Anyway, one of the neatest things about the new OS X interface is the dock. The dock is Apple’s answer to the omni-present task bar that is sitting on your desktop at the moment; it’s used to show the currently running applications as well as giving you a “Quick Launch” icon bar for launching applications. Like I said, it’s about the same as the Windows’ XP task bar, but with a great deal more flare and style – it’s basically become the new trademark of the Apple desktop. In fact it’s one of the neatest pieces of OS code that I’ve seen in a good long while, probably since the animated and fading menus of Windows 98 – I’m comfortable in saying “one of the neatest” because there’s been a new product released that is equally as cool, but for Windows XP users: Y’z Dock.
[To those of you that haven been following this site for a while now, you’ll remember that I’ve become a Quasi-Switched user. It started with an iPod which made me take a long look at Apple as a technology company. Having spent some time reading about OS X, I eventually got around to picking up an older Mac, a Sawtooth G4 – thanks eBay! – and started to check out the Carbonized equivalent of all of my “regular” applications. I have yet to pull the trigger, however, and show up on an all white background Apple commercial. Sorry, Ellen, but I’m just not that brave… yet.]
Anyway, one of the neatest things about the new OS X interface is the dock. The dock is Apple’s answer to the omni-present task bar that is sitting on your desktop at the moment; it’s used to show the currently running applications as well as giving you a “Quick Launch” icon bar for launching applications. Like I said, it’s about the same as the Windows’ XP task bar, but with a great deal more flare and style – it’s basically become the new trademark of the Apple desktop. In fact it’s one of the neatest pieces of OS code that I’ve seen in a good long while, probably since the animated and fading menus of Windows 98 – I’m comfortable in saying “one of the neatest” because there’s been a new product released that is equally as cool, but for Windows XP users: Y’z Dock.
Yep, M. Yamaguchi has been working on some cool shit again! If you don’t remember, Yamaguchi is the guy that gave us Y’z Shadow that I’ve been using for a bit now; this is his take at bringing the OS X Dock to Windows. He’s smart, this guy – he doesn’t try to replace the task bar (like some other XP Dock apps have tried and bombed at) but instead his only acts as a launch bar. He uses PNG’s for images, instead of the typical ICO files that ship with applications, but that’s even better – PNG’s offer all sorts of drawing benefits to the typical ICO files and there’s a bunch of utilities to help out with extracting PNG’s from ICO files. He also expects the PNG’s to be 128 x 128 pixels, so they can be the same maximum size as OS X. He’s got the bar split into two sections, to help you organize – the dock itself can go to any of the four screen sides, can auto-hide, has all sorts of background and transparency settings, and supports drag and drop to help you set up your shortcuts. He’s also got the tool tip and button magnification that makes the original dock so freakin cool… want to know the most interesting thing? This is just the second beta release: version 0.2. This is the second time I’ve seen the code – it has yet to crash – and it’s already filled with working features. Oh it can be a little more fine tuned and right now deleting an icon required me to go to the INI file, but who cares? It’s truly exceptional the work this guy does – the fact that it’s freeware is just a bonus… I would actually pay for this lil bugger!
If you’re like me and you like new UI controls, go take a look at it… in fact here’s some screenshots (1 2) of this Rant being written with the Y’z Dock at the bottom – just a cool thing to play with!
