Things 10.6 should steal from Win 7
Like Jobs and Picasso before him said, “Good artists copy, great artists steal”. Microsoft seems to have realized that there really is something to the application centric model that Mac OS has been using all these years (as opposed to Windows’ long running window centric model, where each window is a separate process), and that the Dock might have some potential. Thus, they made their own version of the Dock in Win7, not the same, but similar. And I’m loving it. Apple really needs to take some UI hints from Microsoft here (!). Some observations follow…
- When you right click on an app in the Mac Dock, you get an ordinary text menu with all the open windows in that app. In Windows 7, you get a graphical grid of thumbnails. This is so much better. Steal it!
- When you hover over this thumbnail in Win7, that particular window is highlighted and all other windows are hidden. You can then scrub over all the thumbnails in that app without having to wait for the on-hover delay, to quickly look through the app and find the window you’re looking for. So useful, please steal this!
Now, I’m tempted to try to work in Windows, but I can’t make iPhone apps in Windows, and there are some things I know I just can’t stand. The most annoying thing is that the scroll wheel acts on the active control, not the control under the mouse (SO FRUSTRATING, especially when the active control is a popup menu). Doesn’t seem like they’re even viewing it as a fault. Also, I can’t stand Visual Studio, but I guess I could code in another IDE. Any suggestions? (I’m the kind that actually like XCode)
