Tog Takes on Mac OS X 10.3 670
Rick Zeman writes "Bruce 'Tog' Tognazzini, founder of Apple's Human Interface Group years ago, has finally pointed his electrons to Mac OS X 10.3. He's been dormant for while, and hasn't said anything since the early days of Mac OS X. His new articles include 'Panther: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly' and 'The Top Nine Reasons why the Dock Sucks,' all coming from A Guy Who Knows."
Finder (Score:1, Informative)
Mirror (Score:5, Informative)
Dock (Score:4, Informative)
But for the most part he is right. All documents look the same, no tagging, trash can in the dock, dragging from the dock erases what you drag. It's dangerous.
I don't agree with the dock taking too much space. If you make it the smallest you can still make out what programs are which.
Plus, if the dock bothers you so much, HIDE it
Re:Two simple changes to improve the dock (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Dock (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Two simple changes to improve the dock (Score:2, Informative)
WindowShade Rocks (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.unsanity.com/haxies/wsx/
Actually, these guys make a lot of cool, useful little app's, but WindowShade's "minimize in place" is wonderful. When you click on the 'minimize' control for a window, it's minimized down to an icon. But unlike the dock it's minimized right where the window was, so you can arrange the icons yourself. Also, the icon is a live version of the document's contents (so you can see a progress bar's progress, differentiate between two different Photoshop images, etc.) and has the application icon superimposed (so you know what kind of window it is). Apple should at least use these icons in the Dock.
Tog's solution to Dock problems worth checking out (Score:4, Informative)
From an Old Mac User (Score:4, Informative)
1. I have to agree that the open and save dialogs are a bit obstrusive, I remember being able to move around the open and save dialog to see what was going on behind it at times. Now when I get an ICQ add request I can't see the request because the dialog box is sticking in the way. Perhaps Apple needs to implent ment a "Rip" button that gives you the option of ripping the dialog box off the window on a case by case basis.
2. I disagree with the trash can issue. I like it in the Dock and find it pretty usefull there. Not to mention the fact that I just rather hit apple+delete to trash things anyway.
3. Ok, so the UI is differant, but honestly I think it is the best one that apple has designed since I have used the mac. They removed a lot of the issues that plagued it in it's infancy. I love the single window option and I have not had an issue with screen density at all. Quite frankly I think the new finder is the most functional they have had since 7.5 (yeah it's flame bait but II loved 7.5). It provides everything that you would want to access quickly right there for you with minimal problems. Yeah things may be bigger, but I like that.
Re:Two simple changes to improve the dock (Score:5, Informative)
When items get added to it... something's got to give. You either need to make the items smaller or show less image data. Apple chose the wiser of the two options before it. The ability to lock the dock would be a step backwards IMHO.
"For the OS X dock this would be a good feature beacuse it is easy to accidentally remove programs from the dock by slightly dragging the mouse when you double click"
You don't double click items in the dock to launch/activate them. Its all single-click. Second, you have to drag an item relatively far outside the dock to remove it. If you slightly move it... (as per your analogy) the item snaps back to its origional position.
"and it is easy to change the size of the dock by accidentally dragging the mouse on the border."
You don't resize the dock by dragging the mouse on its border. You have to command-click the line-seperator and drag... (a combination you wouldn't be using otherwise when at the dock and so it makes the chance of accidentally re-sizing the dock almost impossible.
Article text (Score:3, Informative)
Apple Sales is in love with the Dock. You can't go into an Apple store without seeing it splayed across the bottom of the screen, in the very configuration least conducive to computing on a Macintosh. Why? Because it's sexy and it sells. It makes that bright, shiny new Apple look simple, approachable, and beautiful. It makes for a great demo.
The problem does not lie with the Dock itself?if it makes a great demo, leave it in?but with Apple's apparent belief that it is a complete solution. The Dock is akin to a brightly-colored set of children's blocks, ideal for your first words?dog, cat, run, Spot, run?but not too effective for displaying the contents of War and Peace.
Contrary to my previously-held position, I no longer believe Apple should get rid of the Dock. It's just too pretty there in the store, and it does help set Mac apart from the more utilitarian appearance of Windows (although Windows grows more attractive with every release). You want that in sales. You want a visibly-apparent manifestation of the personality of the underlying technology. That's why automakers spend milliions making the outside of the car project an image of what's underneath the skin.
A certain class of Apple users?those who check their email once or twice a week and sometimes need to print an attached photo?may need nothing more than the Dock.
The rest of us need more powerful tools, so, Apple, leave the Dock as the smashing demo it is, but also supply some serious, information-dense tools. You have the talent and wherewithal to make such tools as attractive as the Dock if only you will cease seeing this one single object as a complete solution.
Apple has made a few improvements to the Dock in the last three years. Items no longer jump around seemingly at random, although the size of the Dock continues to "wheeze" in and out without user control.. Items alsoi act like buttons, so clicking anywhere within their confines will open them. Apple also quickly gave us the ability to turn off magnification, a major improvement in day-to-day usability.
The other good news is that independent solutions now exist for getting around every limitation of the Dock. Read Make Your Mac a Monster Machine to learn how to turn your Mac into a high-productivity, but still fun workhorse. Meanwhile, here are eight continuing problems with the Dock, plus a new one, a decided lack of color. Most of these are inherent, and the solution is more and varied tools. A few can be directly addressed by design tweaks.
9. The Dock is big and clumsy
The Dock by default sucks up around 70 pixels square minimum, more than four times as much vertical space as either the Windows task bar or the Macintosh menu bar. (Yes, you can set it much smaller, but then you make it progressively more difficult to identify an icon without "scrubbing" the screen with your mouse to reveal its label.) Couple that with Apple's move to 16:9 wide screens (read: short screens), and you have a real problem. For good measure, add in the Dock's habit of floating on top of working windows, and you have little choice but to hide it.
8. Identical icons look identical
This was originally entitled "Identical pictures look identical." I pointed out that the Dock's use of thumnails in small sizes made all normal text documents look pretty much alike. Apple has now dumped thumbnails in return for identical icons. My original advice still holds: "We need information on data types, file sizes (as represented by the thickness of the icon), age, etc." They've now given us data type. We need more?any attribute that can help differentiate one object from another.
The better solution to this and many of these other limitations is to supplant the Dock with additional objects that are designed for representing groups of non-application objects, so that people aren't even attempting to put folders and documents in this already overloaded single object.
Re:Finder (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Finder (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Two simple changes to improve the dock (Score:4, Informative)
To be pedantic, while XP's 'resizing' is worse than OS X's IMO, OS X icons are not vector based. They simply have multiple sizes of graphics and choose the next-largest size and scale it down. It's still bitmaps.
SGI's IRIX is vector based. OS X is not.
Re:Two simple changes to improve the dock (Score:5, Informative)
defaults write com.apple.dock pinning end
defaults write com.apple.dock orientation right
Then restart the Dock. Enjoy!
Re:Two simple changes to improve the dock (Score:3, Informative)
Just to be picky, a regular click and drag on the line-seperator is enough to resize the dock. At least that's the way it works for me...
Re:Two simple changes to improve the dock (Score:2, Informative)
You are wrong twice in that one sentence.
1. It's not an easy mistake to make, you need to drag icons fully off of and away from the dock to remove them.
2. It's not an irreversable mistake. Just open the Applications folder and drag the icon of the app in question back onto the dock. Done.
Re:Two simple changes to improve the dock (Score:3, Informative)
One thing he COMPLETELY missed (Score:2, Informative)
Everyone who knew the simplest thing about OS9 knew you could customise the Apple Menu to hold cascading menues of applications, files etc, and the OSx Apple Menu completely sucks in that regard.
Luckily, the fine folks at Unsanity also figured that out, and wrote a Haxie that I recommend:
Fruit Menu [unsanity.com]
With Fruit Menu I can develop quick and easy ways to get at any range of apps and documents and folders without resorting to the idiocy of the Dock.
I find it odd that Tog missed that. Oh well, that's why /. was invented, I suppose.
RS
If GWB is re-elected there is a 50-50 chance there won't be an election in 2008.
Re:They should've never been let go (Score:3, Informative)
a) create a Folder of Aliases to your Apps (you can also do subfolders), then drag that Folder to your Dock; a right-click reveals the hierarchy; downside: manual adding.
b) use a utility like LaunchBar [obdev.at] or AnotherLauncher [petermaurer.de] that enables you to get to Apps (or anything else for that matter) with a couple of keys.
2) This is what the new Expose [apple.com] feature in Panther is designed to do. Pretty spiffy.
DragThing, more or less? (Score:3, Informative)
The chooser in classic Mac OS wasn't "like a start menu." The "Apple Menu" was what the start menu was cribbed from. The chooser was on it, but you used it to "choose" your printer and to mount network drives, and that was it.
You could try dropping an alias (or the originals) for all these things you want to categorize into some sort of folder structure, organized as you like it, and then put the top level folder on the dock. Right-(or option-) click on the dock item, you get your menu. Hoop-de-doo. For a big set of documents, it'd be just fine. Most people seem to have their Apps folder this way, don't they?
If you want something that's sort of a combo of the dock behavior and the menus you say you want, I personally think DragThing is a decent choice. Dragthing also includes a process dock that shows you open apps at all times.
(As far as "Windows does this by shoving every window title into the taskbar," well, no, it doesn't for me. On W2k, here, individual Apps behave differently. DreamWeaver pre-MX showed every open page as a task bar icon; from MX on it's just got one item on the bar at all times. Sometimes Windows will open several instances of a given app on me, depending on how I chose the documents I wanted to open. Highly idiosyncratic behavior for a very basic function.)
Re:One thing Panther gets right... (Score:5, Informative)
I run Windows XP, and almost everything I do is done via a command. Create a folder called c:\shortcuts. Copy shortcuts to your favorite apps, vbscripts, whatever to this folder and name them whatever you want. Add C:\shortcuts to your PATH env variable. Now all I do is hit Windows+R (Same as start run), type in my new command, and hit enter. What used to take many seconds of menus, right mouse clicks, and options, now takes less than 2 seconds. I want to start Microsoft Word, I type "word". If I want to start iTunes, I type "itunes". If I want to start device manager and connect to a remote machine, I type "mg computername".
Not all Windows users are GUI freaks...some of us are pretty proficient with our workstations without the pretty pictures.
Re:From an Old Mac User (Score:3, Informative)
Perhaps there should be a way to make it easier to see the work you're doing underneath the dialogue with something to make it transparent for a few seconds, but I think the benefit of never losing one of those stupid panels far outweighs the minor benefit of seeing work that I'm saving (why would I do that, exactly?)
Re:Two simple changes to improve the dock (Score:5, Informative)
Re:You did what? (Score:2, Informative)
> You actually swiched OS's because of the Dock? Seriously? I'm impressed.
I'm not surprised. I, too, have been reluctant to make the switch because I find the dock horrible. Fortunately, I can get the application menu back with little effort [unsanity.com], but the dock is still lame. To each his own I guess.
TIP: Drag using the command key (Score:5, Informative)
The trash stays where it is, need a haxie for getting it on the desktop.
Re:What about 2-3 Button mice? (Score:5, Informative)
Middle-button text editing, a popular staple of Linux geeks, is not present, but the drag & drop features are powerful enough that you will never miss it, once you get used to the new OS.
Safari's hidden feature imports bookmarks! (Score:5, Informative)
There's a hidden Safari feature which allows you to import bookmarks
Type the following command in Terminal (while Safari is NOT running):
Quit Safari. Enter the following command in Terminal
defaults write com.apple.safari IncludeDebugMenu 1
Launch Safari -- you'll have a Debug menu added to the application's bar. Amongst the Debug menu options are two ways to import bookmarks.
To get rid of Debug, quit Safari and enter the following command in Terminal
defaults write com.apple.safari IncludeDebugMenu 0
Re:Finder (Score:3, Informative)
You can turn off the sidebar.
Importing bookmarks into Safari ... (Score:2, Informative)
defaults write com.apple.safari IncludeDebugMenu 1
Launch Safari -- you'll have a Debug menu added to the application's bar. Amongst the Debug menu options are two ways to import bookmarks. To get rid of Debug, quit Safari and enter the following command in Terminal
defaults write com.apple.safari IncludeDebugMenu 0
Re:Two simple changes to improve the dock (Score:3, Informative)
Share your Dock on steroids stories (Score:3, Informative)
I'll start: I immediately drag my Home, Applications folder and Utilities folder to the right side. There, just about anything I need to browse to in a hurry. One click = the window in question, click-hold-for-a-second and you can navigate a popup menu.
Then there's the fun stuff like guages and my RSS-eater, or a weather monitor.
I pin mine to the bottom right side to make up for my crusty old system 1.0 user muscle memory fixation on the trash. But then, as so many people note, command delete (and Cmd-Z!!) is what I use anyway.
Your turn.
Re:One thing Panther gets right... (Score:1, Informative)
me? my desktop is vim.
Re:Finder (Score:1, Informative)
Apple purchased emagic last year.
They've actually cleaned up the look a bit -- and if you've ever used Logic, you know that this is a Very Good Thing. Logic's look and UI dates from its origins on the Amiga!
I can only hope that Apple now has the nice emagic engineers busy updating the look of Logic itself.
Application menu (Score:2, Informative)
try this: drag your Applications folder to the document area of the dock. now you have an application menu! (right-click or click-and-hold)
was that so hard? i tend to keep my home directory there too, so i can access my apps & files in a similar fashion.
As far as I'm concerned, replacing two UI gadgets with one isn't a blunder -- it's efficency. (really, its 3 widgets -- because it's more like Launcher than anything else) you now have one device that keeps track of your processes, using the same icons you use to launch frequently used programs. programs you use less frequently you can launch from the aforementioned in-dock applications folder.
Re:Two simple changes to improve the dock (Score:1, Informative)
Anxious to show off OS X to an old Unix hand, I opened up my TiBook, launched terminal, and started banging away. "See," I said, "it's UNIX, with a beautiful UI."
"Can I see?" he asked.
"Sure," I said proudly, and handed him my TiBook.
"What's this?" he asked, pointing to the dock.
"It's a dock, for quick-launching applications," I replied.
"Oh," he said, and promptly drug an icon out of the dock and let go. **P*O*O*F** I was agahst. "What was that?" he asked?
"Well, you just removed an application from my dock, " I said, grabbing my TiBook back. "Which one did you delete?"
"I dunno," he said, "the icon looked cool."
"No problem, I'll just Undo...nope...shit," I said, as I scanned the dock, trying to figure out which icon was missing. "Right. Undo doesn't work because the dock is a standalone app without a menu bar, and Undo applies to the front application..."
But my friend was already snickering. "Hum...pretty...I guess," he said, and walked away.
Apple, please lock the dock.
Thank you.
Re:Two simple changes to improve the dock (Score:3, Informative)
You actually need to restart Finder. Hit cmd-opt-esc to bring up the "force quit" panel. Choose Finder, and the button changes from "Force Quit" to "Relaunch".
Re:If the dock had been introduced back in the day (Score:2, Informative)
keyboard changes (Score:2, Informative)
Re:OS X (& The Dock) Lovers (Score:2, Informative)
Tell them:
1-go to any finder window
2-click on "computer" or your home directory depending on the depth of your search
3-locate the "search" textbox in the top right corner of your finder window
4-type the name or part of the name of the file you are looking for, result will appear in realtime so its not long
5-double-click on the item you want to open or drag it where you want it to be or do whatever you wish with it
Re:Two simple changes to improve the dock (Score:1, Informative)
correction: iPhoto (Score:2, Informative)
iPhoto manages the files in ~/Pictures/iPhoto/... it copies new images there (whether you import them from HD or camera) and arranges them in folders (
Re:Application menu (Score:2, Informative)