The Dock on Mac, from OS 10 to macOS 27 | Hacker News Reader

The Dock on Mac, from OS 10 to macOS 27

blog.jim-nielsen.com

107 pointssoheilpro76 comments

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.

But look at the subtle refined nuances. Sure they have no distinctive silhouette. Sure they're painfully bland. Sure none of the nuance is noticeable when viewing the icon at normal scale. But they're so refined; just look at them individually at 2000x2000 pixels! </sarcasm>

Yea, I cant count how many times I click on the wrong icon because the color is the same: Outlook, Word, Chromium, VSCodium all use the same blue for example.

This didn't happen before since we had shape and color to distinguish. So we lost one dimension...

And this is just because Apple is trying to merge iOS and MacOS at some point. I don't see any other reason.

I think the Alan Dye team thinks it looks "consistent" and that this is a good thing. I mean, they're right in that it looks the same, but that's clearly very bad.

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.

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?

To be fair I assume a lot of HN users spend most of their time in the terminal anyway, so maybe not representative of your average user

Call it completely frivolous. I've had it hidden since the day I started using macOS and I cannot think of anything I use it for

Right-clicking bouncy icons?

just cmd+tab to them?

When I have 20 different apps open cmd+tab is useless.

You can cmd+tab and click the app?

Or reopen the app you need via spotlight?

Sometimes that doesn’t work for me. I have to klick the icon in that god forsaken Dock and it pops up.

I want Windows/KDE/GNOME whatever, to just copy Mac OS X, not the other way

Interesting. I've only been a (work) mac user for 2 years now and I don't really have anything against it, as long as I can move it to the side (looking at you, Windows 11) - I am not even hiding it.

I mean, sure, it's not i3 and I can't fully work without using a mouse, but alt-tab, and cmd-space and the occasional click work for me. Work as in: as a user with opinions on most software I am just now actively wondering why I never had problem with it :P

Different paradigms. macOS is app-document based while Windows is, well, window-based. Some functionality is also delegated to Exposé/Mission Control.

It all depends on what one’s used to. I always end up frustrated trying to daily drive window-paradigm desktops (including KDE, etc) because windows being the only logical unit of organization makes keeping everything wrangled feel a lot more difficult. As a result, I only run Windows and desktop Linux distros on machines that I’ve assigned to a single purpose (which only ever see 1-4 windows open at any given time).

What apps are document-based nowadays? 90% of people's app use is in browsers and Electron apps that end up being an agglomeration of tabs and documents. And MacOS has objectively horrible window management for apps that run multiple windows.

That's another thing that varies between users. I still use a number of document-based apps written in AppKit and there still exist cross-platform apps that aren't single-window things. Sublime Text and Obsidian come to mind (the latter even being Electron).

macOS window management is basically not managing them at all and allowing them to pile up and overlap like papers on a desk, with relevant parts of each peeking out. Exposé is there for the occasion when all windows or all app windows need to be seen. It doesn't try to micromanage them all into being maximized or tiled. Not everyone's cup of tea but it works for me.

Only if you count programmers only as people.

Why let it run at all then?

`launchctl bootout/gui/$(id -u)/com.apple.Dock.agent`

Enjoy!

Isn't dock also responsible for mission control? There was a trick to set an extremely long show-timeout to effectively permanently hide the dock, if that works it's probably better.

Shoji is $4.99 once. No subscription.

And that's relevant as a Dock replacement how?

Wow, you can pinpoint exactly when design went from interesting to boring. (For me: 10.9 Mavericks to 10.0 Yosemite.)

Also, putting on a product manager hat for a moment: one concern you need to have in your role is creep: small changes accumulate over time into something materially worse, but where each stage is small and not excessively bad on its own. The graphic shows it clearly in the quantity of items on the Dock. The first version had 14: already quite a lot. macOS 27 has 22, and is very wide. I find it visually overwhelming, not just because all the icons have the same silhouette, but because there are so many of them.

Yet I bet the addition or removal of an app to the default Dock was carefully assessed in every single release.

Edit: check out this comment in the thread [1], where tkcranny states it more colourfully than I do :)

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50066878

Mavericks Forever website has notes about goods and bads in different versions of Mac OS X. The good part of history ended in 10.9, and the author managed to port some pieces from 10.6 to 10.9

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.

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.

Yeah, many years ago, I used to move the dock to the left and auto-hide it to recover the screen space. But it resulted in the dock popping up (sliding right) at unexpected times and I ended up clicking the dock items unintentionally.

So, after about a year or so, I defaulted to moving the dock to the left but stopped auto-hiding it.

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.

If it’s auto-hide what’s the point of moving it to the side?

I find I'm much less likely to automatically trigger it on the left than on the bottom. And, muscle memory for on desktop/larger screens where it is not hidden.

changing what cursor actions prompt it to stop hiding

Why would it be pointless then? Those are orthogonal concerns.

Whether you constantly show or auto-hide the dock, it still has to be somewhere. So if you prefer to have it on the side (meaning it also auto-shows when you move your mouse to the side) as opposed to the bottom, it makes absolute sense to move it to the side.

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.

Yes drives me mad.

Maybe they don’t realise you can change what’s there?

They don’t care. They’re not power users, they’ll use whatever defaults are there, and as long as they’re good enough, stick.

Vast majority of computer users (including phones) don’t customize anything beyond the out of the box set up. In fact, I’d that’s even true for my sass customers, only particular percentage of them use any of the customizable settings. Which is why UX is so hard, we have to do our best to make sensible default choices. As technologists, it’s very easy to forget this while on the thick of it.

Dock on the bottom can move between displays. Dock on the left/right is stuck on the leftmost/rightmost display, which can be annoying if you regularly switch between laptop-only and laptop-plus-external-displays layouts.

I make it as small as possible and put it on the right side of the screen and have it auto hide. I can go open it if I absolutely need to but mostly just pretend it doesn't exist.

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.

I agree 10.8/10.9 is the sweet spot.

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.

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

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

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

What does it do? It sitll shows non-active apps. Unless I quit it and if I quit it then it goes out of dock even without this setting unless I've set "keep in dock" which keeps the icon in the dock even with this flag. Genuinely curious. Is it something more nuanced?

Did you kill the dock and re-launch it?

Most set-defaults take effect the next time something is launched, and basically all of the things that affect the dock are only read at launch time.

Yeah, did `killall Finder' quite a few times, just to be sure

Some apps just don't leave the dock.

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

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.

The squircles are really mentally exhausting for me sometimes when juggling a bunch of apps and trying to keep track of which is which, especially now that a bunch of them have the details completely washed out if on a non-4K external display. I'm looking at the Books.app icon on a 1440p monitor and it's just an orange outline with two blobby white wings in it.

Man I hate the squircles. I understand for iOS you want apps to be consistent uniform touch targets. But for the desktop let the UI breathe a little, take off the jacket and tie. Such an absence of negative space with the squircles. There's glimpses of creativity like the Notes icon being the top of a legal pad but god so many icons are just white symbol in square.

I know the Leopard era design is having a bit of a retro cool moment right now (frutiger aero) but for me its all about that pre-Leopard Aqua. Something very bright and friendly about that design language where the Leopard era feels a bit dark, moody, and dusky. Bordering on chiaroscuro. Especially when you compare classic Aqua to like the classic Windows look which while coming off as corporate felt like it had a precision to it (at least to my kid brain).

I have to say my hot take is that I actually kinda like Liquid Glass. It feels like a bit of a throwback to that era and dragging objects behind transparency to see the refraction was the first time in a long time I've ever just been transfixed with just playing with a UI detail. Especially since I use the Dock as bootleg taskbar (undock everything so the only things in it are the open applications and autohide), when it does pop up its fun to see everything bend around.

> I understand for iOS you want apps to be consistent uniform touch targets.

The touch targets can still be sane though. The click targets for the dock aren't the shape of the icons anyway.

There's just no need to unify the look and feel. Convergence didn't happen, its time to give up on it.

> I know the Leopard era design is having a bit of a retro cool moment right now (frutiger aero) but for me its all about that pre-Leopard Aqua. Something very bright and friendly about that design language where the Leopard era feels a bit dark, moody, and dusky. Bordering on chiaroscuro. Especially when you compare classic Aqua to like the classic Windows look which while coming off as corporate felt like it had a precision to it (at least to my kid brain).

I feel exactly the same way about pre/post leopard Aqua. The latter isn’t bad, but the former has a bright optimism that made it fun to sit down at your computer and use it. The 10.2-10.4 variants had toned town the more garish bits from the original and hit a sweet spot.

10.8/10.9 brought back much of that early aqua cheeriness while bringing some refinements and some whimsy of its own. The only “sins” that version commits are the monochrome (albeit still shaded) sidebar icons and iOS-style scrollbars.

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.)

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.

I think early Aqua (10.0-10.1) may be my personal favourite, although I don't think I can explain as to why. I remember liking the pinstripes (although I think they were controversial at the time). The 10.5-10.6 look (which was a relief after the brushed metal tsunami of 10.3 onwards) is a close second place and I still use a Snow Leopard box for occasional tasks to this day. I may even have my slipstreamed 10.6.8 disc image still kicking around somewhere.

There's real value in art. And the designs back then weren't smooth graphic design as we'd understand it today, but artistic.

I miss OS X. Life was better.

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.

Macs were at their absolute peak with 10.6 Snow Leopard. Unfortunately Apple badly ruined it with the iOSification update that was 10.7 Lion, with things getting worse and worse from there.

I think the death of Apple (and the birth of modern Apple) was iOS 7. Skeuomorphism, Steve Jobs being freshly deceased (RIP). The UI looked and felt like an undergraduate design project. The minimalism was pretentious and out of touch, and it's only gotten worse in my opinion.

This kind of retrospective meant something when the software was made with care. Now it’s a sloppy something that takes care only in making profits. UX became irrelevant.

Snow Leopard was my favourite. Was also the version I first started out with as a Mac user, so there's probably a nostalgia component that influences that opinion.

What I do know is that in the uniform-looking icons we have in the current dock, I seem to find myself hunting for the right icon to click a lot more than I have in the past.

The icons reflecting on the isometric bar is also far more tasteful than any of the semi-opaque tricks they're doing today. I agree that skeuomorphism was getting out of control back then, but the only alternative wasn't to go brutally flat with everything, everywhere.

Aesthetically I think the dock peaked with 10.9 (Mavericks).

10.9 seems also to be the last version that had an "depth" to the icons.

The Dock is a poor man's Start Menu / Panel. Missing major features such as a built in search, universal menu, easy window management (no, Mission Control does not count) and system options.

The Menu Bar at the top unnecessarily separates those out.

The Dock has always had a major issue of taking up a hilarious amount of vertical space in its default position. Having it vertical on the left or right side of the screen in "auto hide" mode is the most optimal configuration.

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.

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

Heh, Internet Explorer in the early days :)

Uh oh, TIL exploder was a thing on a mac. I moved to macintosh when first macbook air was released, so that’s os x leopard or snow leopard.

Good on OP for pronouncing the Roman numeral "X" as His Steveness intended.

I miss the 10.10 - 10.15 era

I've got it on the left and auto-hide on my laptop. Otherwise, it just sits there and has the apps I use on it.

Took at least 5 minutes to set it up and add the apps, then I forgot about it until now.

Just went and removed some apps that I used but don't anymore.

The squircles suck. 10.10–10.14 were best.

Most useless UI element

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