Is the Windows task bar usable 2595

James Davis

Yes, it's surprising just how lame Microsoft can be in gui design. The company has been trying to hone its gui for over 20 years now, and still they botch basic stuff like the task bar. It's surprising that you don't have complete control over the things you mention: size, position, display, ... At least, if you do, it must be buried somewhere.

There's an option for the task bar called something like "group similar items." If you check it, the task bar puts all windows for a given app next to each other, regardless of when they were opened. However, that is only a marginally helpful. If the taskbar gets crowded enough, those windows get collapsed into a single "drawer." I actually prefer having the "drawer" all the time. It's much less clutter, and more intuitive. Gnome offers that option, which is how the Mac does it as well, but I don't think Windows has that option.

I also don't know how to "pin" the windows in a predictable place. On Mac, the items in your dock are permanently "pinned," and the others can be moved and arranged as you like. OS-2 had a way of pinning and arranging task bar items in its gui over 10 years ago. If fact, OS-2 had some really cool taskbar-dock kinds of things all the way back then that I don't think any other system has even now. For instance, you could have a multiple layouts of the dock and switch between them instantly. So you could have a dock for programming, and a dock for music, etc. By clicking in the right place, you could scroll through them or choose the one you wanted, and you'd have something adapted to how you were working at that moment. It was quite nice, and it came out in 1994. Kind of sad, huh?

For Microsoft bashers, here's a great quote, one of my favorite of all time. It's from a 1994 NY Times interview with Brad Silverberg, who was in charge of the Windows 95 project at Microsoft. OS-2 Warp had already shipped (it turns out more than a year before Windows 95), with internet tools and these gui features I've mentioned which Windows still doesn't have. Yet, somehow Silverberg is here claiming that OS-2 Warp is a copy of Windows 95: "OS-2 is a cheap imitation of the next Windows release. They've basically taken what we've announced and said `me too.' It's a product without a vision from a company without a vision."

Inexplicable, but hilarious.