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- Iwantawii, on 11/01/2007, -4/+94It looks nice in the screenshot but notice that there's just a flat grey background. This smoked Dock doesn't stand out as well against dark desktop images.
- AquaOSX, on 11/02/2007, -8/+97I'll probably get -20 diggs for critiquing a something people want to love, but as a professional graphic and interaction designer, here's my 2 cents.
The default glass dock has quite a few problems. First off, there is not enough contrast between the active process lights and the dock's surface. It's incredibly difficult to see which applications are running and which applications are not.
Secondly, the doc is visually complicated and that hinders the speed in which people can track their eyes to an icon. The visual hierarchy has a ton of elements overlapping each other -- an "s-curve," individual icon reflections, window reflections, drop shadows drawn on icons, drop shadows rendered behind icons, a desktop background that's visible over the top half of icons, etc. These are all fairly basic examples of bad graphic design. I'm not saying the dock needs to look boring, but Apple could have made something that was both attractive and smart. That's harder to pull off, but that's the way to go. At the very least, this little patch removes the s-curve, minimizes some of those icon shadows, and makes the process lights easier to see.
Lastly, Stacks are somewhat of a disaster. Stack icons are insanely confusing. The dock is something that heavily relies upon iconography. Users can't depend on tracking the cursor to a fixed position because the dock resizes, and users can't totally rely upon text labels because those are only available upon roll over. It's really important for Apple to make sure icons are a highly effective communication tools. Stacks produce muddy layered icons that often change. Moreover, stacked documents can be mistaken for docked documents (try it, put one document in your download stack... it looks like a docked document, not a document within a stack).
I could go on and on. The stack menu, the lack of traditional popup menus, etc. The Dock is now host to a number of amazingly bad design decisions. I can only hope that Apple fixes these problems via software update, and not an OS revision that we have to buy in 12 months. - Mudcrutch, on 11/01/2007, -3/+82Different users have different weight on their diggs from past activity. It's an algorithm. There is no set # of diggs to get on the front page.
- HillerMylife, on 07/24/2008, -12/+77I much prefer:
defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES
killall Dock - dasutin, on 11/01/2007, -6/+60no digg for Real Player :(
- DaffyDuck, on 11/06/2007, -2/+52I have an idea for the 3D dock. When in autohide mode, have the shelf slide (retract) away and the icons fall off the edge. Pure eye candy I know but it would be fun at least for a few minutes.
- LordSkywalker, on 10/31/2007, -8/+53Dugg for Domo-kun.
- nphase, on 10/31/2007, -1/+40At least now we know how to make our own dock skins?
- theprez, on 11/01/2007, -3/+32-30 diggs for jklyon's useless comment? This is getting ridiculous.
- antitab, on 11/01/2007, -2/+30FYI: Remove these "scurve" images completely to have a fully reflective dock.
http://mike.command-q.org/img/mirror.png - acu8509, on 10/31/2007, -5/+31dugg for "Untitled Document"
- Firehed, on 10/31/2007, -0/+25You must be the only person on Digg that understands and accepts the idea that people prefer different things. Please continue to set a good example; others, please learn from it.
- Nitro420, on 10/31/2007, -1/+25http://www.tuaw.com/2007/10/30/triangles-back-on-t ...
- DaffyDuck, on 10/31/2007, -1/+23I know. I'm being shunned by my own compadres. Sniff sniff
- iChainsaw, on 11/02/2007, -1/+22See everyone, if you want to make your case; this is how you do it. One of the best comments backing up an opinion i have seen on digg. Dugg.
- MacParrot, on 10/31/2007, -0/+21No, that's about right
- advancedOption, on 10/31/2007, -4/+25I used ObjectDock, it's horrible and glitchy. So shhhhh...
- se1zure, on 10/31/2007, -4/+24because it's so easy for me to alter the appearance of the start bar in vista
- inactive, on 10/31/2007, -2/+20There's nothing "wrong" with it. Some people prefer otherwise, that's all.
- DaffyDuck, on 10/31/2007, -1/+19The dock would slide back out and the icons would just appear and blink a couple of times like the Super Mario guy coming back to life after falling off a cliff.
- MacParrot, on 10/31/2007, -6/+22And apparently so ground shattering that trolls have to take time out of their day to comment on it
- bluenullity, on 10/31/2007, -8/+24I would stick with the glass dock if I could change the little blue light to something actually visible.
- ddcrandall, on 11/01/2007, -1/+16None of the mirrors above were working. Here's a picture of it, though:
http://i.fosfor.se/i07/071030_2.jpg - noahhoward, on 10/31/2007, -1/+16Or you know, maybe the took the dock they've had for years and made that lay down.
- alevel27mage, on 10/31/2007, -2/+16>defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES
>killall Dock
Type that in terminal. '>' = New line. - lukes, on 10/31/2007, -2/+15Hopefully someone will make a simple app that will let you switch dock themes, and modify the indicator image.
- juicebag, on 11/03/2007, -3/+15DISREGARD THAT I SUCK *****
- beanlambert, on 10/31/2007, -1/+12Yeah that's true. I wouldn't use it with a dark background, and would probably go with the original, but on a light background its loads better.
- jayfehr, on 10/31/2007, -0/+10I dugg you up for the creativity, but out of curiosity, how would you get them back up. In a similarly creative fashion
- MacPPC, on 10/31/2007, -0/+10Adium does, you only need to check out their extras and install it
- AquaOSX, on 10/31/2007, -0/+10This really isn't "pseudo-technical." These are graphic and interaction design no-no's that are clearly documented within graphic and interaction design literature. Moreover, a lot of these questionable concepts can be reenforced with past quantitative and qualitative research. If you're interested in stuff like this you might want to check out out some work by Tufte, Raskin, and Buxton.
Just because you have an in-house interaction design team, that doesn't mean everything you produce will be successful. Unfortunately, it's quite common for an in-house design department to have their work compromised by the software engineering dept, the product development dept., marketing dept., executive management, or a some weird idea an art director won't let go of.
I've experienced this a number of times. After logically arguing your position without being an ass, and after user feedback has come in after the product ships, you should hopefully have enough ammunition to sway internal opposition.
I'd like to say that I amazed when a bad design idea makes it's way all the way through prototyping and beta testing, but I'm not. Design illiteracy is the norm, and graphic / interaction designers are often at the low end of the corporate food chain. - Firehed, on 10/31/2007, -2/+11Looks like someone just discovered the interrobang. You only need one.
And yes - put it on either side of the screen. - beanlambert, on 10/31/2007, -0/+8Adobe Creative Suite CS3.
Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign, Dreamweaver - iChainsaw, on 10/31/2007, -0/+7i'm using object dock pro right now...i paid for it...and i wish i had the leopard dock right now.
- juicebag, on 11/03/2007, -0/+7I do give OS X props for looking really damn cool.
- hmunkey, on 10/31/2007, -4/+11Rocketdock is better.
- zakatov, on 10/31/2007, -0/+7no Time Machine?
- casemon, on 10/31/2007, -1/+7http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20071 ...
- obtix, on 10/31/2007, -0/+6Also remove the "frontline.png" file and get rid of the silver line under it all.
- Slungsolow, on 10/31/2007, -0/+6a while now != less than an hour ago.
- TheTSArt, on 10/31/2007, -0/+6The icons could pop up from the bottom before the shelf appears and then land on it. You know kind of like the way the icons would bounce to get your attention.
- dirtyhand, on 10/31/2007, -10/+16Whats wrong with the default look? I love it.
- pabloD, on 10/31/2007, -2/+8Actually, the dock doesn't bother me as much as the transparent menu bar. I mean, wtf??? That's just plain retarded, especially if your destop picture doesn't play nice with the transparency. I can see no reason for it. Let me know when someone figures out how to change it back.
- dandiemer, on 10/31/2007, -0/+5I think AWN created a similar theme after the Leopard screenshots started to leak.
- iChainsaw, on 11/02/2007, -1/+6did you just ask that?
- zeejay, on 10/31/2007, -0/+5Since the dock images are just flat, rectangular semi-transparent PNGs, would it be possible to replace them with, say, a checkerboard pattern to look like a tiled floor?
- solidus636, on 11/01/2007, -8/+13Working mirror:
http://www.blambert.co.uk.nyud.net:8090/smokedock/ - inactive, on 11/03/2007, -0/+5I got an error 403, Forbidden. How do they know I'm running Windows?
/sarcasm - chubbRock, on 11/03/2007, -0/+5I did this....now how do i undo it? defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean NO
killall Dock ??? thanks. wanna put back the default - DaffyDuck, on 11/09/2007, -0/+5http://tinyurl.com/2nn76c
There's a visual. I like it. Maybe others don't but if someone figures out how to modify the dock to look like this, I'll be one of the first to make mine look like this. -
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