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>
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.)
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
So, after about a year or so, I defaulted to moving the dock to the left but stopped auto-hiding it.
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.)
I’ve come to thoroughly dislike the grind getting rid of them all with the dog slow animation each new Mac I set up.
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.
link: https://macos-defaults.com/dock/static-only.html
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.
defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-time-modifier -int 20
so that I never have to see it.