for and unprofessional. And unlike a blog, that wasn't an op. ed. piece. It was supposed to be a history of the dock. He's certainly entitled to his opinions but they don't belong in that article.
He criticises critics by saying they're paying too much attention to details. I thought it was the attention to details that set Apple apart from Windows and Linux, but I guess I was wrong. I should settle for a visually unappealing product because the details are unimportant.
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Jt Hollister said 10:24PM on 10-10-2007
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention...the article itself was very poor for exactly the reasons Simon Arch pointed out. Still, the screenshots and historical part of things was nice to read.
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James said 10:24PM on 10-10-2007
The idea behind the transparent menu bar is this:
1) Aesthetic: allows your desktop picture to take up the full screen should you so want.
2) Use: It demands your attention less. The menubar is a place to go when you are looking for something, not something that should be demanding your attention with it's blazing whiteness otherwise.
3) Reduces screen burn in. Yes, it's not quite burn on LCDs (they just call it "stuck pixels" now, but the end result looks the same). Guess what the first part of a screen running OS X to "burn" will be: menu bar
I'm pretty sure a transparent menu bar isn't really using any more "precious processing power" than the rest of OS X: it's just setting a layer to be transparent, which OS X is doing all the time in various ways (like Expose). So please let that argument go.
One more thing: how will the new menubar affect hacked iPhones?
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Simon Arch said 11:13PM on 10-10-2007
re: the menubar
Well... I use Tiger pretty much all the time and I can't say its menubar with its "blazing whiteness" distracts me from being able to do anything.
And it doesn't matter how bright or dim something is - burn in is caused by something being exactly the same all the time (which the menu bar mostly is). The translucency of the menu bar isn't going to do a thing to prevent burn-in.
My sole criticism of the new menubar is this: With certain desktops (far too many of my favourites, sadly) it looks terrible. But it looks great with a lot of them, too, so... I'm on the fence with this UI tweak.
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Stuart Bell said 4:06AM on 10-11-2007
The irony about the Dock being a direct descendant of the icon-bar under RISC OS (and ARTHUR before that) is that to build RISC OS computers Acorn designed their own processors, initially Acorn Risc Machines. To distance themselves from the educational computers, ARM was re-designated to stand for 'Advanced Risc Machines' and hived off to a separate company. Then the CPU production side took off, Acorn became too small a player to compete with PCs and Macs, and almost all the value of Acorn as a company was its shareholding in ARM. With the take off of demand for high performance low power CPUs in mobiles/cell phones, ARM became a big player and was taken over.
The irony? That about 10 after I sadly gave up on Acorn RISC OS computers, my new iPod touch has at its heart an ARM processor. So, not only has Mac OS X taken loads of ideas from Acorn's software, the iPhone and iPod touch use versions of little Acorn's processors. yet Acorn is dead.
Stuat
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Jon H said 11:11AM on 10-11-2007
I hate stacks. I hate that you can't give a folder on the Dock a constant icon. Instead you get a munge of icons, the topmost of which changes depending on the contents of the folder and the sort order you've chosen. The icons on your Dock can change if a program saves a file in one of the folders. I hate that there is no longer a hierarchical menu that you can get into for each folder on the Dock.
Stacks might make sense for certain folders, but not for every folder on the Dock. They're slow in operation and uninformative in depiction.
And the transparency of the menubar needs to be configurable. Either that, or the text color of the menubar needs to be configurable. On dark backgrounds, the black menubar words and icons are barely distinguishable. That would not be a problem if you could turn down the transparency, or change the menubar's foreground color to something lighter and legible.
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Lars said 11:43AM on 10-11-2007
I just hope that there's some kind of classic mode (like, *gasp* Windows provides) when you don't like the changes.
Otherwise it's another waiting game for some kind of hack and we all know how anal Apple gets about those these days.
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Adam said 1:44PM on 10-11-2007
Stacks are no different philosophically than the "old way" that folders were on the dock. It's basically just reorganized. The default left click behavior now delivers something functionally identical to the old right click menu, which is fine with me. Right click now delivers some configuration options for the way that folder (stack) is displayed, and an Open menu item that will *gasp* open the window in Finder. I can still drag icons to it on the dock and they copy to it. It still acts like a folder in all the important ways, but now there are some fancy view options. It seems to me like they decided that the "menu" behavior was much more useful than the "open" behavior and swapped the mouse buttons accordingly. I happen to agree. The only thing I miss is the cascading folders in the menu, but it's about time I overcame that Windows-ism anyway.
In the end, the default behavior is for the neat organic stack to only happen if you have 7 or less files in the folder. Over 7 it turns into a grid that shows you up to 62 of the folder contents, and then over 62 items you get a button in the corner of the grid that opens the folder in Finder. It's really pretty intuitive. "Hey, I want something in that folder on the dock. I should click it." And then you likely see your thing. If not, you click the "See More" button. That's it. Not revolutionary, not a brain buster either, and the flashy is nice. The grid and stack expansion is pretty snappy, even on an aging Powerbook.
Besides the somewhat "off" floating look the Dock gets when you go vertical, you lose the organic curved stack thing as well, it's all grid all the time. You also lose reflections on the icons. In the end, and as an OSD (that's original side docker), I can still put the dock on the side and function, but it's clearly intended to stay on the bottom, and that's where most will people leave it.
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Fritz Laurel said 2:58PM on 10-11-2007
If there were one thing I could change about OS X, it would be to blast the dock into smithereenees and go back to my beloved Apple menu customizations of the previous OS 9.
It either takes up too much valuable screen real estate, or if you hide it, it keeps getting in the way by popping up when you don't want it. This whole UI thing of trying to interpret what a user is doing is horrendous and should never be done in a UI, IMHO.
With UI, Apple needs to stop listening to the Unix and Windows programmers it hired 10 years ago and start listening to the System 7-type psychologists it fired 15 years ago.
Again, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
Cheers,
FL
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Jon H said 3:07PM on 10-11-2007
""Hey, I want something in that folder on the dock. I should click it." And then you likely see your thing."
Folder? What folder? All you see on the dock is a messy pile of unintelligible icons.
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