On 8 Mar 2006 at 11:54, Eric Dannewitz wrote: > Er, no. I believe NeXTStep OS, which Mac OS X is based upon, had a > dock way back in 1992. Maybe earlier. > > http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/oshistory/7.html
I don't see your basis for that claim from skimming the article. The only thing that looks like the Dock is a toolbar at the bottom of this image: http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/oshistory/images/nextstep.jpg I think that you can see it's a toolbar if you compare it to the OpenStep image here: http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/oshistory/images/openstep.gif If you can point out a reference to a Dock-like representation of running tasks in that article, please quote it. I simply may be missing it in my quick skimming through the article. In any event, Bruce Tognazzini, one of the "fathers" of the Mac UI, thought that many aspects of the Dock (and the basic concept, though I can't find his review of the original release of OS X where he made this explicit) was copied by Apple from the Windows TaskBar. Here's a quote that makes it explicit, in his article "Top 10 Reasons the Apple Dock Still Sucks": 4. The Dock's locations are unpredictable Apple's solution to the early fire storm of protest over the Dock was to allow the user to hide it. That way, it doesn't float over all your applications. Slide below the screen with your mouse and the Dock appears. This Windows copy job, unfortunately, suffers from the same defect as the Windows Task Bar: You can't predict where a given object is until you reach the bottom of the screen and cause the Dock to appear. Worse than with Windows, your job is not over. Now, you begin the task of scrubbing the length of the Dock, trying to force the labels to appear, hoping you won't go far enough out of range in the process to cause the bar to disappear on you. (The Dock is linear; the human hand was designed to move in an arc. We don't do well with scrubbing.) Now right here, he's referring to the autohide as being copied from Windows, but elsewhere (in articles I can't find), he made extensive comparisons of the Dock to the Windows Taskbar, treating it as an effort by Apple to copy from Microsoft, and showing various things that Apple had gotten wrong in the copying, as well as things that were wrong with Microsoft's implementation that Apple didn't correct. Ah, yes, found it, in his first look at OS X: http://asktog.com/columns/034OSX-FirstLook.html Under the heading for "The Dock" he writes: . . . The deleterious effect of this emphasis can best be seen in the Dock, a graphical equivalent to Microsofts Task Bar. That's not exactly the statement of "copying" that I was remembering. In reviewing the rest of the article, it seems to me that this is not the only article I'm recalling, but maybe I'm misremembering. The point is that nowhere does Tog see the Dock as being an adaptation from NextStep, so I'm rather skeptical of the claim of derivation of the Dock from Next. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
