Yet another Hacker News

42 points soheilpro 3 hours ago 21 comments

cosmic_cheese 1 hour ago | parent

My favorites are probably the 10.8/10.9 rounded flat matte w/perspective look because it does such a nice job of looking polished without being garish (unlike the 10.5-10.7 glossy dock, which I didn't like that much) followed by the 10.2-10.4 for its sheer simplicity. 10.1/10.2 gets third place simply because they're the OGs and the pinstripe texture was fun.

10.10 onwards is pretty forgettable.

During the 10.5-10.7 era there were a number of third-party dock themes people made that worked by swapping a few image resources, which in addition to visuals could adjust reflectiveness. I had mine set to a nice studio-lit dark gray matte shelf with white 3D indicator arrows.

flomo 1 hour ago | parent

There was some discussion about the Finder icon in a previous thread a while back. It's a riff on the original 'Happy Mac' power-on-self-test icon. My take is it's based on the reflection of the user's face against the monitor, reflecting enjoyable human-computer interactions. Also you get a smilely face on your screen.

This icon goes back to the Mac Clone era when they wanted separate branding for System 7.5 etc. Kinda funny it survived Jobs and is still around.

Also, IMO there's a lot of undue nostalgia for Snow Leopard. But that 3D Dock was cool. (It didn't do that when you put your dock where it belongs, on the right side.)

seabrookmx 1 hour ago | parent

The last Mac I used before buying a Neo was a PowerMac G5 running Leopard. So it's probably just due to familiarity/nostalgia but I think it was the best OS aesthetic out of everything I've used.

seemaze 1 hour ago | parent

I miss the 10.10 - 10.15 era

fouc 1 hour ago | parent

It baffles me seeing tech people often seem to leave the dock along the bottom of their screen, wasting valuable screen space, especially if they're on a laptop. No auto-hide or anything.

socalgal2 44 minutes ago | parent

different strokes for different folks. Auto-hiding = super frustrating everytime it pops up when I didn't want it where as with it always there there's zero frustration. Zero frustration wins over some wasted space for me.

hydhyd 43 minutes ago | parent

First thing I do on a new Mac is move the dock to the left hand side and auto-hide if it's a laptop. With typical screen aspect ratios, you lose so much usable space with the dock along the bottom.

pantulis 18 minutes ago | parent

What baffles me is people having the stock macOS apps in the Dock without taking the time to at least remove what they don't use. I think this goes to show that for most people they don't even notice the Dock is there.

tkcranny 1 hour ago | parent

Look how wiiide it’s become, full of so much gunk now. I could use spotlight for all these, which is telling why Apple is using it for promotion instead of being useful for the users. So much of this is redundant and promotional; I don’t want Apple TV, Apple Arcade, Apple maps, iPhone mirroring, all 3x of the phone and messages and FaceTime, or the Siri app on my dock.

I’ve come to thoroughly dislike the grind getting rid of them all with the dog slow animation each new Mac I set up.

eviks 57 minutes ago | parent

Couldn't you set it up once and save the settings in a script to reapply to others?

pvtmert 50 minutes ago | parent

I always set `static-only` via `defaults write com.apple.Dock`. Highly recommended...

link: https://macos-defaults.com/dock/static-only.html

crossroadsguy 11 minutes ago | parent

[delayed]

halflife 29 minutes ago | parent

How many Macs are you setting up? This is only a 1 minute chore…

isityettime 22 minutes ago | parent

Wherher you're setting up one computer or a hundred, you should just use dockutil for this: https://github.com/kcrawford/dockutil

But I agree with GP. The dock only really feels usable to me when it has almost nothing in it. The default is by now extremely cluttered.

matt3210 33 minutes ago | parent

I thought this was a vib coded replacement that makes my tahoe doc look like macos 10.1 or something ... I'd buy that

trey138 32 minutes ago | parent

I miss being able to put the dock at the top of the screen and hide it, so that it was nearly impossible to make it appear. Now I have mine on the left and do

defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-time-modifier -int 20

so that I never have to see it.

gnarlouse 29 minutes ago | parent

I miss OS X. Life was better.

crossroadsguy 18 minutes ago | parent

I stopped having any use of Dock other than seeing what windows/apps were still around that should have gone by now. But some apps keep toggling "keep in dock" for themselves so that makes it a bit more useless. Basically it shows what macOS has become – remove useful things, keep useless ones; repeat. There was a time aroound 2011-14 (or so) when this OS actually felt good coming from Linux distros. What worked for this company is the hardware competition esp. at fair prices just collapsed/vanished or at least severely lags behind.

whatever1 26 minutes ago | parent

Completely useless for the past 20 years. I have it always hidden with 0 loss of functionality.

It provides no info about what windows are open, it does random things when you click on an icon, it has an indicator that tells you that an app is in memory but may or may not have a window. And all these become even worse once you have multiple monitors / spaces.

Just copy whatever gnome/kde/windows are doing. All of these have figured it out. Only macOS needs an investment of like $50 per year in helper apps to deal with the poor app and window management.

mrkpdl 3 minutes ago | parent

You are saying the the dock on Mac OS has been ‘completely useless for the past 20 years’? I mean I can think of at least three uses… And certainly more if I bothered to actually count?

al_borland 22 minutes ago | parent

The icons sure do start to look boring when they are all the same shape.

The iTunes icon in 10.7 kicked it off. If felt lazy and out of place, even at the time I hated it. Then other new apps followed in the same style... App Store, Books, TV, News... By 10.15 most of the life had been drained from the icons. Then in 10.16 they went fully corporate and boring, shoving them all into their little squircle jails where they've remained for 6 years and counting.