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Dock vs. Taskbar, Basic

Overview

Mac OS X and Windows XP have two different strategies for working with open windows and applications. OS X is considered an application-centric operating system, while Windows XP is considered a document-centric operating system.

OS X has the Dock for working with windows and applications, while XP has the Taskbar.

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Basic Features

Mac OS X

The primary way of working with applications and documents on OS X is through the Dock.


OS X's Dock

OS X is "application-centric," so application shortcuts are stored on the left side of the dock, while document/folder shortcuts, minimized windows, and the Trash are stored on the right side. A vertical line clearly separates each half.

Application icons in the dock perform three main functions:

  • Launching (click an application icon to launch that application)
  • Controlling application-specific settings (quitting, hiding open windows, etc.)
  • Bringing all open windows to the front (see Window Management)

Once an application is launched, the latter two functions will become available. A black arrow will appear beneath the application icon to denote that it is running. Clicking the icon of a running application will bring all of that application's windows to the front.

In addition, once an application is running, its context menu will expand to include options specific to that application. For instance, iTunes' context menu shows the currently playing song, and lets you adjust some options such as repeat, shuffle, etc. This lets you control the application (to an extent) without first switching to its window.


iTunes' context menu

While the dock's background is transparent, items behind it are not clickable. While most applications respect the dock and smartly do not let you move their windows behind it, not all applications are written as dock-aware. For ones that aren't (such as Internet Explorer), key portions of their interface (such as a resize corner) can easily be placed behind the dock, making them inaccessible.

The dock supports "magnification" - as you move your mouse over it, the icons directly under your pointer will grow in size, making them easier to identify. The drawback to this behavior is that icons become a "moving target." Fortunately, the amount of growth is a variable setting, and it can be turned off altogether (it is disabled by default).

One of the dock's most impressive features is its advanced real-time application feedback. DVDs and QuickTime movies continue playing back in the dock while minimized, for instance. When an application like Photoshop or BBEdit is in the process of completing an operation, its dock icon sprouts a progress bar. OS X's Activity Monitor application can alter its dock icon to dynamically display CPU Usage, CPU History, Network Usage, Disk Activity, or Memory Usage. Mail sports a red badge showing how many unread messages you have, while iChat sports one to show how many instant messages you've received (if iChat is in the background).

Windows XP

The primary way of working with applications and documents on XP is through the Taskbar.


Windows XP's taskbar (system tray not shown)

Windows XP is "document-centric," so application icons stored in the taskbar are used solely for launching purposes. Once an application is launched, taskbar buttons appear for each open document in that application. Once all the documents of a specific application are closed, the application quits.

If you have many open windows of the same application, they will condense down into one button to conserve space (as seen above with Internet Explorer). Clicking this "group" button will pop up a menu of all open windows of that application.

Since application launching is separated out from working with individual documents and windows, you can use an application shortcut to quickly launch multiple instances of that application. For example, if Internet Explorer is open and displaying a webpage, clicking Internet Explorer's shortcut icon in the taskbar will open a new Internet Explorer window.

Managing Multiple Windows

How exactly should an operating system handle accessing multiple windows of the same application? The application- and document-centric designs of OS X and XP, respectively, handle this issue differently.

Mac OS X

Click a running application's dock icon to bring all of that application's windows to the front. Their position and stacking order will remain untouched.

Click and hold (or right-click, or control-click) an application's icon in the dock to see a list of windows associated with that application. The frontmost window is checked; other open windows have no icon, and minimized windows have a diamond. Select the window you want from the list to bring it to the front.

dock-menu.gif

Windows XP

Since Windows XP is "document-centric," each open document gets its own taskbar button. Click on a taskbar button to bring that document to the front. If the document is already frontmost, clicking its taskbar button will minimize the window.

If there are many open windows, windows of the same application will be grouped together to conserve space:

taskbar-menu.gif
Grouped taskbar buttons

When this happens, clicking on a grouped taskbar button will display a menu of all the open windows of that application. From there, you can choose which window to switch to, although there is no distinction between the frontmost window and other windows. If you select the frontmost window from this list, it will minimize.

Right-clicking on a grouped taskbar button presents a contextual menu with options to cascade, tile, minimize, or close all windows. However, you can't bring all of them to the front at once.

taskbar-context.gif

Whose text labels are superior?
Some readers have mentioned that the dock's handling of text labels is inferior to that of the taskbar, because the dock's text labels only appear when your mouse is over an item. In contrast, XP always displays text lables for all its taskbar buttons. However, that approach is not optimal either:

taskbar labels

Under anything more than light use, taskbar text labels degrade to mere visual noise. In the above screenshot, the text on the buttons for Microsoft Outlook, Word, and Excel becomes meaningless, as it does nothing to help differentiate each button group. When this happens, you'll have to resort to mousing over an item to see its text label - just like you do on OS X.

Managing Multiple Applications

Mac OS X and Windows XP have different approaches to situations when a user is running lots of applications.

Mac OS X

For obvious usability reasons, OS X's dock will not expand to be a greater width than your monitor. Thus, once you have so many dock icons that the dock spans the entire width of the screen, OS X begins scaling all the icons down in size to create room for additional ones. While this behavior is clever, smaller icons are harder to identify as well as target. Though you can enable magnification to assist you when this happens, this creates a moving target out of icons (as discussed above).

Windows XP

As the number of running applications increases, XP starts out by truncating the text on each taskbar button label. Next, it begins clumping windows into groups to save screen space (as discussed above). Finally, it relegates additional applications to secondary rows of the taskbar, accessible via up and down arrows. Though XP lets you change the height of your taskbar to accommodate multiple rows of applications without scrolling, this takes up additional screen space.

Conclusion

While each operating system takes a different approach to application/window management (application- vs. document-centric), neither implementation is perfect. OS X's dock has many great features, but suffers from a number of usability flaws. The same goes for XP's taskbar. Overall, each operating system's offerings seem evenly matched.

Mac OS X: 7
Windows XP: 7

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