[Mac OS X TeX] alpha X piccies

[Jon Guyer]

At 10:22 AM -0500 1/29/02, William Adams wrote:

>The Dock being on the right was a non-starter 'cause that was where
>NeXTstep had it, and it'd interfere with the disk icons for those
>traditionally-oriented Mac users who'd have their disk icons on the
>desktop preference turned on.

Bzzt! Wrong. At the point the Dock was inflicted on us, you couldn't 
have disk icons on the desktop even if you wanted to. /Accessible/ 
configurability came only with 10.1.

>Other Mac OS 9- apps are better behaved in this regard---FreeHand for
>example allows one to have its info window as either a palette, or a bar
>which can be docked to whichever screenedge is desired.

And Alpha's status bar can be torn away as a palette, too. It's not 
particularly elegant about it, but it's been able to do it since late 
in the Eisenhower administration.

>If the app was coded so as to be Dock-savvy and to not position elements
>in areas of the screen controlled by other UI elements this wouldn't be
>an issue at all.

Well, gosh. Thanks for bringing those tablets down from the mount, 
Moses. I've seen the light. Sheesh.

>As opposed to having forced the formerly hard-coded placement?

What part of "we're fixing it" are you having a hard time grasping? 
The fact is, Pete Keleher wrote Alpha that way and he no longer has 
anything to do with the app. We're fixing it.

>Overall the Dock has been quite well-received,

We evidently run in /very/ different circles. I don't know anybody 
who likes it and many who decidedly do not. Bruce Tognazzi, amongst 
others, has written far more eloquently than I can about what is 
profoundly wrong with the design of the Dock 
<http://www.asktog.com/columns/044top10docksucks.html>. A few of his 
beefs have been fixed since he wrote that, but the Dock still ignores 
a great deal of what Apple itself has proven over two decades about 
UI design.

>and is configurable enough that
>that allegation scarcely warrants that sort of vehemence.

Only very recently and only in response to exactly this sort of 
vehemence during the Public Beta and earlier phases. I will grant, 
the Dock sucks much less than it used to.

-- 

   Jonathan E. Guyer
   <http://www.his.com/jguyer/>

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