UI Opinions

Aaron J Reichow reic0024 at d.umn.edu
Thu Apr 27 16:18:57 UTC 2000


On Thu, 27 Apr 2000, Russell Allen wrote:

> This is interesting.  Was the Next dock aligned along one of the sides of
> the screen to take advantage of Fitt's Law when dragging/selecting
> minimized windows?  And what did it do as the number of minimized windows
> increased?  Without the growing-shrinking-mouse-over-eye-candy feature did
> the icons shrink, or scroll off screen or what?

I don't know if it had anything to do with Fitt's Law (?), but it was
aligned on the right side of the screen, and couldn't be moved to any
other side, although it could be hidden, by dragging the topmost dock
element (the unremoveable NeXT icon which brought up the File Viewer) to
the bottom of the screen.

When you minimized a window, it went to the bottom edge of the screen, to
the left most spot open.  They never got bigger or smaller with the number
of icon minimized, and didn't have the text of the window appear on a
mouseover (they were already over it, in small, but readable text).   I
don't know what happened when you have more minimized window icons than
the width of your screen - perhaps it started on the next row up on the
left.  I never ran into that problem -- you could also Hide applications,
like you can in Mac OS, making every instance of the program's windows
disappear.  I utilize that more than minimizing, whereas on Windows, the
only option is minizing.

Aaron





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