By 'astroturfing', do you mean 'having a differing opinion to the groupthink'?

I'm still yet to see a single mote of evidence that Microsoft bothers to astroturf Slashdot. Can you honestly think of a community of individuals (save, say, BoycottNovell) that are less likely to either:

a) Switch to Windows, or
b) Do anything at all on the whim of a commenter?

And Windows never had a TASKBAR with BUTTONS for APPLICATIONS before Mac even had a dock.

Noooo.

For god's sake, grow up, OSX is not some holy friggen grail of OSes that everyone copies you know.

We arrived at the pretty much same place after starting somewhere else, so that makes it very, very, very, very different. Very.

I may or may not have been talking out of my ass.

Did they copy it? Did they not? Do I care?

Is it useful? Does it do what it should? Does it make my work easier? That's what I care about. There are things that are clever. And, bluntly, I'd rather have them copy a good concept than come up with a completely moronic one (Office 2007, I'm looking your way!) just to be "different", just to have nobody claim they "Xeroxed something else".

Honestly, why should I care whether Windows, Mac, KDE, Gnome or whoever else copies anything from whoever? Ain't the damn patent lawyers not busy enough already, do we have to start with the same crap? What I care about is whether the system is reliable, fast and easy to use. Where they got the idea for it, I do not care.

But when Apple copies something it's innovation. When Microsoft does it, it's child porn.

The obvious change in the new Windows Taskbar is that there are icons for non-running-applications. I don't care how you try to word it, that is the major difference between the OSX Dock and the Windows Taskbar. So Damn right it is copying it.

But is that really bad? Yes they copied good ideas, and perhaps made their own improvements to it. But that is how we get better software! Is this somehow wrong when Microsoft does it? You mean you really want Look & Feel Patents and Lawsuits? Don't be idiotic!

And the Microsoft astroturfers should not be showing such knee-jerk stupid reactions. Why not say *proudly* "we copied good ideas and improved on them even more!" instead of convoluted arguments that somehow they did not copy it.

Personally, I don't necessarily care if one company copies a good idea that another company has. What I don't like is when that company comes out and acts as if they were the first ones to have the idea and that it's better than anyone else's. Going a step farther, if they bastardize what they're copying and still proclaim its greatness, that's just utter bullshit.

I agree, but enough companies do it often enough that I stopped caring that much. I favor openness and innovation over complete compliance with patent law/spirit of fair attributation, and though I think both are important, I feel it's more important to err on the side of innovation.

I've no doubt that it's a major improvement over the old Taskbar, but nearly every feature is cloned from the dock.

That includes mixing running/pinned applications, application-specific context menus, active application switching, integration with Spaces, nearly everything except the rollover thumbnails.

But the OS X dock allows multiple docked folders, stacks, and documents. Plus the dock supports additional functionality like the numbered icon badges for Mail's inbox counts, in-progress status bars for apps like Handbrake, snapshot icons for minimized documents and movies and even minimized windows (icons) for things like the Activity Monitor's CPU usage graph.

As such, I fail to see how, as the article suggests, that "superbar" is markedly superior.

I'm just the opposite: I love how Mac OS separates window and application. It's just LOGICAL!

There is an application running; but not handling any document right now. Therefore, it does not have to show a window.

There is an application running; and it is handling a document right now. Therefore, it displays the document in a window.

Because the window is the document.

And the Xerox Alto. Sure, it didn't have a fancy taskbar, or many of the features of todays GUIs, but it is still the paradigm from which nearly every current GUI has spawned from thus far.

Yes, the "Superbar" and the OSX Dock aren't terribly original, but they are quite useful evolutions of the idea. I'm pretty sure I remember that many pundits were saying that the Dock was ripping off Windows when it first turned up on the OSX Public Beta in late 2000.

Now, it seems that the Mouse, Icon and Window GUI is approaching it's logical conclusion, that there isn't much else you can add without making things more complicated than they need to be. The Big Two aren't really innovating so much anymore, rather they're fine-tuning and optimizing their existing products as much as possible rather than adding feature bloat. Both have evolved into very similar products with regards to "look & feel", functionality and performance.

Who will really create a completely new way of interacting with data that really works? Multi-touch looks promising, but needs new ideas and refinement. Voice recognition is still pretty weak, it has improved steadily with increase in computing power. With todays processing power and connectivity, isn't it time for something as radical as graphics and a mouse were in the times of text based computing?

You probably shouldn't care, because you don't. But some people do care, and some people work in fields where they *have* to care (well, more likely, they *like* caring about stuff like this which is why they work in UI and OS GUI development, either in programming or design fields.)

Honestly, why should I care whether Windows, Mac, KDE, Gnome or whoever else copies anything from whoever?

The article asked "is it a copy (ie, is it very similar)?" not "did MS copy Apple?" Those are two very different questions, and the only reason you might care is because you're interested in learning about the difference in how MS and Apple has historically treated the applications vs window GUI question.

If you already knew, then of course, don't be interested. If you didn't, then maybe you might be interested (but only if it was a personal or professional interest of yours.) I always find it weird to hear people say, "Why should I care?" Maybe the more important question is, "Can anyone actually convince me to care?" If the answer is no, then it's probably not worth commenting.

There isn't a single programmer or UI designer out there that is worried about dudes on websites saying that they Xeroxed something. Nobody can hold down a job if they're primary motivation is to avoid being told that they copied something that has been accepted in the market place.

Why do you think so? The Mac always - since Macintosh 128k - supported window independent menu bars. Certainly I never created any transparent windows.

Document-centric is the natural way for humans to work. Everything else has been trained upon us like you can train a left handed person to write with the right hand.

Don't believe me? Well have you ever started Acrobat-Reader just for the fun of it? No - you want to read a PDF! Apart from system tools everything out there is about documents of one type or another.

God, I don't know what I'd do without Expose nowdays. On my windows machine I compensate by having a few huge screens that I leave everything scattered around. But Expose + Spaces works much quicker for me, especially with limited screen real estate.

So you start iTunes just for the fun of it? Interesting. I usually want to play some Music and iTunes is just the means to do it.

Note that I once used OS/2 which had a different approach: You would not launch applications at all. You would double click documents and the application would launch for you.

Ok, you can do that any OS these days. But there was a difference here. The reason why you would not do that with i.E. music is that Finder does not browse music folders all that well. In OS/2 an application could/should provide a plug in for the Workplace Shell (the Finder equivalent) to make browsing easy.

And then you have true document centric interface where applications are just there in the background. But this won't happen ever - and for vanity reasons. Vanity? - Yes: Have you ever noticed how many icons the Acrobat-Reader installs on a Windows system? And have you ever used one of these? I don't - I double click PDF files. Vanity - there are just there for Adobe to show off.

It's funny because it's true.

I find the iPod's wheel is often described as a revolutionary peice of design and used as an example of the amazing things Apple does.

Unfortunately, the Creative Zen had a side scroll wheel years earlier that you'd scroll up and down to scroll through songs and click in to select etc. etc. The wheel on the iPod is different only in that you move your finger round the wheel straight on rather than having a physical wheel you scroll up and down- the concept is identical, only the implementation is different.

If anyone truly believes Apple is some great innovator and that there ideas didn't stem from existing ideas then they're pretty oblivious to how just about all businesses work. Apple did what Apple do well, they made the idea popular, making it popular doesn't necessarily mean they innovated and invented in the first place though.

The usual hypocritical response by what I can only call the extremist element of the set of all Mac fans would probably be "the wheel is different because it's used front on therefore it's innovation" but to take that stance the hypocrisy is that one could equally argue that the Windows 7 sidebar is different enough to be classed as innovation rather than immitation then also, which you can be sure the most extreme of Mac fans simply would not accept. When they're forced into a corner of applying the same principles to Microsoft as to Apple or choosing hypocrisy, they choose hypocrisy.

I don't hate Apple, I don't hate people who love Apple, I hate people who can't be objective and realise things for what they are.

Like gnome/kde/xfce/etc virtual workspaces which have been around for rather a long time? I'm surprised it took so many years for apple to implement what has been around in unix for so long.

I find the OS X interface counter-intuitive compared to Gnome, which I switched to from windows about 3 years ago. OS X is on a par with windows though for intuitivity.

IMHO.

In Windows 1.0 those minimised icons were always visible on screen, even if you maximised a window. So it was almost like an early application switcher. From Windows 2.0 and upward the behaviour changed to allow a maximised windows to take up the entire screen and obscure the minimised applications. It is a subtle difference, and I guess they changed the behaviour from Windows 1.0 due to alt+tab switching.

I love these arguments. "Mac was first! No, Windows! No, Xerox! .. .. Bah, you're all Half-Life noobs! Let's frag in a proper FPS game, like QUAKE 1 for DOS. I bet you can't even configure AutoExec.bat!"

Step away from yourselves for a minute, and laugh, a lot.

Really, to people reading: Don't get into this kind of argument. Just watch the show in amusement.

The suggestion elsewhere that an open source version of the dock might be called "SpackleMonkey" is apropos. If you patch leaky paradigms often enough, they begin to resemble each other: big balls of spackle.

For me, the pre-OS X version of the Mac were about as good as things get. It was like those Japanese sedans that are alike as peas in a pod because their design was very task centered. I have found OSX just as annoying as Windows. Although it looks fabulous, it does so at the expense of getting in the way.

This is the down side of Jobs' recreation of Apple. It is no longer a computer company. Yes, its still a user interface leader on its music players, but it's focus is on doing an impressive job on fine details. That works fine for iPods, but it doesn't work for computers, which users ask so much more of. The Dock is a prime example of a clever, obtrusive solution to a problem which had been handled with quiet competence before. In its jolly, gleaming, bouncy default state, it hogs huge amounts of real estate, jiggling and wiggling and generally calling attention to itself whereas everything it does was accomplished in less space, with less obtrusiveness in older versions of the operating system. You can tone it down, reduce it, and hide it, but aside from the fact it pops out when you don't want it, the Dock was designed to work best when it's just sitting there with a few big, fat icons. I do admire the magnification effect, which is a clever bit of UI spackle, but it would have been better to make it easy to launch/select with smaller widgets.

The key, pre OSX user interface principle that Apple followed was deference to the user, and one aspect of that is that when the user arranges things a certain way, they should stay that way. This, of course, is impossible when you combine the functions of launching and switching. Once you've gone down that route, you've thrown away the user's ability to put launch functions where he can find them without thinking. To my way of thinking, anything that takes a user's attention away from what he wants to do is bad.

After using OSX for about a year, I've concluded I'd rather use Vista, although it's frustratingly paternalistic, insisting on doing things on my behalf because it thinks it knows better. No, I don't want you to automatically install an udpate and reboot at 3AM by default, ruining a calculation that has been running for two days. But once you've fought it into a workable configuration, and thrown enough hardware at it, you can live with it.

It's not that I'm anti-Apple. Their iPod user interfaces are clearly superior. While iTunes has serious defects, there's no question they're light years ahead on making the whole music store to player business work. They're just no longer a company that produces a great computer user interface, from the perspective of somebody who spends well over a thousand hours a year working on a computer. Gnome, KDE and Xfce are all better to work with on if you have to do complex things, hour after hour.

Best of the two maybe, but not best overall.

Grouping by application isn't quite as helpful as grouping by task, as often an application is in use for more than one task simultaneously. I've found a good solution to this to be virtual desktops. I prefer Gnome's implementation of this, particularly the thumbnails always being visible on the panel, and the ability to make the window list only show the windows on the current desktop - preventing things unrelated to my task from distracting me.

For example:
I might have an IDE open with a browser window viewing API documentation, and a couple of terminal windows. At the same time I've got some messenger windows and IRC open, some browser windows of articles being discussed on IRC, or screenshots of games. I might also have another chat window open with my boss and and another browser logged into our FTP server, and a few local folder windows open.

I use the virtual desktops to group things by task, letting me first choose the task, then cycle through its associated windows with Alt-Tab (or whatever key combination I bind it to).

Obviously it's an evolution, but it's a big one.

Scrolling on the front wheel is a single continuous motion. On a side scroll wheel you have to stop, come back, and scroll again.

Innovation doesn't meant that no one thought of pieces leading up to something, it means you made some jump in how those pieces were used that makes a significant difference in final quality/usefulness.

Yes, the "concept" of a wheel to scroll through lists is the same. But the physical experience of the interface is actually quite different. On an edge-contact scroll wheel, you can only move the list as far as the length of your thumb (or finger) pad before you have to pick up and reposition. This limits how fast you can move through the list. On a flat-contact scroll wheel, you can scroll through an infinite list continuously, which is faster. And (crucial detail) the iPod software actually scrolls the list faster the faster you move your finger (the relationship between fingertip speed and scroll speed is not linear).

The real predecessors to the iPod scroll wheel, at least physically, are the scroll wheels used in the video industry for fine frame scrolling. Like the iPod these were flat-contact wheels that allowed continuous smooth scrolling for as long as you wanted. They just were physically moving parts as opposed to a touch-sensitive surface like the iPod.

I won't claim that Apple is an amazing inventor for what they did with the iPod. I will say that they did a very good job tweaking and combining existing ideas to produce a very compelling product. Yvon Chouinard [amazon.com] draws a difference between invention (the creation of new ideas) and innovation (the application of inventions to create a good product). By that definition I would say that Apple is an innovator.

The Xerox Alto was this way and OSs have regressed in this regard ever since.

I've been saying this for years! The Alto didn't expose foreign inhumane concepts such as "application" to the user. You viewed documents, that's it. There was one--and only one--document viewer/editor, and one--and only one--document format. There was no "e-mail application" either; you e-mailed someone by copying a document into the Outbox icon on your desktop. Similarly, you printed a document by copying it to the desired printer's icon.

People want to deal with their stuff--their documents, their pictures, their content, etc. They don't think in terms of "applications". That's just a programmer-centric concept, which should never be exposed to human beings in a well-designed system.

I wasn't even alive then, and, yet, I find myself clamouring for the good old days. The Xerox PARC people got it right. Why are all modern systems so primitively designed--by 1973 standards?!