When I heard (saw) that Apple did the U-turn thing yesterday on the Dock, I was a bit astonished. First, they haven’t given developers access to the final build of OS X Leopard, so nobody can test their products until Leopard is up for sale. Now they’ve essentially done the same to icon designers like me, by going flip-flop on the Dock. Fortunately, all my time spent on work with clients to make their icon look good in Tiger and the new ‘glassy’ dock wasn’t completely wasted, but they still changed a pretty fundamental design element’s look without giving any type of advance notice.

“Surely,” you may argue, “it’s just the Tiger dock, dark, with some modifications”. Sure. Quick Look windows are just dark backgrounds too; the sidebar accepting just 16px icons are just small additions as well, and Coverflow ‘only distorts’ your icon. But they do define the design considerations and the places where you see the icon most often. I am not trying to imply that I’m in a situation even half as sad as the developers’ (with them not being able to test apps against the Golden Master and such) but it does matter, and there is no real reason to postpone this cosmetic change to the final build. In fact, there’s lots of arguments to introduce this in a quick build before the final one. I hope Apple learns from this, as although they’ve shown they are receptive to input, the time of introduction really couldn’t have been worse.

I just wish we won’t see a lot more of these “surprise surprise!” changes coming from Apple again.

Michel Jansen, fellow Dutch blogger, uncovered a system setting to use the new “on-the-side” Dock on the bottom too (which a lot of you asked for in my last post).

Open Terminal.app and enter;

defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES; killall Dock

Before and after images at the source. Thanks Michel!

It seems Apple listened to the wave of critique, introducing ‘aesthetic tweaks’ and Dock-on-the-side alternate mode (via Macrumors);

(Tiger on the left, new Leopard dock on the right) I must say this had me sighing out loud. What a relief that our input hasn’t been completely unheard. Just a few more days to the next big cat, fortunately!

Edit; show Apple how much you liked them listening to you and digg this

Edit 2; Thanks to Brendan for the comparison image of the Tiger dock.

I have been watching a few TED video’s today (in case you’ve been living under a rock, TED is the Technology, Entertainment, Design conference with some of the brightest and coolest people of this planet attending or ‘lecturing’) which I hadn’t seen before because they didn’t relate directly to me, and what struck me most was a combination of two videos; One, Richard Dawkins’ ‘The Universe is Queerer than we Suppose”, which handled the universe as we see it and the way we are and how these things relate to one each other (you should just watch it, I’m raping it by putting this in my words, I am a great fan of Dawkins’ writing and speech) and Will Wright’s “Toys that Make Worlds”, which is a presentation by Will Wright (-the- Will Wright, the guy who made Simcity, the Sims, and now Spore) about games, specifically Spore, but it made me relate by the games he made previously; Simcity in particular.

Continue reading…