The Dock on Mac, from OS 10 to macOS 27

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Heh, Internet Explorer in the early days :)

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.

I miss OS X. Life was better.

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.

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.)

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 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.

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.

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

I miss the 10.10 - 10.15 era

Most useless UI element

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