Mac dock copied from Windows ?
by Bharat on Mar.27, 2009, under Tech
People always come and tell me how great is Mac OSX dock is and how windows copies everything from Mac OS. So here is a little piece of information for those guys.
As seen in pic above is the Windows 1.0 which also had a place at the bottom to show running appliation. Hoefnagels (Microsoft designer) “What are those big icons?” he asked during his speech at the Mix 09 conference last week. “Is that the Apple Dock? No, this predates the Apple Dock by 15 years. This even predates the NextStep OS on which the dock is based by two years.” So now you know what copied what and who copied whom.
The same taskbar made a comeback in Windows 7 with a little more advanced graphics and features and every one starts jumping and shouting hey that similar to dock or its copied from Linux about which no one even knows about.
The Taskbar of Windows 7
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March 28th, 2009 on 12:46 AM
HuHu ! I mean HaHa …. I just love winomanic freaks … They play nice Jokes
—comment edited using mobile OS X kernel, I mean iPhone OS …. With no dock.
March 28th, 2009 on 12:49 AM
Personally, I don’t ever cry out about things being copied. Copying is good, especially when good ideas are improved upon or when good ideas exist but not fully implemented and another company can make a success out of them. To this end, Apple is much better than Microsoft. Many of the things Apple has been “known for innovating on” has actually been Apple seeing a good idea and making it great.
Microsoft on the other hand has a history of taking good ideas and dominating through monopoly abuse while implementing the good ideas poorly.
That being said, nobody gets credit for the taskbar/dock. Neither Apple nor Microsoft invented the concept of providing task (application) context in some sort of panel. The reality is that this wasn’t ever an innovation, but an inherent practicality when developing an interface for something that had multiple task modes. These pre-date Windows 1 as well as the Mac.
I believe however if you were to take a look at the evolution of the taskbar/dock/panel, you’d see many more things implemented first (and certainly better) by Apple, including Next, and on the Mac, with the Launcher, Control Strip, D/A, and 3rd party panels for the Mac.
But again, none of this matters. I would only care about who copied who if I were a IP lawyer. As a user, all I care about is which one is better for my usage.
The Windows 7 Taskbar, being much more OS X Dock-like, is a huge improvement and offers some advantages over the current OS X Dock. With the current releases, OS X wins, but it looks like the new Taskbar will be slightly better than the one in Snow Leopard (although it’s too early to declare it the winner).
March 28th, 2009 on 12:55 AM
Yes, even i don’t care who copies whom, its just that windows is always criticized by mac osx fans for copying stuff which i just wanted to show that nothing is copied here…
March 28th, 2009 on 10:22 AM
@Kevine, Lemme know if you every do something new or creative on which you have IP Rights. I would be glad to copy those for you, if they worth anything…
P.S.: I copied your comment and posted them on facebook link of this article, hold on a sec, I improved some words
April 3rd, 2009 on 6:25 PM
Well… I wud like to interrupt in here. For those who say Apple COPIES MS’s taskbar, I would like to tell you that Apple bough NeXt Computers when Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997. NeXt was the orginator of the dock. Also The Dock is based on (as in, a gutted version of) the OPENSTEP 4 Beta Shelf. Which Apple bought the IP for. So no, no theft of ideas involved, just outright purchase.
Apart from that Windows 1.0 DID NOT have a taskbar. It just showed running applications at the bottom of the screen. It cant be called a taskbar, just some graphical set of minimized windows. The modern Windows task bar is a “window” based bar whereas dock is”application” based. Of course Ms has again copied the dock in windows 7.
April 20th, 2009 on 8:34 PM
Hello,
Super post, Need to mark it on Digg
Have a nice day
April 21st, 2009 on 1:25 AM
Thnks a lot, you can use the share button below every post to DIGG or SHARE.