Infinite Loop / The Apple Ecosystem

Mac OS X 10.0

User Interface

There were no startling UI revelations in Mac OS X 10.0. In fact, surprisingly little has changed in the OS X user interface since I last visited the topic in my MacWorld San Francisco article. Of course, actually using the post-beta features is somewhat different than seeing Steve Jobs demonstrate them on a stage. Let's see how things turned out.

The Dock

What can I say about the Dock that hasn't already been said in my previous articles? Well, there are new features and improvements in 10.0, but the fundamental nature of the Dock remains unchanged. Whether that's good or a bad thing depends on your user interface priorities. First, let's look at the changes.

Dock Changes


Changing the Dock orientation

  • Dock icons now have "infinite" height. The clickable area of docked icons now extends all the way to the edge of the screen, and the edges of the neighboring icons. It's no longer necessary to carefully aim for the (possibly intricately drawn) icon itself.
  • Docked folders, applications, and "docklets" now support hierarchical pop-up menus. The example that greets users the first time they boot into Mac OS X is the "Displays" docklet that provides a pop-up menu for color depth and resolution switching. Any folder placed on the Dock provides a pop-up menu of its contents, and any running application presents a list of its open windows.
  • QuickTime movies continue to play in miniaturized form in the Dock. While not a particularly useful feature, it does demonstrate that applications are free to do almost anything they want with their patch of real estate on the Dock.

What do these changes buy in terms of usability?

The larger Dock icon click areas improve targeting accuracy tremendously. This is a no-brainer feature for any UI element rooted on the edge of the screen, and only Apple knows why it took so long for it to appear. (It debuted in a post-beta developer release.)

Docklets provide the functionality of the classic Mac OS control strip, but they are currently rare (only three are included in 10.0: Displays, Airport Signal Strength, and Battery Monitor) and the APIs for third party Docklets are still in flux.

Docked folders match most of the functional merits of the classic Apple Menu, providing Mac OS X with a much-needed universally accessible, user-configurable, hierarchical quick-access mechanism.

The window menus attached to running applications offer a shortcut to any open window, provided you know which application it's in.

The ability to move and pin the Dock is useful, but the average user shouldn't have to dig around in XML property lists to enable basic UI features. Apple should provide a GUI for these options.

QuickTime movies playing in the Dock: what else can I say? It's neat.

The Big Picture

The Dock

Taking a step back, aside from the improvements listed above, the big picture remains the same. The interface simplification provided by the Dock--a single UI element that handles a tremendous number of tasks--comes at a substantial usability price. The essential nature of the Dock as a clearing house for almost all aspects of the Mac OS X UI not handled by the menu bar or applications themselves negates many of the post-beta improvements.

The ability to pin the Dock at one end is hampered by the population pattern of the Dock. Minimized windows insert themselves next to the Trash, so pinning the Dock at that end only provides a single stationary target: the Trash itself. Applications insert themselves next to the Dock divider, making it possible to create a series of application launcher icons with stationary targets on the left side. But complex launching requirements are arguably better handled by hierarchical pop-up menus instead of a linear list of icons, and folders cannot be stationary on the Dock unless you never minimize a window.

The Control Strip-like functionality provided by Docklets is handicapped by the Dock's catch-all nature. The advantages of the Control Strip are mostly absent in Docklets: the small size, the ability to be minimized when not needed, and the isolation from unrelated UI elements. Dockets take up just as much room on the Dock as folders, the Trash, running applications, inactive application, documents, and URLs, no matter how you rank the relative importance of those items in your daily work.

Similarly, anyone who wants to use a docked folder to duplicate the Apple menu must consign himself to a much larger loss of screen real estate, since the entire Dock must be visible if the one docked folder he's interested in is to behave like the always-accessible Apple menu. Even at its smallest size, the Dock very quickly consumes considerably more room than the small Apple Menu icon.

Don't misunderstand, these changes are undeniably improvements. In fact, many of them were suggested in earlier articles. The Mac OS X 10.0 Dock is a much more useful and usable interface element than the Public Beta Dock. Furthermore, the simplification provided by the Dock is a tremendous help to novice users.

But does even the new, improved Dock enable Mac OS X to meet the needs of more demanding users as well as the separate interface elements found in classic Mac OS? Unfortunately, as in all previous Mac OS X releases, the answer in 10.0 remains no.

Even for novice users, some problems remain. Windows can still get stuck behind the Dock. Some native OS X applications are aware of the Dock and try to avoid this situation by automatically resizing themselves (another expert-unfriendly feature, in my opinion), but classic applications are not so lucky, and often find themselves buried.

The Dock still gets very crowded, very quickly, even in the hands of a novice doing nothing more than a little email and web browsing. I've observed that window minimization is the screen clutter solution most likely to be found by novices in OS X. And once they find it, they rarely continue looking and discover the application and window hiding features. The end result is a Dock that's jam-packed with windows that were minimized and then promptly forgotten (Finder windows are especially susceptible to this fate since you can always spawn a new one--an issue in its own right.) As the Dock gets crowded, everything suffers: icons get smaller, harder to find, and harder to recognize. It eventually degenerates into a game of "hunt-and-click", something even novices recognize as inefficient and frustrating.

Dock items still lack text labels without a mouse-over, hastening the onset of "hunt-and-click" (or should I say "scrub-and-click"). This is most damaging to folder and minimized window icons which can appear inscrutable (or even identical, in the case of folders) even at very large sizes. And again, this affects both novices and experienced users, although experienced users can mitigate the problem somewhat by applying custom icons to their docked folders.

The Dock's Future

Like the Windows Taskbar before it (and the NeXT Dock before it), the Mac OS X Dock will undoubtedly evolve. And like the Taskbar, I suspect that the Dock's UI flaws will be largely ignored by the average personal computer user. But experienced Mac users know it can--and should--be done better.

For novice users, the Dock's simplicity probably outweighs its problems. Throughout its development, it seems the philosophy of the OS X UI has been to strip everything back to its barest essentials, and then build it back up in response to user feedback. An optimist might see this as a refreshing break with the past, while a pessimist might see it as an inability to learn from the mistakes (and successes) of past. (You can guess which camp I lean towards.) Either way, as the most visible (and hyped) new interface feature of Mac OS X, the Dock is one polarizing widget. But there are even more pressing interface concerns for the Mac faithful in OS X.

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