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 Post subject: Slavishly Following the Insipid Apple Dock - Not Healthy?
PostPosted: Thu Jun 07, 2018 3:51 pm 
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Looking around at the few themes that are out there from the last few years, several things stick out. Most prominently, that everyone seems to be basing their NeXus docks on that ghastly, insipid MacOS dock. Is that really a healthy state of affairs? I don't think so. And it's very boring, too. To my way of thinking and working, a horizontal dock with half a dozen or so icons sitting near/at the top/bottom of the screen is a waste of valuable vertical screen estate, especially given the 16:9 widescreen format. And purely eye candy effects like reflections of icons etc. compound the waste. With so much screen space virtually going spare at the sides, a vertical dock makes far more sense and far better use of available screen estate.

There is - almost - nothing that can beat the ergonomics of the simple, original NeXT Workspace Dock. Only two things bettered this - a vertical shelf (which, in any orientation, was available in OPENSTEP 4a alpha as part of a new Experimental User Interface but never actually productised), and the Fiend third party Dock and Shelf available for NeXT. The Fiend dock was quite amazing in its flexibility - not only could you have it anywhere that suited you and drag app tiles from the dock and place them anywhere you liked (except in proximity to the Workspace Dock) in the Workspace, but it also offered any number of Virtual Workspaces, each capable of having its own different app tiles while you could also have 'sticky' or persistent app tiles that would be shown in all Workspaces. You could even have the app tiles wrapped around the Fiend tile if that took your fancy. And again, the shelf could be had in any orientation and was extremely flexible, with, as in Workshelf, different types of tabs available, which included, e.g., one that could display a console even.

While none of these were in any way skinnable and had no fancy effects, they were an object lesson in ergonomics. The Apple Dock, the successor if you can call it that of the Workspace Dock, by comparison is little more than a bit of eye candy. So why does anyone want to copy such a mindless design? It certainly is anything but healthy and in effect shows off NeXus as a piece of eye candy when it is and can do so much more.

One of the other things that stick out as one peruses recent (-ish) themes is, they very quickly come to look all very much the same. Everyone seems to follow a very similar formula, and stick with it rigidly. Distracting eye candy and possibly even more distracting walls totally dominate. All this amounts to poor design practice. I have seen very few signs of true originality and well thought out design. The execution might be perfect, but there's little behind it. This gets very tedious very quickly.

Myself, I generally start off with an original idea and then make some paper sketches of what I have in mind. Foremost for me anyway are ergonomics and productivity, so I tend to favour a fairly minimalist approach myself. After the sketches, I examine whether and how it's all doable, and then do a quick, rough mock-up on screen, i.e., in a GFX app. Then, if it passes muster in terms of ergonomics and productivity as well as aesthetics, and only then, comes the actual putting together of a theme And then comes a 'test drive' - I have to be able to live with that theme for a week or two or it gets binned.

It's not easy though not to be somewhat formulaic in the absence of a proper theme builder, I grant that.

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 Post subject: Re: Slavishly Following the Insipid Apple Dock - Not Healthy
PostPosted: Thu Jun 07, 2018 4:44 pm 
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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.

But the thing is, a dock is still pretty useful *and* it allows for some nice eye candy. Most people like candy.

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.

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.

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 Post subject: Re: Slavishly Following the Insipid Apple Dock - Not Healthy
PostPosted: Fri Jun 08, 2018 10:43 am 
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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.

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