winstep wrote:
Well, Bruce Tognazzini, Apple's first Interaction Designer and the founder of the Apple Human Interface Group where he remained for 14 years, completely agrees with you that the Apple Dock sucks.
So much so that he wrote
an article explaining 10 reasons why.
I vaguely remember that article, and good to revisit it, and although now somewhat dated it still remains valid.
winstep wrote:
But the thing is, a dock is still pretty useful *and* it allows for some nice eye candy. Most people like candy.
Sure, it has its uses - primarily, as an app launcher. (And, under NeXT, it also supplied the equivalent of a very sophisticated tasklist.) (And Microsoft liked the concept so much they licensed it and turned it into the taskbar and start menu.) And that's how it should be used. It's what it is best at. Anything other than apps (apart from the odd inf-intensive module perhaps and the trash at its end) should have no place on it. Certainly not folders, let alone documents. We have the shelf and NextSTART for that kind of thing. A dock is a bit like a d*ck - a fine thing to have if you have one that has its uses, but you don't go around dressing it up (too much anyway, in the case of the former) and waving it in people's faces.
winstep wrote:
I started with the Shelf, if you remember, which I always thought to be much superior to a dock in terms of usability - but users still cried out for docks and for Nexus to finally make an appearance. In retrospective, taking so long to come up with Nexus really hurt Winstep at the time. So yes, eye candy sells.
Remember it very well indeed Jorge, and totally agree it's far superior to a dock in terms of usability and, versatility and sheer power. Alas, I well remember the clamour for a dock in those days - when so many docks had already pretty much fallen by the wayside due to lack of support. (NeXT clearly saw the shelf as a more useful replacement for the dock as demonstrated in the 4a beta but didn't bother in the end because the deal to bail out the ailing dark side was already on the horizon.) And I can see that delaying the dock (ISTR it already had its name - NeXus - and a graphical mock-up quite early on) at a time when skinning and eye candy where at their height must have hurt sales then. Sure, eye candy still sells, but that is now clearly a very diminished market while productivity is a largely untapped market for Winstep. And no mistake about it, it can be an extremely useful and powerful productivity aid/tool. The multiple shelves will enhance productivity even more. Not so much in having more than one shelf (personally, I doubt I can see any benefit in hving more than one) but in being able to have a vertical shelf sitting on one side, where there is (with the 16:9 screen format anyway) lots of space available.
winstep wrote:
As for themes, it was always very difficult to find great skinners and even in it's heyday you could count such people by the fingers of one hand. Others are good skinners but they sacrifice originality in favor of number of themes produced, which cause most of their themes to be variations of the same basic configuration, like a sausage factory.
The make matters worse the good skinners were spread out thin over all the different skinnable applications.
Because skinning is so much about eye candy, there is also the temptation to go overboard - and that is definitely not what you want in a theme if you are more productivity oriented than eye candy oriented.
Again Jorge, have to agree with you on all points there. Some of the best in those days actually seemed to start out with some sort of proper design concept, which is exactly my own approach as described above. Going overboard is definitely not a good thing all round.