Re: Is the Windows task bar usable?


Addle Jones wrote:
James Davis wrote:
Let me clarify my exact point. When you have 10 tabs at the bottom in
Windows 2000 Professional

- The tabs are not tall enough. They are taller in XP
- The icon for the program is too small to really register in your mind
like the stuff in the Dock. I had to keep the screen at 1280x1024 as a
lower resolution wasn't usable when switching between 4 or 5 windows
that I needed to see everything in.
- The four different IE windows I believe just said "Administration" or
some general thing. If they had said like "DreamWeaver FAQ", they
would have been more recognizable.

These factors combined just made it impossible to quickly move between
several tabs.

Oh, and another annoyance was that there didn't seem to be a way to
arrange the order of the tabs at the bottom. I wanted to have the same
order, so I would open things in the same order. I would open my
customer database first. But if it crashed, I could not then get it to
be first again (left-most), without closing all the programs and
opening them in the proper order.

Here's the solution in XP:

Create a folder.

Place Aliases of the programs you wish to see in a Taskbar grouping
into this folder.

Right-click the Taskbar and select "Toolbars," and on that menu pick
"New Toolbar."

In the dialog that appears, select the folder you created, then click
"okay."

A tool bar will appear on your Taskbar, with all the icons from your
created folder in it. The tool bar will have the name of your folder.

Arrange the icons in any order you like by simply dragging them around.

Yes, it's surprising just how lame Microsoft can be in gui design. The
company has been trying to hone its gui for over 20 years now, and still
they botch basic stuff like the task bar. It's surprising that you
don't have complete control over the things you mention: size, position,
display, ... At least, if you do, it must be buried somewhere.

It was all just a right-click away.

There's an option for the task bar called something like "group similar
items." If you check it, the task bar puts all windows for a given app
next to each other, regardless of when they were opened. However, that
is only a marginally helpful. If the taskbar gets crowded enough, those
windows get collapsed into a single "drawer." I actually prefer having
the "drawer" all the time. It's much less clutter, and more intuitive.
Gnome offers that option, which is how the Mac does it as well, but I
don't think Windows has that option.

Right-click the Taskbar. Unclick "lock the taskbar." Put your
cursor at the top of the Taskbar so it changes into a double arrow.
Pull up to make the Taskbar larger vertically, until it's large enough
to display all icons.

I also don't know how to "pin" the windows in a predictable place. On
Mac, the items in your dock are permanently "pinned," and the others
can be moved and arranged as you like. OS/2 had a way of pinning and
arranging task bar items in its gui over 10 years ago. If fact, OS/2
had some really cool taskbar/dock kinds of things all the way back
then that I don't think any other system has even now. For instance,
you could have a multiple layouts of the dock and switch between them
instantly. So you could have a dock for programming, and a dock for
music, etc. By clicking in the right place, you could scroll through
them or choose the one you wanted, and you'd have something adapted to
how you were working at that moment. It was quite nice, and it came out
in 1994. Kind of sad, huh?

You can get what you want from XP buy combining the techniques I listed
above. Create toolbars as I described, each with their own unique
groupings of icons, which you can rearrange as you like, and make the
Taskbar tall enough to display everything.

[snip]

.

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