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June 21, 2007

apple

Leopard’s Dock: Finally out of the way

Posted Jun. 21, ’07, 1:44 PM PT by Pat Nakajima
Category | Apple

I’m the sort of fellow who will talk about interface design for hours on end, and I’ll rip apart any design that I believe to be sub-standard in even the slightest regard. In other words, I’m a snob. But a recent post from Watching Apple has me batting for the other team. A rare occasion for sure, though probably helped by the fact that the post was criticizing an interface design created by Apple.

The ruckus was caused by Apple decision to lay Leopard’s Dock flat, with icons seemingly floating above it, or as Derik described it on our most recent podcast at 4 minutes, 25 seconds, “I feel like it’s almost serving food to me1.”

Watching Apple’s stance on the interface is that Apple has made the elementary designer’s mistake of mixing viewing angles in a pseudo-3D interface, which is the same thing as opening a file in Photoshop, creating two shapes, and have their shadows facing each other. The illusion of depth is broken.

Except in this instance. If anybody knows how to do the pseudo-3D interface, it’s Apple, who arguably introduced a pseudo-4D interface by asserting that the interface was “lick-able.” By laying the dock on its back, Apple’s interface designers have removed it from the foreground. This frees up your eyes to focus on the application you’re working on, which is angled at a dead perpendicular angle to you. It brings you closer to your work, and diminishes the negative effects of omnipresent navigation.

1 Thus unleashing a bevy of puns from the part of my brain that thinks of puns to the part that thinks they’re funny. Samples included such gems as “Almost Butler-esque?” and “Talk about Delicious Library!” Fortunately for the sake of the podcast, I refrained from blurting them out.


7 Comments

Dana Sutton said:

(I bet within two weeks of Leopard's release somebody will release a hack that disables this feature and I for one will be happy to apply it). The real annoyance with the Dock is that if you have it in Hide Dock mode and then if you happen to graze the bottom of your screen with your cursor accidentally for even a millisecond, up it comes. Much better for Apple to revise this "hair trigger" effect so that the cursor has to remain in contact with the bottom of the screen for an appreciable amount of time (a second, say) before the Dock can appear.

June 21, 2007 3:39 PM
Jack said:

While there are lots of thngs I'm bitching about in the current screenshots of Leopard, the dock is not one of them. In fact the current dock, from a pseudo-3D perspective (pun for you), doesn't work. When you have Windows trying to look like they are floating, and they are to near to the piece of scotch tape that is now the dock, all perspective gets flushed down the crapper (his "gravity"?) It needed to be knocked over. Now did they do a good job knocking it over? I don't know, but I like the dock, and I think I'll like it more now. But don't get me started on whatever intern designed the folder icons...

June 21, 2007 4:09 PM
Melangell said:

I use a hack to remove the opaque background of the dock so that my dock icons "float". This new way of viewing the dock is a step (major) backwards for me. Hopefully someone will find a way to get rid of it.

June 21, 2007 7:08 PM
Gedeon said:

Sorry, but I have to say that you guys are wrong on this analysis 100%. There is very little about Leopard's dock that is done well. It wastes precious desktop space (check the distance from the bottom of the screen to the bottom edge of icons), it creates multiple, dynamic shadows that fight with shadows already present in icons (making them heavy and clumsy), it only works semi-well when anchored on the bottom, and the dynamic reflections are gratuitous web 2.0 eye candy. Put Panic's Transmit icon in Leopard's Dock and tell me it looks good. Really.

It's obvious it was tossed in at the last minute and it shows. I have faith that Apple will improve it before October, so I'm not too worried, but if you think this is an improvement over the current Dock, I really can't help you.

June 22, 2007 6:45 AM
iNuron said:

I've been browsing through the vids and pictures of the new dock cause I'm curious in what direction it will disappear: will it just move down (then the perspective of the doc should change a little) will it move towards you? like when an app opens?

I love the stacks, that's extra functionality, but the 3D thing just looks weird to me. Look at the position of the (barely visible) blue dots in front of active apps. They'r not positioned according to rules of perspective. Look at the iTunes logo. The CD is tilted backwards, shouldn't you see the bottom of the CD when reflected instead of the upside-down+alpha version of the logo? Where does the dropshadow around icons drop on , thin air ? It's just another layer of eye-candy on top of already effects laden iconset IMHO. If you want to do 3D, make 3D icons. The current ones just aren't suited.

June 22, 2007 9:02 AM
James Lee said:

There is much more Apple could with the Dock. To start, I would like to see more flexibility in the dock. For instance, there are times I want to see the whole thing. When I am on a large screen I don't mind at all. But when I am traveling and using a portable the real estate is more precious.

How about a “partly auto-hide” feature, showing (maybe) just the top tips of the icons? Perhaps an option to have them (just the one I approach) rise up in its full glory only when approached would be interesting and less intrusive. An earlier poster's suggestion of a user controlled time delay would be an excellent option. What about the same paradigm as in the Finder: large icons, small icons or name only? Like in the Safari toolbar, let me edit the names in the dock (w/o changing the Application name, please). So, for instance, I could have an "M" for mail, an "S" for Safari, saving me real estate.

Why can't I have 2 docks, one left, one right, or 3? Why not let me set up and save "sets" of docks. I might have one for my developer tools, one for my daily productivity tools, one for web work, and another for art. We tend to work in stages and need sets of tools for a while, then dismiss them and move on to something else. This would be a huge help!

Now, take this one more step and let me specify different Dock sets in different Spaces. This is the sort of real power married with flexibility and elegance I hoped for when Apple started allowing us to move the dock, but new functionality just pretty much stopped there. Apple follows discussions like this. I am confident they are listening and will keep moving the Dock forward as the OS evolves.

June 22, 2007 10:30 AM
dggraphics said:

Another thing is Piles.

Piles took a simple thing and made it more extravagant and at the same time less useful.

In Tiger, you place a folder in the dock to access the items in it. A right-click and the contents list appears.
It it EASILY identifiable in the Dock because the user most likely has placed an icon on the folder to make it EASILY identifiable.

Stay with me.

In Leopard when you drag a folder to the dock, the folder icon dissapears and is replaced by a visual stack of what is in the folder. The only problem is, the particular folder you want to access is

from the other piles you place in the Dock.

The only way to know what folder it is, is to mouse over the pile to display the folder contents.

This seems backwards. Oh and yes this is from personal experience with Leopard.

You are able to sort how they are displayed, ie(Name, Type, Date added/modified etc.) but that does not help.

June 25, 2007 6:58 PM

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