Posts by Paul

@Thomas

"What are you talking about? The dock is a collection of icons that are linked to programs. They have a visible mark if that program is currently loaded. "

Yeah, a tiny little blue speck of light below it. This is really obvious for new users isn't it?(not) Maybe you think this is really obvious, but this will not be totally obvious to a new user who hasn't decided to join the cult of Jobs. Current versions of Windows to are arranged in a much more logically partitioned view - if you want to do something new, you click on the 'start' button; if you want to open something that already exists you use the taskbar. The 'quick launch' toolbar muddled this slightly, but at least (unlike the dock) there was still a partition between launching a new instance of a program, and currently running instances.

" If you right click a running program you get a context menu, if you right click an unloaded program you get basic options to load it or remove its icon from the Dock."

wahahahahaha!! Right-clicking on a Mac!

"To be honet, if you find that confusing then I'm not sure you're qualified to use a computer."

It is not about the average el Reg reader, but rather about users who have never seen the UI before.

"The Dock (including the NextStep predecessor and very similar RISC OS thing) has been praised because humans are much better at recognising images than text, so it lets you find what you're looking for more quickly."

I'm sure humans are better at recognising images, but what about if you have a new program and have no idea as to what the hell the image means!! Microsoft's approach with the 'Quick Launch' was fine - frequently used and recognisable programs launched with only icons; currently running programs show both the icon and descriptive text - surely there is nothing wrong with showing both?

Dock is a crock

Influenced by the dock?!! The dock is a TERRIBLE and confusing piece of user interface. It doesn't know what its purpose is.

While I haven't obviously used nor seen the new Win7 taskbar, the nice thing about the Windows taskbar was that it was simple - it showed you the list of currently running programs, and you could switch between them - it didn't try to be anything else. Another much nicer thing in Windows than OSX was that it had the name of the program that was running, rather than just some silly icon - IMO moving to icons only is a very BAD idea.