| Thursday, January 22, 2009 |
18:14 - He tasks me, and I shall have him
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/dock-and-windows-7-taskbar.ars
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Ars Technica takes a well-illustrated look at the new Windows 7 Taskbar and its conceptual—if not stylistic—similarities to the Mac OS X Dock.
On a superficial level, the similarity is obvious; both Dock and Taskbar are rows of large icons used for application launching and switching. Closer examination, however, reveals that there's a long way to go before anyone should worry that Microsoft is slavishly following Apple. The Windows UI isn't turning into the Mac OS X UI—not yet, at least.
Well, hell, it's been eight years since OS X and its Dock were new kids on the block. It ought to be clear that it's not just that it takes Microsoft that long to copy something that third parties had emulated within weeks. Nah, it couldn't be just that Microsoft is simply that desperate and out of touch.
As the article points out, there are still some very deeply rooted conceptual differences between the Dock and any incarnation of the Windows Taskbar. The thing that drives me batty about the Taskbar behavior that's been present since XP (and is now spit-shined in 7) is how after you get a certain number of windows in a given app, they all collect together under a single tile. This tends to happen when you're not paying attention, so when you've got your muscle memory trained to go to the taskbar to click on one window's tile, you find that in the intervening few minutes something happened that coalesced it up into another tile, and if you don't immediately recognize what's happened, you figure you closed it and open up another window. Which also gets sucked up under the coalesced tile. Only now do you figure out what happened, so you go digging into that tile to find your original window, but they all have the same label... etc, etc.
(My God, how MDI sucked... a band-aid meant to compensate for the Windows one-app-per-window metaphor and people's weird tendency to maximize each app to the size of the entire display. If you could just combine multiple applications into a single MDI, why, you'd have a little gray emulated Mac!)
These days we've all pretty much gotten used to the Dock, its shortcomings included. The things we used to get all fired up about, when Mac OS X was new, are all but forgotten. And in eight years, the Dock has hardly changed, except for some cosmetic tweaks here and there (which haven't all been for the better—I wouldn't be at all surprised if they ditch the dumb 3D "tray" effect in the next major release). If Microsoft wants to try to capture some of its secret sauce, they're welcome to try—by this point it's a metaphor as venerable as any other part of the "desktop" milieu was by the mid-90s, and that was all well understood to be fair game. Unfortunately for Microsoft, its long-standing (and for all intents and purposes immutable) policy of maintaining backward compatibility at all costs means that cosmetic tweaks are really all they can give their products too.
Via Chris.
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Brian Tiemann
