I've been bitching about the OSX dock for ages, as it's a horrible, horrible bit of combo UI.
It's a taskbar! It's a program lancher! An icon on the dock can represent a running app, or an app that you might want to run. STUPID.
That said, after a few months of running Windows 7, I've come to like the identical functionality in Windows 7's new task bar. So, I still think the UI is a terrible design, but as someone who knows why I put those icons there, I'm never confused about what's running.
Surely a few Mac users are also smart enough to know which icons are launchers and which are tasks as well.
What makes me laugh is how many docks sprang up to fulfill the Linux crowd's need to simulate Macs and all of their terrible UI decisions. I can choose from Simdock, Gdesklets dock, Kiba Dock, AWN, Cairo Dock, Wbar, Docky, and many more. Some look and act just like Mac's dock, gel buttons, reflections, table perch, et al.
I could tell if an item in the dock was an open program as there would be a little blue LED-like light below it. However, sometimes I'd go way up to File->Quit at the top left corner of the screen and the blue light would simply wink out beneath the icon, and other times the entire entry would disappear from the dock. Being new to mom's machine meant finding programs of the second group to reopen them was a bit like an Easter egg hunt using sonar out in the open ocean.
At least it's sharpening your mind. I read somewhere that terrible UIs keep minds quick and healthy.
This is a very long post. Some of these things are serious UI problems that come from the metaphor shear between the classic Mac metaphor and OSX, which screwed the pooch. I don't like the dock either
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This is a long list of complaints, and I'll be honest, I didn't read them all. That being said, for most of those that I read, there are easy to use functions that mitigate the frustrations you experienced. Any UI will have a learning curve that deviates from the expectations set by the UI you're familiar with.
You might be right. It just feels like all the defaults are really wrong - not arbitrarily, but in ways that using them in the way they are designed requires a lot more work than the defaults on other systems. Also, though I'm not a world-class Mac-user-watcher, I've watched a fair number of people who are on Macs often enough - friends, coworkers, family - and they're never remotely as fast as I am on my OS; there's a lot of rolling the mouse all around trying to accomplish the next thing. I'd love to see a real power user on a Mac and see if and how it's possible for them to fly through operations and multitask with great efficiency.
In the end, it may simply be that the OS I'm on has defaults that make sense to me for the most part. That said, I'm the guy who decided one day that vim made a whole lot of sense, so my opinions are perhaps a bit suspect.
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Thank you.
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clicking on finder in the dock just shows you the finder that's open, instead of giving you a new finder window
This is a really annoying feature of Windows 7 too.
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It's a taskbar! It's a program lancher! An icon on the dock can represent a running app, or an app that you might want to run. STUPID.
That said, after a few months of running Windows 7, I've come to like the identical functionality in Windows 7's new task bar. So, I still think the UI is a terrible design, but as someone who knows why I put those icons there, I'm never confused about what's running.
Surely a few Mac users are also smart enough to know which icons are launchers and which are tasks as well.
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I could tell if an item in the dock was an open program as there would be a little blue LED-like light below it. However, sometimes I'd go way up to File->Quit at the top left corner of the screen and the blue light would simply wink out beneath the icon, and other times the entire entry would disappear from the dock. Being new to mom's machine meant finding programs of the second group to reopen them was a bit like an Easter egg hunt using sonar out in the open ocean.
At least it's sharpening your mind. I read somewhere that terrible UIs keep minds quick and healthy.
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In the end, it may simply be that the OS I'm on has defaults that make sense to me for the most part. That said, I'm the guy who decided one day that vim made a whole lot of sense, so my opinions are perhaps a bit suspect.
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