Re: The Dock through the years

Woody <usenet@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Rowland McDonnell <real-address-in-sig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Woody <usenet@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Rowland McDonnell <real-address-in-sig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

[snip]

I've got the killer rabbit icon snaffled out of whatever system file
lurking around somewhere. Mind you, I've got System 6 and the Macs to
run it somewhere.

I never ran system 6. Apart from some early game, it was 7.0.2 for me.

7.*0*.2? Really? 7.1.2, I've heard of. 7.0 and 7.0.1 and 7.1 yes -
but 7.0.2?

But I've not been able to get out of the house for
some days so - oh, one day I'll play with the old kit... I've some
things I'd like to do before I die. Gloomy day.

Some things everyone wants to do. Although not the same things.

Most people have the ability to do something. Most days, I can't even
leave the house.

and some of them
were just better anyway as they needed more thought.

How do you mean?

Few pixels, fewer colours, you had to represent an idea or concept,
rather than a picture of something.

Ah - that side of things.

[snip]

The launcher - it is either in the way of what you want to do, or
if it isn't, then you need to find it again.

I don't quite understand your point here. It's either in the way,
or it's just behind what you're working just *there* where it always
is and you can get to it (well, I could) usually with a single
`boff' of the mouse on something.

If it is under one thing, or if it is sticking out then yes, but after
a few windows, something is going to sit on top of it and then you
have to dig it out.

Not if you keep an edge clear - and even if you don't quite manage it,
you know which edge you had been meaning to keep clear so there's
probably only one thing to shift. And apps could be hidden even back
then, couldn't they?

I think so.

I've recalled the UI details - I'm sure of it. I now recall the trouble
I had getting the hang of moving to the left in order to hide apps under
OS X, 'cos it's on the right with previous versions.

Anyway, I did hide apps a lot to keep things clear. Had to, now I
recall - no screen space to spare at all when it's 640x480.

The dock is a list - but it's a lot larger than a text menu so it's more
work to traverse, you don't know where your target is going to be so
it's more brain work to use and slower because your `mousing towards the
dock' can't veer towards the end of the dock you might need until you
get to see the damned thing when it pops up, whereupon it's hard to
idenfity the target, and you don't get to see the actual names of the
things on the list unless you hold the mouse over them!

True, but for switching applications I would hit cmd-tab anyway.

That didn't work with early versions of OS X. The dock was what you
were supposed to use for all of it - launcher, app switcher, the lot.

Surely that's got to be harder to use than a pull-down text menu? Why
move your mouse to a hard-to-use graphical list when you could use
something that's easier to use?

I don't find it easier to use than pulling down a list, which is the
same but you also have to open the list before you can even look, and as
you said earlier, adobe applications don't appear as their name, but as
adobe <whatever> and I am not looking for that.
However, the icon stands out easier.

Hmm. I find that icons don't stand out these days. Icon+text is what I
like.

But text-only menus - well, I can work with them very efficiently. If
I've got a set of apps open, well, I know where any given app is likely
to appear in an alphabetical list. I might look for `Acrobat' (not that
I've got it) but I'd find it if it appeared as `Adobe Acrobat' - 'cos
it'd be in pretty much the same alphabetical position in the list and I
can read words at a glance - I can identify the word `Acrobat' on screen
in a list *enormously* faster than I can work out which one of a set of
icons is supposed to represent that app (or whatever). Figuring out
icons is a very slow job with modern computer icons unless you've taken
the trouble to sit down and learn to recognise all the ones you're
interested in and I'm damned if I'm doing that.

I can't see any straightforward way of learning to distinguish readily
between (say) BBEdit's icon and Mailsmith's to take one specific problem
example. And far too many OS X icons are just vague circular things
that don't convey any meaning at all unless you blow them up to a huge
size and you can see what the designer was up to. But such icons are
useless for anything but `being pretty'.

I'm trying to understand, you see.

I think I am better at icons and worse at text than you.

I don't think that's quite it. I think that I just don't get on with
icons stripped of their text labels. I use `icon+text' as you use
`icon'. Well, tiny little arbitrary pictures that I don't often see
mean very little to me. And they are tiny when on the dock (so it's
impossible to make out any details) and very arbitrary by design if it's
a modern icon - what the hell is the Firefox icon supposed to be, eh?
Okay, you can see what's going on when it's made very large, but looking
in my dock I see a circle of orange and blue. Means nothing at all to
my mind, nothing at all.

It's nothing like hunting down a particular icon on the
dock.

Fair enough - a choice thing.

More of a `what works for me' thing. It's not arbitrary - it's
functional. I don't really have a choice given what works for me and
what doesn't.

Presumably though there are orders of working.

Eh?

I mean I could use a
launcher. I did before. I just find a different way easier, so it is a
choice.

I don't see it as much of a choice, what I do. I don't see that I could
work at all effectively unless I had things set up efficiently-for-me.

I prefer the dock to a launcher thing, but
i prefer the keyboard way to all the others.

In which case, you are clearly a depraved pervert and there is no hope
for you, is there? ;-)

I doubt it, but hope is overrated!

Oh aye - hope being my mother's maiden surname. Very over-rated. Of
course she got called `hopeless' at school. God knows why - the way she
relates the matter, it upset her terribly, and she'd *eventually* take
it out on her tormentors, all of whom got beaten to a pulp every time,
'cos she was so much bigger and stronger than pretty much everyone else.

Rowland.

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