Completely useless for the past 20 years. I have it always hidden with 0 loss of functionality.
It provides no info about what windows are open, it does random things when you click on an icon, it has an indicator that tells you that an app is in memory but may or may not have a window. And all these become even worse once you have multiple monitors / spaces.
Just copy whatever gnome/kde/windows are doing. All of these have figured it out. Only macOS needs an investment of like $50 per year in helper apps to deal with the poor app and window management.
You are saying the the dock on Mac OS has been ‘completely useless for the past 20 years’? I mean I can think of at least three uses… And certainly more if I bothered to actually count?
The icons sure do start to look boring when they are all the same shape.
The iTunes icon in 10.7 kicked it off. If felt lazy and out of place, even at the time I hated it. Then other new apps followed in the same style... App Store, Books, TV, News... By 10.15 most of the life had been drained from the icons. Then in 10.16 they went fully corporate and boring, shoving them all into their little squircle jails where they've remained for 6 years and counting.
But look at the subtle refined nuances. Sure they have no distinctive silhouette. Sure they're painfully bland. Sure none of the nuance is noticeable when viewing the icon at normal scale. But they're so refined; just look at them individually at 2000x2000 pixels! </sarcasm>
Yea, I cant count how many times I click on the wrong icon because the color is the same: Outlook, Word, Chromium, VSCodium all use the same blue for example.
This didn't happen before since we had shape and color to distinguish. So we lost one dimension...
And this is just because Apple is trying to merge iOS and MacOS at some point. I don't see any other reason.
I think the Alan Dye team thinks it looks "consistent" and that this is a good thing. I mean, they're right in that it looks the same, but that's clearly very bad.
Wow, you can pinpoint exactly when design went from interesting to boring. (For me: 10.9 Mavericks to 10.0 Yosemite.)
Also, putting on a product manager hat for a moment: one concern you need to have in your role is creep: small changes accumulate over time into something materially worse, but where each stage is small and not excessively bad on its own. The graphic shows it clearly in the quantity of items on the Dock. The first version had 14: already quite a lot. macOS 27 has 22, and is very wide. I find it visually overwhelming, not just because all the icons have the same silhouette, but because there are so many of them.
Yet I bet the addition or removal of an app to the default Dock was carefully assessed in every single release.
Edit: check out this comment in the thread [1], where tkcranny states it more colourfully than I do :)
Mavericks Forever website has notes about goods and bads in different versions of Mac OS X. The good part of history ended in 10.9, and the author managed to port some pieces from 10.6 to 10.9
My favorites are probably the 10.8/10.9 rounded flat matte w/perspective look because it does such a nice job of looking polished without being garish (unlike the 10.5-10.7 glossy dock, which I didn't like that much) followed by the 10.2-10.4 for its sheer simplicity. 10.1/10.2 gets third place simply because they're the OGs and the pinstripe texture was fun.
10.10 onwards is pretty forgettable.
During the 10.5-10.7 era there were a number of third-party dock themes people made that worked by swapping a few image resources, which in addition to visuals could adjust reflectiveness. I had mine set to a nice studio-lit dark gray matte shelf with white 3D indicator arrows.
It baffles me seeing tech people often seem to leave the dock along the bottom of their screen, wasting valuable screen space, especially if they're on a laptop. No auto-hide or anything.
First thing I do on a new Mac is move the dock to the left hand side and auto-hide if it's a laptop. With typical screen aspect ratios, you lose so much usable space with the dock along the bottom.
different strokes for different folks. Auto-hiding = super frustrating everytime it pops up when I didn't want it where as with it always there there's zero frustration. Zero frustration wins over some wasted space for me.
Yeah, many years ago, I used to move the dock to the left and auto-hide it to recover the screen space. But it resulted in the dock popping up (sliding right) at unexpected times and I ended up clicking the dock items unintentionally.
So, after about a year or so, I defaulted to moving the dock to the left but stopped auto-hiding it.
Dock on the bottom can move between displays. Dock on the left/right is stuck on the leftmost/rightmost display, which can be annoying if you regularly switch between laptop-only and laptop-plus-external-displays layouts.
What baffles me is people having the stock macOS apps in the Dock without taking the time to at least remove what they don't use. I think this goes to show that for most people they don't even notice the Dock is there.
Vast majority of computer users (including phones) don’t customize anything beyond the out of the box set up. In fact, I’d that’s even true for my sass customers, only particular percentage of them use any of the customizable settings. Which is why UX is so hard, we have to do our best to make sensible default choices. As technologists, it’s very easy to forget this while on the thick of it.
Man I hate the squircles. I understand for iOS you want apps to be consistent uniform touch targets. But for the desktop let the UI breathe a little, take off the jacket and tie. Such an absence of negative space with the squircles. There's glimpses of creativity like the Notes icon being the top of a legal pad but god so many icons are just white symbol in square.
I know the Leopard era design is having a bit of a retro cool moment right now (frutiger aero) but for me its all about that pre-Leopard Aqua. Something very bright and friendly about that design language where the Leopard era feels a bit dark, moody, and dusky. Bordering on chiaroscuro. Especially when you compare classic Aqua to like the classic Windows look which while coming off as corporate felt like it had a precision to it (at least to my kid brain).
I have to say my hot take is that I actually kinda like Liquid Glass. It feels like a bit of a throwback to that era and dragging objects behind transparency to see the refraction was the first time in a long time I've ever just been transfixed with just playing with a UI detail. Especially since I use the Dock as bootleg taskbar (undock everything so the only things in it are the open applications and autohide), when it does pop up its fun to see everything bend around.
Look how wiiide it’s become, full of so much gunk now. I could use spotlight for all these, which is telling why Apple is using it for promotion instead of being useful for the users. So much of this is redundant and promotional; I don’t want Apple TV, Apple Arcade, Apple maps, iPhone mirroring, all 3x of the phone and messages and FaceTime, or the Siri app on my dock.
I’ve come to thoroughly dislike the grind getting rid of them all with the dog slow animation each new Mac I set up.
What does it do? It sitll shows non-active apps. Unless I quit it and if I quit it then it goes out of dock even without this setting unless I've set "keep in dock" which keeps the icon in the dock even with this flag. Genuinely curious. Is it something more nuanced?
I think early Aqua (10.0-10.1) may be my personal favourite, although I don't think I can explain as to why. I remember liking the pinstripes (although I think they were controversial at the time). The 10.5-10.6 look (which was a relief after the brushed metal tsunami of 10.3 onwards) is a close second place and I still use a Snow Leopard box for occasional tasks to this day. I may even have my slipstreamed 10.6.8 disc image still kicking around somewhere.
This kind of retrospective meant something when the software was made with care. Now it’s a sloppy something that takes care only in making profits. UX became irrelevant.
The last Mac I used before buying a Neo was a PowerMac G5 running Leopard. So it's probably just due to familiarity/nostalgia but I think it was the best OS aesthetic out of everything I've used.
I stopped having any use of Dock other than seeing what windows/apps were still around that should have gone by now. But some apps keep toggling "keep in dock" for themselves so that makes it a bit more useless. Basically it shows what macOS has become – remove useful things, keep useless ones; repeat. There was a time aroound 2011-14 (or so) when this OS actually felt good coming from Linux distros. What worked for this company is the hardware competition esp. at fair prices just collapsed/vanished or at least severely lags behind.
Snow Leopard was my favourite. Was also the version I first started out with as a Mac user, so there's probably a nostalgia component that influences that opinion.
What I do know is that in the uniform-looking icons we have in the current dock, I seem to find myself hunting for the right icon to click a lot more than I have in the past.
The icons reflecting on the isometric bar is also far more tasteful than any of the semi-opaque tricks they're doing today. I agree that skeuomorphism was getting out of control back then, but the only alternative wasn't to go brutally flat with everything, everywhere.
Aesthetically I think the dock peaked with 10.9 (Mavericks).
There was some discussion about the Finder icon in a previous thread a while back. It's a riff on the original 'Happy Mac' power-on-self-test icon. My take is it's based on the reflection of the user's face against the monitor, reflecting enjoyable human-computer interactions. Also you get a smilely face on your screen.
This icon goes back to the Mac Clone era when they wanted separate branding for System 7.5 etc. Kinda funny it survived Jobs and is still around.
Also, IMO there's a lot of undue nostalgia for Snow Leopard. But that 3D Dock was cool. (It didn't do that when you put your dock where it belongs, on the right side.)
I miss being able to put the dock at the top of the screen and hide it, so that it was nearly impossible to make it appear. Now I have mine on the left and do
The squircles are really mentally exhausting for me sometimes when juggling a bunch of apps and trying to keep track of which is which, especially now that a bunch of them have the details completely washed out if on a non-4K external display. I'm looking at the Books.app icon on a 1440p monitor and it's just an orange outline with two blobby white wings in it.
Completely useless for the past 20 years. I have it always hidden with 0 loss of functionality.
It provides no info about what windows are open, it does random things when you click on an icon, it has an indicator that tells you that an app is in memory but may or may not have a window. And all these become even worse once you have multiple monitors / spaces.
Just copy whatever gnome/kde/windows are doing. All of these have figured it out. Only macOS needs an investment of like $50 per year in helper apps to deal with the poor app and window management.
I want Windows/KDE/GNOME whatever, to just copy Mac OS X, not the other way
You are saying the the dock on Mac OS has been ‘completely useless for the past 20 years’? I mean I can think of at least three uses… And certainly more if I bothered to actually count?
To be fair I assume a lot of HN users spend most of their time in the terminal anyway, so maybe not representative of your average user
Call it completely frivolous. I've had it hidden since the day I started using macOS and I cannot think of anything I use it for
Right-clicking bouncy icons?
just cmd+tab to them?
The icons sure do start to look boring when they are all the same shape.
The iTunes icon in 10.7 kicked it off. If felt lazy and out of place, even at the time I hated it. Then other new apps followed in the same style... App Store, Books, TV, News... By 10.15 most of the life had been drained from the icons. Then in 10.16 they went fully corporate and boring, shoving them all into their little squircle jails where they've remained for 6 years and counting.
But look at the subtle refined nuances. Sure they have no distinctive silhouette. Sure they're painfully bland. Sure none of the nuance is noticeable when viewing the icon at normal scale. But they're so refined; just look at them individually at 2000x2000 pixels! </sarcasm>
Yea, I cant count how many times I click on the wrong icon because the color is the same: Outlook, Word, Chromium, VSCodium all use the same blue for example.
This didn't happen before since we had shape and color to distinguish. So we lost one dimension...
And this is just because Apple is trying to merge iOS and MacOS at some point. I don't see any other reason.
I think the Alan Dye team thinks it looks "consistent" and that this is a good thing. I mean, they're right in that it looks the same, but that's clearly very bad.
Wow, you can pinpoint exactly when design went from interesting to boring. (For me: 10.9 Mavericks to 10.0 Yosemite.)
Also, putting on a product manager hat for a moment: one concern you need to have in your role is creep: small changes accumulate over time into something materially worse, but where each stage is small and not excessively bad on its own. The graphic shows it clearly in the quantity of items on the Dock. The first version had 14: already quite a lot. macOS 27 has 22, and is very wide. I find it visually overwhelming, not just because all the icons have the same silhouette, but because there are so many of them.
Yet I bet the addition or removal of an app to the default Dock was carefully assessed in every single release.
Edit: check out this comment in the thread [1], where tkcranny states it more colourfully than I do :)
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50066878
Mavericks Forever website has notes about goods and bads in different versions of Mac OS X. The good part of history ended in 10.9, and the author managed to port some pieces from 10.6 to 10.9
My favorites are probably the 10.8/10.9 rounded flat matte w/perspective look because it does such a nice job of looking polished without being garish (unlike the 10.5-10.7 glossy dock, which I didn't like that much) followed by the 10.2-10.4 for its sheer simplicity. 10.1/10.2 gets third place simply because they're the OGs and the pinstripe texture was fun.
10.10 onwards is pretty forgettable.
During the 10.5-10.7 era there were a number of third-party dock themes people made that worked by swapping a few image resources, which in addition to visuals could adjust reflectiveness. I had mine set to a nice studio-lit dark gray matte shelf with white 3D indicator arrows.
I agree 10.8/10.9 is the sweet spot.
It baffles me seeing tech people often seem to leave the dock along the bottom of their screen, wasting valuable screen space, especially if they're on a laptop. No auto-hide or anything.
First thing I do on a new Mac is move the dock to the left hand side and auto-hide if it's a laptop. With typical screen aspect ratios, you lose so much usable space with the dock along the bottom.
different strokes for different folks. Auto-hiding = super frustrating everytime it pops up when I didn't want it where as with it always there there's zero frustration. Zero frustration wins over some wasted space for me.
Yeah, many years ago, I used to move the dock to the left and auto-hide it to recover the screen space. But it resulted in the dock popping up (sliding right) at unexpected times and I ended up clicking the dock items unintentionally.
So, after about a year or so, I defaulted to moving the dock to the left but stopped auto-hiding it.
Dock on the bottom can move between displays. Dock on the left/right is stuck on the leftmost/rightmost display, which can be annoying if you regularly switch between laptop-only and laptop-plus-external-displays layouts.
What baffles me is people having the stock macOS apps in the Dock without taking the time to at least remove what they don't use. I think this goes to show that for most people they don't even notice the Dock is there.
Yes drives me mad.
Maybe they don’t realise you can change what’s there?
They don’t care. They’re not power users, they’ll use whatever defaults are there, and as long as they’re good enough, stick.
Vast majority of computer users (including phones) don’t customize anything beyond the out of the box set up. In fact, I’d that’s even true for my sass customers, only particular percentage of them use any of the customizable settings. Which is why UX is so hard, we have to do our best to make sensible default choices. As technologists, it’s very easy to forget this while on the thick of it.
Man I hate the squircles. I understand for iOS you want apps to be consistent uniform touch targets. But for the desktop let the UI breathe a little, take off the jacket and tie. Such an absence of negative space with the squircles. There's glimpses of creativity like the Notes icon being the top of a legal pad but god so many icons are just white symbol in square.
I know the Leopard era design is having a bit of a retro cool moment right now (frutiger aero) but for me its all about that pre-Leopard Aqua. Something very bright and friendly about that design language where the Leopard era feels a bit dark, moody, and dusky. Bordering on chiaroscuro. Especially when you compare classic Aqua to like the classic Windows look which while coming off as corporate felt like it had a precision to it (at least to my kid brain).
I have to say my hot take is that I actually kinda like Liquid Glass. It feels like a bit of a throwback to that era and dragging objects behind transparency to see the refraction was the first time in a long time I've ever just been transfixed with just playing with a UI detail. Especially since I use the Dock as bootleg taskbar (undock everything so the only things in it are the open applications and autohide), when it does pop up its fun to see everything bend around.
> I understand for iOS you want apps to be consistent uniform touch targets.
The touch targets can still be sane though. The click targets for the dock aren't the shape of the icons anyway.
Look how wiiide it’s become, full of so much gunk now. I could use spotlight for all these, which is telling why Apple is using it for promotion instead of being useful for the users. So much of this is redundant and promotional; I don’t want Apple TV, Apple Arcade, Apple maps, iPhone mirroring, all 3x of the phone and messages and FaceTime, or the Siri app on my dock.
I’ve come to thoroughly dislike the grind getting rid of them all with the dog slow animation each new Mac I set up.
I always set `static-only` via `defaults write com.apple.Dock`. Highly recommended...
link: https://macos-defaults.com/dock/static-only.html
What does it do? It sitll shows non-active apps. Unless I quit it and if I quit it then it goes out of dock even without this setting unless I've set "keep in dock" which keeps the icon in the dock even with this flag. Genuinely curious. Is it something more nuanced?
Couldn't you set it up once and save the settings in a script to reapply to others?
How many Macs are you setting up? This is only a 1 minute chore…
Wherher you're setting up one computer or a hundred, you should just use dockutil for this: https://github.com/kcrawford/dockutil
But I agree with GP. The dock only really feels usable to me when it has almost nothing in it. The default is by now extremely cluttered.
I think early Aqua (10.0-10.1) may be my personal favourite, although I don't think I can explain as to why. I remember liking the pinstripes (although I think they were controversial at the time). The 10.5-10.6 look (which was a relief after the brushed metal tsunami of 10.3 onwards) is a close second place and I still use a Snow Leopard box for occasional tasks to this day. I may even have my slipstreamed 10.6.8 disc image still kicking around somewhere.
There's real value in art. And the designs back then weren't smooth graphic design as we'd understand it today, but artistic.
This kind of retrospective meant something when the software was made with care. Now it’s a sloppy something that takes care only in making profits. UX became irrelevant.
The last Mac I used before buying a Neo was a PowerMac G5 running Leopard. So it's probably just due to familiarity/nostalgia but I think it was the best OS aesthetic out of everything I've used.
I miss OS X. Life was better.
I stopped having any use of Dock other than seeing what windows/apps were still around that should have gone by now. But some apps keep toggling "keep in dock" for themselves so that makes it a bit more useless. Basically it shows what macOS has become – remove useful things, keep useless ones; repeat. There was a time aroound 2011-14 (or so) when this OS actually felt good coming from Linux distros. What worked for this company is the hardware competition esp. at fair prices just collapsed/vanished or at least severely lags behind.
Snow Leopard was my favourite. Was also the version I first started out with as a Mac user, so there's probably a nostalgia component that influences that opinion.
What I do know is that in the uniform-looking icons we have in the current dock, I seem to find myself hunting for the right icon to click a lot more than I have in the past.
The icons reflecting on the isometric bar is also far more tasteful than any of the semi-opaque tricks they're doing today. I agree that skeuomorphism was getting out of control back then, but the only alternative wasn't to go brutally flat with everything, everywhere.
Aesthetically I think the dock peaked with 10.9 (Mavericks).
10.9 seems also to be the last version that had an "depth" to the icons.
There was some discussion about the Finder icon in a previous thread a while back. It's a riff on the original 'Happy Mac' power-on-self-test icon. My take is it's based on the reflection of the user's face against the monitor, reflecting enjoyable human-computer interactions. Also you get a smilely face on your screen.
This icon goes back to the Mac Clone era when they wanted separate branding for System 7.5 etc. Kinda funny it survived Jobs and is still around.
Also, IMO there's a lot of undue nostalgia for Snow Leopard. But that 3D Dock was cool. (It didn't do that when you put your dock where it belongs, on the right side.)
I miss being able to put the dock at the top of the screen and hide it, so that it was nearly impossible to make it appear. Now I have mine on the left and do
defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-time-modifier -int 20
so that I never have to see it.
I thought this was a vib coded replacement that makes my tahoe doc look like macos 10.1 or something ... I'd buy that
I've got it on the left and auto-hide on my laptop. Otherwise, it just sits there and has the apps I use on it.
Took at least 5 minutes to set it up and add the apps, then I forgot about it until now.
Just went and removed some apps that I used but don't anymore.
The squircles are really mentally exhausting for me sometimes when juggling a bunch of apps and trying to keep track of which is which, especially now that a bunch of them have the details completely washed out if on a non-4K external display. I'm looking at the Books.app icon on a 1440p monitor and it's just an orange outline with two blobby white wings in it.
Heh, Internet Explorer in the early days :)
I miss the 10.10 - 10.15 era
Most useless UI element