The Dock and other things I love about OS X


One man's beloved application is another man's revulsion.

Windows guru, Paul Thurrot, posts a Tiger review at his website.

Although I agree with the broad thrust of Thurrot's conclusions, one comment jarred with me.

Thurrot writes:

Mac OS X 10.0 also included a few flops, which continue in the product to this day, including the reviled Dock, which is used to switch between running applications and, confusingly, non-running applications.

I love the Dock.

Perhaps Thurrot is talking purely from a personal perspective, but it is not one I share. Although app starting in OS X could be more intuitive, the Dock is not the problem in my view. I further don't understand his antagonism, given the Start Bar in Windows, which has become so polluted in XP. And we need not get into the discussion again of why do we click "Start" to close down a system?

I have always loved docking styles for task starting and switching. I loved Amiga's Amidock , OS/2 Warp's WarpCenter, and NeXTSTEP's dock, which is obviously the inspiration for OS X's dock. I seem to recall PC Tools had something similar in 1994.

It seems many of the OS's in the last decade have used variations on the dock theme, including Windows, and it fulfills a need for a lot of us.

But for faster task starting under OS X I use Rachero's TigerLaunch, a brilliant tool that lets the user start apps in much the same way they did under the Apple menu on earlier Mac OS's and the Windows' Start button.

Posted: Sun - April 24, 2005 at 02:38 PM          

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