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UI grumble: dock stacks
Oct. 29th, 2007 09:17Under previous versions of OSX, I settled on a way to keep my dock clean and uncluttered.
• Remove all application icons from the left side of the dock, except those ones that I expect to be running all the time and start first thing I log on (like Safari, Emacs, Terminal). This results in having a cleaner dock, and it also means that any icon appearing on the left side of the dock is a running process.
• On the right hand side of the dock, prepare a number of folders (which I placed in my ~/Applications directory); inside these folders, I placed links to all the Applications I commonly use, organized as I want them (for example, I have a "Graphics" folder, a "Writing" folder, a "Games" folder, and so on). Because all the applications actually reside in the main /Applications directory, I can have an app show up in more than one place amongst my custom folders, because each instance is just a symlink back to the original app. It also means I can have folders organized semantically, rather than by publisher.
In the old dock, my application containing folders looked just like folders. Click them once to open the original folder; right click them in the dock to get a list of the contents, from which I can then select an application. Right-clicking presented a slight delay, but this was OK, because I subscribe to the "open once and leave running" school of operation (another reason why I want the left side of my dock to behave as I described). Indeed, I could paste a custom icon on each one of my "custom folders" so that each folder of apps would have a meaningful visual clue as to what it contained.
In the new dock, folders with items in them are called "stacks", and the folders containing the stacks do not appear in the dock to make it look nice and uncluttered. Rather, the stacks look cluttered! OSX draws every icon in the folder one on top of the other, so that the one on top is (tadah!) alphabetically the first item in the Folder!
To me, there are two big, big problems with this:
(a) The dock looks messier, not neater. One of the principles of UI design (as far as I know) is that the more often the user must stare at a UI element, the simpler it should be in visual presentation. Minimizing noise is a goal that UI design should espouse.
(b) Choosing the first icon in the stack by the same criteria as you can sort a finder view (by name, by creation/usage/modification date, by item type) is flexible, but it also may not at all give you that all important visual clue as to what else is in the stack. When I had my special-icon Writing folder, I knew that all my writing tools could be found therein. Since the dock shrinks and grows with the number of apps running, the position of one of these stacks is not static! Therefore, a visual clue as to the contents of the stacks is vital, because it may not be in the same place on the screen as the last time you looked!
My hack to solve the last of these issues is to make a copy of my special custom folders, and inside the Foo folder, place the copy, renamed to '_Foo', so that it will show up as the first item on the list (sorted by name). Now, when I sort the stack by name, I get the appropriate visual clue.
But I still get the ugly, messy, background behind the icon of all the other icons in the stack.
Bad Apple engineers! Bad!
• Remove all application icons from the left side of the dock, except those ones that I expect to be running all the time and start first thing I log on (like Safari, Emacs, Terminal). This results in having a cleaner dock, and it also means that any icon appearing on the left side of the dock is a running process.
• On the right hand side of the dock, prepare a number of folders (which I placed in my ~/Applications directory); inside these folders, I placed links to all the Applications I commonly use, organized as I want them (for example, I have a "Graphics" folder, a "Writing" folder, a "Games" folder, and so on). Because all the applications actually reside in the main /Applications directory, I can have an app show up in more than one place amongst my custom folders, because each instance is just a symlink back to the original app. It also means I can have folders organized semantically, rather than by publisher.
In the old dock, my application containing folders looked just like folders. Click them once to open the original folder; right click them in the dock to get a list of the contents, from which I can then select an application. Right-clicking presented a slight delay, but this was OK, because I subscribe to the "open once and leave running" school of operation (another reason why I want the left side of my dock to behave as I described). Indeed, I could paste a custom icon on each one of my "custom folders" so that each folder of apps would have a meaningful visual clue as to what it contained.
In the new dock, folders with items in them are called "stacks", and the folders containing the stacks do not appear in the dock to make it look nice and uncluttered. Rather, the stacks look cluttered! OSX draws every icon in the folder one on top of the other, so that the one on top is (tadah!) alphabetically the first item in the Folder!
To me, there are two big, big problems with this:
(a) The dock looks messier, not neater. One of the principles of UI design (as far as I know) is that the more often the user must stare at a UI element, the simpler it should be in visual presentation. Minimizing noise is a goal that UI design should espouse.
(b) Choosing the first icon in the stack by the same criteria as you can sort a finder view (by name, by creation/usage/modification date, by item type) is flexible, but it also may not at all give you that all important visual clue as to what else is in the stack. When I had my special-icon Writing folder, I knew that all my writing tools could be found therein. Since the dock shrinks and grows with the number of apps running, the position of one of these stacks is not static! Therefore, a visual clue as to the contents of the stacks is vital, because it may not be in the same place on the screen as the last time you looked!
My hack to solve the last of these issues is to make a copy of my special custom folders, and inside the Foo folder, place the copy, renamed to '_Foo', so that it will show up as the first item on the list (sorted by name). Now, when I sort the stack by name, I get the appropriate visual clue.
But I still get the ugly, messy, background behind the icon of all the other icons in the stack.
Bad Apple engineers! Bad!
