Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Fri 31st Oct 2003 17:21 UTC
Some time ago we featured an interview with an... official Mac OS X switcher. A year later, we found another Apple switcher, James Dorn ("noviteo" for his friends) and we ask him a few details upon the switch. Especially with the recent price cuts on Apple hardware and the Mac OS X Panther release last week, being a switcher becomes "cool" all over again.
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"Hmm, you're right. OS/2 had tabs about 1990, and apparently, some Amiga apps had them in 1985. They probably go back even farther."
It wouldn't surprise me :-) Thanks for pointing out that Amiga used them too. I never had one of those.
I think what I'm remembering is that Windows was the first one to use tabs extensively (for prefs panels and whatnot) and when Apple put tabs into MacOS, it was because of a direct influence from Windows.
MS has the enviable position of being envied. Lots of things that they do come from elsewhere, but, when MS does it, it suddenly gets noticed and people try to emulate it. Sometimes this is good and sometimes this is bad.
As for the Dock, its nice because it preserves a nice spatial relationship between an application window's and its icon in the dock.
I don't think I can agree here. I would say you're wrong, but maybe I don't understand your statement. The Dock, specifically, goes against many "good UI design practices." Such as maintaining a consistent location and size for and of a control or object that a user needs to interact with (I could give about 6 specific examples of this one). So, spacially, the Dock is an utter failure except with the fact that it is a place to store shortcuts and limited window management that is always on screen (unless you have it auto-hide, which is good that this is not a default behavior).
If you don't really care for classic MacOS's whole spatial thing, then you probably won't care for the Dock either.
I like these things about classic Mac OS very much. Classic MacOS had far more adherence to spacial concepts than OS X does. Classic Mac OS has a lot of things that OS X lacks (not that it can't acquire them through hard work and attention to details). Not just the little features like spring loaded folders and labels, either. Basic and fundamental design concepts such as easy system management, modularity, sensible names for most all objects in the file system (including the system folder's contents!!), consistency, UI speed, easy management of system add-ons, etc. Classic OS just lacked the modern memory and tasking functions that everyone wanted. The new Mac OS Apple was working on before they brought Jobs back to the company was a much better product (it just didn't live up to management's time expectations). The Classic mode in OS X is actually a port from that OS (the OS was called Copland).