Although it was written earlier, it seems interesting to today, on the 25th anniversary of the original Mac and the first widespread implementation of and mainstream introduction to the window-based GUI, point out that we’re not home and dry yet. (“‘We could not even be said,’ replied Ford, ‘to be home and vigorously toweling ourselves off.’”)
Ars Technica’s Peter Bright sails through the confusing world of windows, tasks, buttons, application icons, launching, switching and minimizing and argues that the Windows 7 task bar is not a clone of the Dock but a logical extension that tries to solve some long-running problems and duplicates some Dock functionality along the way, and that there’s still work to be done. I agree.
This is a hard problem, one that neither Microsoft nor Apple nor Gnome, KDE or any Linux vendor have gotten right. 7′s constant window/app grouping by default both overshoots and underperforms (I routinely have three or four Visual Studio solutions open in my day job, and it’d be nice if they had their own button; I use Google Chrome and group tabs in windows based on content, and if it’s just flattened to a list of thumbnails of all tabs in all windows in order, there’s no point). Stating the problem in such a detailed way and providing history and context goes a long way towards solving it.
Moreover, I advise that the iPhone software platform must be opened.
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