BUT MAYBE NOT!
People crap on Windows a lot. A lot of it's deserved, but at least with XP (I can't speak for Vista) I could make it look like Win2000, change all the colors around and customize it reasonably extensively. Recolor the OS down to the application level, change all the fonts. Its' really nice. My copy of Ubuntu isn't even as easy to muck around with, so I applaud Windows (XP)
Things I can customize in Apple's OS-X:
1. The color of the minimize/maximize/close gumdrops on each window
2.
That's right. There is no number two.
For all their "it just works" and "It's for people not robots" attitude, the choices in OS-X are nil. You get gray and white and more white and more white and a little more gray and some colored gumdrops. And you know what? You're gonna fucking like it!
I'm well aware that the reason Apple's popular is the same reason the Nazis were fashionable: fetishistic attention to detail and complete and utter uniformity. But I'm a "mac"; I'm your guy from the movie Dodgeball, with my comfortable clothes and desire to get high and make beats in garage band. I am an individual, and your operating system is not letting me shine.
Truth be told, I could give two shits about changing the font. Whatever they've got going on works well enough (except in Maya--are you reading this Autodesk?). I want two things:
1. As a working professional in the digital arts, I'd like to be able to make my OS a dark-ish gray so I'm not blinded by the mandatory bar across the top of my screen when I'm working on dark imagery. I don't need to "theme" color my os, but the ability to darken it down (and not that garish "cmd+opt+ctrl+8" nega screen).
2. The ability to not have the dock, but instead a drop down menu on the mandatory top bar where I could put my aliases instead. (Where have I seen this before.....?) Then, when I didn't need them (which is most of the time--and that is true for everyone) all my dock application icons aren't annoyingly in my way or popping up to say "hey" every time my cursor goes to the bottom of the screen.
Admit you screwed up. Admit the dock, like your shiny screens may impress the type of people who are more into shinyness than functionality, admit the dock is a bad design choice.
All I'm asking for is the option. I'd even be happy if it was command line only, I don't care how hard you have to bury it, but I want it.
5 comments:
I don't understand. Why don't you just hide it?
While I have not yet found a way to murder the Dock, you can use XMenu to stash apps and files in if you want a drop down menu. I've confirmed that it's loginwindow that initiates both the Finder and the Dock after start up through Apple's documentation, I just haven't found a way to use that information yet.
@tom,
Can't speak for the author, but hiding is a crap solution. The Dock Sucks. Because it sucks I don't want to use it, if I move my cursor to the bottom of the screen it will pop-up in all of its nonexistent glory reminding me how much I hate it, in fact not being able to properly disable it completely is the single most annoying aspect about it. It's something I don't want and don't use* so I don't want it consuming precious computer resources that are better used by the apps I DO use. In a single month I can have over 3 million page-ins and I only restart once a month, the Dock is always kept in RAM because my cursor is always hitting the bottom of the screen so it can't even page-out and hand over whatever memory it has in RAM over to another app that should be using it.
* Not entirely true, Apple has implemented some features via the Dock, so disabling them means disabling those as well, and in no particular order: the cmd-tab switcher (the only thing on this list I use, mostly out of habit as I'd like to free the keyboard shortcut for Witch which I have on ctrl-tab which is a bit harder to hit on my laptop), Exposé, probably Spaces though I'm not sure on this one, the Dashboard, and the only space to minimize a window. I'm pretty sure Hiding an app is dependent on the Dock as well but I've never confirmed that, it just wouldn't surprise me. Stacks of course is also tied to the Dock.
I don't hide the dock because then it keeps inappropriately popping up. I just want the damned thing gone and replaced with the old os9 apple menu or something else similarly out of the way.
and yeah, killing the dock outright via command line or any of the poorly coded apps available to do just that also kills the Command+Tab functionality, which unlike the Dock, is useful.
Killing the dock also kills expose, as far as I know. You can uninstall the dock, but then you lose ctrl+tab plus expose, as you've noticed. Or you could just switch to a different (dare I say "better") OS + DE + Window manager such as Linux + KDE + KWin or Linux + LXDE + Openbox, both of which I run and which are mightily impressive. I don't know how much you rely on OS X specific software though, and whether you could feasibly run it in as a virtual machine e.g. in virtualbox.
I've been thinking of switching to the Mac just because it's near impossible finding a good 15" notebook with a 1600x900 res screen. But OS X both attracts and detracts at the same time, so it's a tough call.
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