* Posts by Paul

2 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Oct 2008

Apple patents OS X Dock

Paul

@ Webster

"Most importantly - Paul, Windows 95 with the first US Task Bar (Dockable apps) was first publically SHOWN in late 1994 WITH THE TASK BAR! I never wrote anything about first for sale. INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY is based on when first done and the proof was that MS showed it at the Dev Conf in Redmond (I was there along with 2300 other developers) in '94! There were press leak pics of Win 95 all over the place in 1994."

Your point being? NEXTSTEP was publicly demoed prior to that... now, I'd say more, but let's look at your next point first:

"Beside, there is NO Taskbar or "Dock" with and "dragable" capability on any version of NeXTstep ... before Windows 95 anyway! Proof? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:NeXTSTEP_desktop.jpg"

Congratulations! You've posted a link to an image! All that does is prove that you've never seen NEXTSTEP in action, so you see a static image and cry 'Oh, there's no drag'n'drop!' Well done!

You see that row of icons on the right-hand side? That's the dock. You drag icons from the file browser window over to the dock. If they are applications, and the dock icon slot is free, your application now sits proudly on the dock ready for you launch by double-clicking it.

A 'taskbar'-ish functionality was provided by visual cues inside the app icon. An ellipsis in the dock icon means that the application is not running. Not the best in the world, but certainly easy to spot apps that weren't running. Incidentally, if an app was running which wasn't in the dock, it would put a tile along the bottom of the display, along with any iconised documents.

Now, like I said earlier, if you have a document you want opened, you can just drag the document icon over a relevant icon on the dock and it'll open up for you.

Here is Jobs demoing NeXTSTEP 3. I am unsure of the date this was produced, but I think it's safe to say that it was somewhere around 1993: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j02b8Fuz73A

Pay attention to what Jobs says about the dock. He doesn't go into great depth, but is that enough proof that NeXTSTEP did drag'n'drop to the dock?

There is also http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1wYy5qvA24 which appears to be NeXTSTEP 2. It's just a shame he doesn't show off the drag'n'drop capabilities of the dock to any great extent.

"All Stevie Gods did with this "wonder OS" was rip-off FreeBSD anyway .... continuing his career as an OS Thief."

Partially correct, partially hand-waving and trolling.

Jobs took initially took on the developer of CMU Mach to work at NeXT. Mach was to form the kernel with 4.2BSD providing the rest of the underlaying operating system. Naturally, 4.2BSD is somewhat deprecated now, so what did Avi do when it comes to updating Mach for OS X? Use a recent descendant of 4.4BSD.

So OS X isn't exactly a FreeBSD 'rip off', much in the same way that Windows isn't a 'rip off' of 4.3BSD for including a socket implementation based on that of BSD.

"So .... correct yourself. 8^P"

...but there's nothing to correct?

Paul
Gates Halo

@Webster Phreaky

NeXTSTEP would allow one to drag documents over an app on the dock and do one of several things:-

If the app was running, it would pass inform the app to open the document.

If the app wasn't running, start the application and have it open the document.

The NeXT dock also had a recycler on to which users could drag unwanted files - similar to, oh surprise surprise, Recycle Bin (albeit this was probably taken from the Mac, as Jobs took a lot of ex-Apple Lisa/Mac hackers along to NeXT)

If you look really closely at NeXTSTEP, you will even see the UI buttons used somehow make an appearance in Windows 95, but that's ok, as you're on your Apple-bashing spree, you'll just say that NeXT took the design from Microsoft... except NeXTSTEP was around before Windows 95 was even an idea.

Oh, and your comment on Unix/BSD is somewhat moot given that the X11 Windowing System and window managers and desktop environments are somewhat independent from those systems. Even with that taken into consideration, I recall CDE allowing users to drag things from the file manager to applications in the dock. It seems that in your haste to troll, you missed out on something that was seen in most commercial Unix systems from the 80s and early 90s. I also suspect that OPEN LOOK did a similar thing - one could certainly do funky inter-application drags.

Incidentally, the link to that blogspot entry is somewhat interesting, although it does miss out on an entire swathe of quite influential user interfaces, you might be better off using http://www.guidebookgallery.org to actually research things before posting.

So, to recap:

NeXTSTEP 1.0 - 12 Oct 1988

Windows 2.0 - 9 Dec 1987

OPEN LOOK 1.0 - Apr 1989

Windows 3.0 - 22 May 1990

CDE 1.0 - 1993

Windows 95 - 24 Aug 1995