Folks have been complaining about the visual clutter of the upcoming Leopard dock and one man has decided to do something about it. The dock, as it stands now, offers two odd reflections and some perspective issues, knocking the elegance of OS X icons into the gutter and confusing art nerds everywhere. ThinkMac is proposing the dock above, which is resizable, separates document short-cuts, and avoids all the bouncy bouncy reflecty reflecty stuff for which Leopard will soon be famous. Here’s hoping.
Hint: How to redesign the Leopard dock so it sucks less [ThinkMac]
Yawn. Meh. Ridiculous. At this point of the game with Leopard being so close to RTM it is unlikely that anyone, especially not some external dude, will be able to cause anyone to change anything, especially not on the UI which has been refined and signed off on over a long period of time. It’s just not going to happen.
Aaaaaaaaaaaand I can assure you that even if somebody would adopt this proposed change, just as many people would complain about it and ask for the previous implementation. There are just too many users to hit everybody’s taste. The one-size-fits-all paradigm doesn’t work for user interfaces, and hopefully one day operating systems will offer plug-in capabilities that let you customize and exchange every UI bit to your liking.