@CPTMuggle This reminds me of a video Paul Miller posted a while back showing a trackpad ui concept. It was sort of like webos for the desktop using a trackpad. Really cool concept.
@dovemouse That's a very cool concept and a very nice vid to explain it indeed. I saw this almost a year ago and I can only say it would be extremely cool if Apple will release something similar to it with this touchpad. 10-finger control computer might very be the next revolutution in human-computer interaction, if you think about it, it's just a plain and stupid QWERTY-phenomenon that we're all still using a single mouse cursor as the only way to interact with computers.
imagine if the whole thing was backlit and you could use it as a monochrome screen. you could add custom buttons and sliders etc to it. super cool me thinks!
That video, and this product, begin with an incorrect assertion. The video says:
"A user's entire hand... is reduced to a simple pair of coordinates."
That's wrong because at the same time that the hand is moving the mouse, it can simultaneously manipulate two or three buttons or a wheel. Therefore, the user can activate or select objects while moving, in one fluid motion. Performing selection (or clicking-type) actions with a touch interface means halting and tapping or some other interrupting maneuver.
Another problem with touch interfaces (for anything other than simple selecting or dragging) is that the special gestures they require aren't readily discoverable by the user. You can see the buttons on a keyboard or mouse (unless it's an Apple mouse, of course). But how are you supposed to guess that a triple-swipe in some direction is going to have a special meaning? There are no legends anywhere to reveal all the secret gestures. It's so perfectly Apple in its obscurity; Apple's the company that, alone in the marketplace, doesn't put real Delete keys on its laptops. They expect everyone to cumbersomely make do with only a Backspace key (mislabeled "delete") or guess at a completely unmarked two-handed hotkey to simply delete a character.
While the video correctly points out the absurdity of working with a touchscreen all day, it goes on to make another flawed assertion about window management. It says, "Modern workflows with many windowed areas and objects," but then shows a mock-up that's distinctly Mac-like. The Mac's window management is anything but modern; Apple has clung to the unfortunate decision to have a single menu bar stuck to the top of the screen (on one monitor), and this very decision is what leads to a proliferation of floating windows.
Mac developers, not having a main application window frame in which to work, treat the entire screen as a single window. They might as well, since the user has to roll up to the top of it every time they need to access a menu. This has created the mess that is the typical Mac desktop. Applications do not corral their child windows nor put up an opaque background upon which to work; you're herding a gaggle of windows around the screen, through which you can see all the other apps' windows and whatever's littering your desktop. Part of good application UI design is to create a workspace in which tools are well placed. Barfing up 10 windows all over the desktop is lazy, piss-poor design. Think of how many Mac apps can't be moved, resized, or minimized, because they're a mass of separate windows. Multitouch is going to solve that? No.
But really, let's take a look at what this represents for Apple's direction. This is the company that has always prided itself on being the computer for "creative" people and content producers. Those days are gone. Touch interfaces are for taking what you're given, not for producing it yourself; they're extremely cumbersome for text input and not precise enough for many other kinds of "content creation" work. They're good for numbly picking from the choices that someone else thrusts upon you.
The canned, limited nature of touch interfaces fits perfectly with Apple's effort to eliminate any use of its products that it hasn't foreseen. Look at the pompousness of claiming to invent a new product category and then utterly failing to imagine the ways people want to use it.
Hey, Apple can do what it wants. But its "1984" commercial now stands as an embarrassing testament to hypocrisy.
@Information Central While you make some valid observations, I think you're a little stuck on how stuff works right now. I agree that just throwing in a multitouch controller and not fundamentally changing the way the desktop works, will not work. But I disagree that having a mouse with a few buttons is the end-all of input schemes, with 5 fingers and multitouch gestures you have so many more degrees of freedom, that it would allow a completely different way of working, something that doesn't fit in with the current desktop paradigm yet. Also, I don't think multitouch gestures are 'hard to learn' or 'obscure' the way Apple is using them. In fact the only gestures used are 2-finger tap, 2-, 3- and 4- finger swipe, pinch-zoom and pinch-rotate, all of which are intuitive and easy to remember, and most of which can be assigned to arbitrary actions.
And of course the video is cutting quite a few corners, but that's to be expected for a sales pitch. I think the examples they show are just a beginning and it definitely looks promisiing.
@Information Central "it goes on to make another flawed assertion about window management. It says, "Modern workflows with many windowed areas and objects," but then shows a mock-up that's distinctly Mac-like."
And there's your flawed assertion.
"The Mac's window management is anything but modern; Apple has clung to the unfortunate decision to have a single menu bar stuck to the top of the screen (on one monitor), and this very decision is what leads to a proliferation of floating windows."
Yes. By explicit design. The MDI model is anything but modern, too, and it has the unfortunate interactivity problems of duplicated controls, inability to select child windows from other levels (you have to switch to the parent and then choose the child), and constrained UI design. If your various windows are locked into wasteful grids, what good does that do? Why not have a floating palette for all documents, and the ability to freely layer and mix UI objects on your desktop so you can, you know, multitask.
The models are different, and your conclusion that it's a mistake is downright laughable. You may prefer the force-nested MDI approach, but it's not exactly modern. Windows has in fact grown much more Mac-like in its windowing over time, not the other way around.
"Mac developers, not having a main application window frame in which to work, treat the entire screen as a single window."
Precisely. This is intentional. It's why there is so much drag and drop interactivity, floating palettes, inspector windows, sliding drawers, and other aspects specifically designed to SHARE THE SCREEN with everything you put on it and like you arrange things on an actual desktop.
"Think of how many Mac apps can't be moved, resized, or minimized, because they're a mass of separate windows. Multitouch is going to solve that? No." It's not a problem to solve. It's an intentional design. Each window can be moved, resized, hidden, layered, or docked as you want. If you want to minimize an "application" (meaning all of its active windows), just hide the app.
You don't have to like the approach, but it's not some broken mistake in need of "fixing". It's just different. It has many advantages over the MDI system, and some disadvantages. But you're absolutely wrong about Windows/MDI approach being the One True Way--expressig your myopia while you hilariously complain about Apple having tunnel vision.
@Information Central Thoughtful comments, but you're coming at it from your own experience. Do we also need labeled buttons for cut/copy/paste? My mom doesn't seem to have a problem deleting things on a Mac. And it was quite a learning curve for her to trust that the thing she was moving on the desk was tied to the tiny arrow on the screen. The mouse is not the perfect input mechanism.
There's a learning curve for all this shit. There's no single holy grail. If gestures make things go more smoothly, then at least power users will learn them.
@CPTMuggle I dont get it! Please someone explain this to me... People wiht laptops deal with trackpads because a mouse can be annoying to carry around. When you can/want you use a mouse....So why would I carry yet another trackpad? And why would I use a trackpad with my desltop?? Mices are much easier to use...
I know apple can sell just about anything and ppl will still buy it but seriously, someone explain to me what the point of this thing is because I am really not getting this!
Jesus dude. A.) CHILL OUT. B.) Go outside. C.) wow the 1984 cliche is lame. D.) I use mac all the time, and have never experiences this barfing of ten windows... E.) why not run in full screen when you've got spaces? All fullscreen, all the time. You've gotta learn to use something, really, before you can criticise it. (otherwise it just looks like you have no idea what you're talking about.)
I work in OSX every day(doing iPhone/iPad dev), and your observations are spot on. It takes a LOT more work to have a nice, clean, organized desktop on OSX than in Win 7. Everyone else in my office uses macs as well, so sometimes I'll have to go use someone else's computer, and it'll take a few minutes just to understand where they've put everything because of all the clutter: random finder windows everywhere, apps that are running but have no windows open, etc.
I'm a big fan of dual monitor setups, and OSX is pretty bad at that too. The menubar can only be on one of the two monitors, so if you're working on the right monitor, and you want to get to the file menu, you'll have to go back to the left monitor just to get to it. There are also the problems of not being able to maximize windows, and it's tricky to move them between monitors and all that. I prefer Win 7's "Windows key + cursor key" shortcuts that allow you to easily move windows around the screen and between monitors(holding shift). Really handy. I also put Win 7's start bar on the left hand side of the screen(instead of at the bottom), where it becomes way more natural and efficient to use.
@Information Central Wow, just the other day I was wondering if anyone out there actually thinks the Mac menu bar is worse than the way Windows does things. I didn't think it was possible.
1. The menu bar always being available makes things instantly discoverable (much to your chagrin I'm sure). On Windows, using the keyboard, how do you make a new folder on the desktop? How do you jump to the Program Files folder? How do you access the help files? How do you empty the trash? The Finder's menu bar answers all of these things: shift-command-N, shift-command-A, command-?, and shift-command-delete.
2. By the time you have more than a few programs open in Windows, there are a ton of menu bars on your screen taking up valuable space and increasing the visual clutter. And you aren't even going to use the ones that aren't in front. This became such a big issue a long time ago that to this day programs are coming up with new and confusingly non-standard ways to HIDE the menu bar until it's needed. Do you tap the alt key once? Do you click the program's name in the title bar? Is it one of the buttons in the equally non-standard toolbar? On the Mac it's always in the same spot and always looks and works exactly the same way. Ahh, standards.
3. Another benefit is that an application can stay running after you close the last document, since the menu bar will stay open. I'm I'm working on some document, then I save and close it so I can work on another document, on Windows I have to find and relaunch the program because it just quit on me (unless it's MDI; more on that below). I have to consciously remember to open the next file before closing the current one (which is also hilariously non-standard: will the open feature launch another window within the same process? Will it launch a second copy of the program? Will it open the document within the same window, overwriting what I already had open? Who knows? On the Mac it always opens a new document window within the same application).
4. If floating-window syndrome bothers you, then use Spaces. It's like MDI except more flexible. MDI is dead these days anyway since it makes poor use of space and prevents you from moving a document window to a different screen. It's kind of like how Windows 7 is starting to kill off the full-screen maximize feature since it makes horrible use of space on large/widescreen monitors. And they're killing off the old task bar design since it was unorganized and also made poor use of space.
I'm sure it's just a coincidence that all of their redesigns for those features are similar to how the Mac does things.
Nobody said everything should be forced into an MDI system. The point is that other GUIs (pretty much anything but the Mac) treat the desktop as an unlimited space. The Mac constrains that space with the one menu bar.
Aside from its sheer distance from where you're working (surprisingly no one brought up Fitt's Law and ignored the big "D" for distance in it like they usually do), a single menu bar changes its contents behind the user's back, depending on which of potentially many child windows he clicked on. Using Photoshop AND Illustrator? Woops, whose floating color wheel did I click on?
Hey, I'm done editing a document with this app, so let's minimize it and get back to what I was doing in Xcode. Oh wait, the menu has nothing to do with the app that's filling the screen. Brilliant. And to compound things, a lot of Mac apps don't put anything meaningful in the floating windows' title bars. You get "Inspector". Well WTF am I inspecting, and which app does it belong to?
So you might say, "Use Command-Tab then." I'll give credit to Apple for admitting that someone else had a good idea here and adopting it. But there are two problems:
1. This doesn't address the floating-window mess. Command-Tabbing switches focus, but you're still going to see the UI of the previous app through the holes in the one you just switched to.
2. Command-Tabbing to an app on the Mac doesn't restore its windows. Seriously, WTF on this one. You Command-Tab back to what you were working on, and it remains minimized and useless in the Dock. So you have to roll down there and click on it anyway.
"This is intentional. It's why there is so much drag and drop interactivity, floating palettes, inspector windows, sliding drawers, and other aspects specifically designed to SHARE THE SCREEN with everything you put on it and like you arrange things on an actual desktop."
I don't pile things on top of each other on my desk when I'm trying to use them concurrently. I also don't cut holes in my newspaper, put it down on top of another newspaper, and then try to read it. That's what your Mac desktop is like: a pile of overlapping UIs with holes cut out of them, through which you can see all the crap underneath.
Do you read clear-plastic books, too?
Dragging and dropping between floating windows is stymied because (as noted above) the windows' owners aren't identified. It also conflicts with the workaround for the mess that Mac apologists often offer: Oh, just hide the app. Well, now your drag-&-drop argument is out the window.
And people complaining about the Windows task bar showing lots of contents: At least it shows (or at least did, before Windows 7 or Vista) what's running. The Dock indicates running apps with a tiny "shine" underneath the icon? Come on. Five hours later, and Photoshop is still running with no UI or open documents. Great use of resources.
Using the Mac GUI is an exercise in running around and tidying up, all day long. Occasionally survey the Dock for the shines and shut down apps you don't need. Herd windows around (and let's not forget the asinine inability to resize windows from their edges on the Mac). Roll, roll, roll up to the menu bar on your 30-inch monitor. Roll, roll, roll down to the lower-right corner of any window you need to resize, then roll back up to the title bar to move it.
Other windowing GUIs allow you to work the Mac way if you want to, and if the application developer has seen fit to implement it. Witness Photoshop on Windows. In fact, witness any app with a strong Mac heritage on Windows.
The good news is that even Apple is moving away from the armada-of-windows paradigm. Aperture is one window, and more such steps forward are forthcoming.
They've also realized, at least in a few apps, that a glaring white background is a failed relic of the late '80s/early '90s, when the mania was to try to make the screen an analog for a piece of paper. That doesn't work, because a piece of paper doesn't blast light into your face all day. But sadly, Mac users are still stuck with the system-wide inverse color scheme that can't be changed, unlike other OSes that allow the user to set up any scheme he wants.
As far as Windows becoming more Mac like: There's a reason GUIs evolved away from the way the Mac is still doing things. A lot of the people who made those decisions, and those perceptive enough to defend them, aren't around anymore. Not to mention the perceived need to change things for marketing purposes. How else would you defend Apple degrading its products and user experience by switching to glossy screens under pressure from third-tier vendors at Best Buy? That's not leadership.
HP has had plenty of time to fine-tune its finger-friendly TouchSmart software, and now, its newest model, the TouchSmart 610, ushers in a fresh design, highlighted by a hinge that allows the display to slide down and lie nearly flat.
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this seems like a super intutive way to use my desktop
@CPTMuggle This reminds me of a video Paul Miller posted a while back showing a trackpad ui concept. It was sort of like webos for the desktop using a trackpad. Really cool concept.
@thomasaquinas
this one? http://10gui.com/video/
it was the first thing that came into my head when i saw this.
it would be cool if it does pen input too for drawing etc but i fear that apple are against styli.
@dovemouse
That's a very cool concept and a very nice vid to explain it indeed. I saw this almost a year ago and I can only say it would be extremely cool if Apple will release something similar to it with this touchpad. 10-finger control computer might very be the next revolutution in human-computer interaction, if you think about it, it's just a plain and stupid QWERTY-phenomenon that we're all still using a single mouse cursor as the only way to interact with computers.
@drange
yeah its quite an old vid.
i might pick one of these up (depending on the price) and do some ui work it - watch this space ;)
do you remember that backlit button tech that apple patented?
http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/30/apple-applies-for-disappearing-button-patent/
imagine if the whole thing was backlit and you could use it as a monochrome screen. you could add custom buttons and sliders etc to it.
super cool me thinks!
@dovemouse There are iPhone styluses that will also work on the touchpads of the latest Macbooks, so I expect they'll also work on this touchpad.
That video, and this product, begin with an incorrect assertion. The video says:
"A user's entire hand... is reduced to a simple pair of coordinates."
That's wrong because at the same time that the hand is moving the mouse, it can simultaneously manipulate two or three buttons or a wheel. Therefore, the user can activate or select objects while moving, in one fluid motion. Performing selection (or clicking-type) actions with a touch interface means halting and tapping or some other interrupting maneuver.
Another problem with touch interfaces (for anything other than simple selecting or dragging) is that the special gestures they require aren't readily discoverable by the user. You can see the buttons on a keyboard or mouse (unless it's an Apple mouse, of course). But how are you supposed to guess that a triple-swipe in some direction is going to have a special meaning? There are no legends anywhere to reveal all the secret gestures. It's so perfectly Apple in its obscurity; Apple's the company that, alone in the marketplace, doesn't put real Delete keys on its laptops. They expect everyone to cumbersomely make do with only a Backspace key (mislabeled "delete") or guess at a completely unmarked two-handed hotkey to simply delete a character.
While the video correctly points out the absurdity of working with a touchscreen all day, it goes on to make another flawed assertion about window management. It says, "Modern workflows with many windowed areas and objects," but then shows a mock-up that's distinctly Mac-like. The Mac's window management is anything but modern; Apple has clung to the unfortunate decision to have a single menu bar stuck to the top of the screen (on one monitor), and this very decision is what leads to a proliferation of floating windows.
Mac developers, not having a main application window frame in which to work, treat the entire screen as a single window. They might as well, since the user has to roll up to the top of it every time they need to access a menu. This has created the mess that is the typical Mac desktop. Applications do not corral their child windows nor put up an opaque background upon which to work; you're herding a gaggle of windows around the screen, through which you can see all the other apps' windows and whatever's littering your desktop. Part of good application UI design is to create a workspace in which tools are well placed. Barfing up 10 windows all over the desktop is lazy, piss-poor design. Think of how many Mac apps can't be moved, resized, or minimized, because they're a mass of separate windows. Multitouch is going to solve that? No.
But really, let's take a look at what this represents for Apple's direction. This is the company that has always prided itself on being the computer for "creative" people and content producers. Those days are gone. Touch interfaces are for taking what you're given, not for producing it yourself; they're extremely cumbersome for text input and not precise enough for many other kinds of "content creation" work. They're good for numbly picking from the choices that someone else thrusts upon you.
The canned, limited nature of touch interfaces fits perfectly with Apple's effort to eliminate any use of its products that it hasn't foreseen. Look at the pompousness of claiming to invent a new product category and then utterly failing to imagine the ways people want to use it.
Hey, Apple can do what it wants. But its "1984" commercial now stands as an embarrassing testament to hypocrisy.
@CPTMuggle
I've always wanted somethin like this. Apple keyboard withoutthe numberpad but this instead. This might be interesting !!
@Information Central
While you make some valid observations, I think you're a little stuck on how stuff works right now. I agree that just throwing in a multitouch controller and not fundamentally changing the way the desktop works, will not work. But I disagree that having a mouse with a few buttons is the end-all of input schemes, with 5 fingers and multitouch gestures you have so many more degrees of freedom, that it would allow a completely different way of working, something that doesn't fit in with the current desktop paradigm yet. Also, I don't think multitouch gestures are 'hard to learn' or 'obscure' the way Apple is using them. In fact the only gestures used are 2-finger tap, 2-, 3- and 4- finger swipe, pinch-zoom and pinch-rotate, all of which are intuitive and easy to remember, and most of which can be assigned to arbitrary actions.
And of course the video is cutting quite a few corners, but that's to be expected for a sales pitch. I think the examples they show are just a beginning and it definitely looks promisiing.
@Information Central
"it goes on to make another flawed assertion about window management. It says, "Modern workflows with many windowed areas and objects," but then shows a mock-up that's distinctly Mac-like."
And there's your flawed assertion.
"The Mac's window management is anything but modern; Apple has clung to the unfortunate decision to have a single menu bar stuck to the top of the screen (on one monitor), and this very decision is what leads to a proliferation of floating windows."
Yes. By explicit design. The MDI model is anything but modern, too, and it has the unfortunate interactivity problems of duplicated controls, inability to select child windows from other levels (you have to switch to the parent and then choose the child), and constrained UI design. If your various windows are locked into wasteful grids, what good does that do? Why not have a floating palette for all documents, and the ability to freely layer and mix UI objects on your desktop so you can, you know, multitask.
The models are different, and your conclusion that it's a mistake is downright laughable. You may prefer the force-nested MDI approach, but it's not exactly modern. Windows has in fact grown much more Mac-like in its windowing over time, not the other way around.
"Mac developers, not having a main application window frame in which to work, treat the entire screen as a single window."
Precisely. This is intentional. It's why there is so much drag and drop interactivity, floating palettes, inspector windows, sliding drawers, and other aspects specifically designed to SHARE THE SCREEN with everything you put on it and like you arrange things on an actual desktop.
"Think of how many Mac apps can't be moved, resized, or minimized, because they're a mass of separate windows. Multitouch is going to solve that? No."
It's not a problem to solve. It's an intentional design. Each window can be moved, resized, hidden, layered, or docked as you want. If you want to minimize an "application" (meaning all of its active windows), just hide the app.
You don't have to like the approach, but it's not some broken mistake in need of "fixing". It's just different. It has many advantages over the MDI system, and some disadvantages. But you're absolutely wrong about Windows/MDI approach being the One True Way--expressig your myopia while you hilariously complain about Apple having tunnel vision.
Hypocrisy, indeed.
@Information Central Thoughtful comments, but you're coming at it from your own experience. Do we also need labeled buttons for cut/copy/paste? My mom doesn't seem to have a problem deleting things on a Mac. And it was quite a learning curve for her to trust that the thing she was moving on the desk was tied to the tiny arrow on the screen. The mouse is not the perfect input mechanism.
There's a learning curve for all this shit. There's no single holy grail. If gestures make things go more smoothly, then at least power users will learn them.
@CPTMuggle I dont get it! Please someone explain this to me... People wiht laptops deal with trackpads because a mouse can be annoying to carry around. When you can/want you use a mouse....So why would I carry yet another trackpad? And why would I use a trackpad with my desltop?? Mices are much easier to use...
I know apple can sell just about anything and ppl will still buy it but seriously, someone explain to me what the point of this thing is because I am really not getting this!
@Information Central
Jesus dude.
A.) CHILL OUT.
B.) Go outside.
C.) wow the 1984 cliche is lame.
D.) I use mac all the time, and have never experiences this barfing of ten windows...
E.) why not run in full screen when you've got spaces? All fullscreen, all the time. You've gotta learn to use something, really, before you can criticise it. (otherwise it just looks like you have no idea what you're talking about.)
@Information Central
I work in OSX every day(doing iPhone/iPad dev), and your observations are spot on. It takes a LOT more work to have a nice, clean, organized desktop on OSX than in Win 7. Everyone else in my office uses macs as well, so sometimes I'll have to go use someone else's computer, and it'll take a few minutes just to understand where they've put everything because of all the clutter: random finder windows everywhere, apps that are running but have no windows open, etc.
I'm a big fan of dual monitor setups, and OSX is pretty bad at that too. The menubar can only be on one of the two monitors, so if you're working on the right monitor, and you want to get to the file menu, you'll have to go back to the left monitor just to get to it. There are also the problems of not being able to maximize windows, and it's tricky to move them between monitors and all that. I prefer Win 7's "Windows key + cursor key" shortcuts that allow you to easily move windows around the screen and between monitors(holding shift). Really handy. I also put Win 7's start bar on the left hand side of the screen(instead of at the bottom), where it becomes way more natural and efficient to use.
@Information Central Wow, just the other day I was wondering if anyone out there actually thinks the Mac menu bar is worse than the way Windows does things. I didn't think it was possible.
1. The menu bar always being available makes things instantly discoverable (much to your chagrin I'm sure). On Windows, using the keyboard, how do you make a new folder on the desktop? How do you jump to the Program Files folder? How do you access the help files? How do you empty the trash? The Finder's menu bar answers all of these things: shift-command-N, shift-command-A, command-?, and shift-command-delete.
2. By the time you have more than a few programs open in Windows, there are a ton of menu bars on your screen taking up valuable space and increasing the visual clutter. And you aren't even going to use the ones that aren't in front. This became such a big issue a long time ago that to this day programs are coming up with new and confusingly non-standard ways to HIDE the menu bar until it's needed. Do you tap the alt key once? Do you click the program's name in the title bar? Is it one of the buttons in the equally non-standard toolbar? On the Mac it's always in the same spot and always looks and works exactly the same way. Ahh, standards.
3. Another benefit is that an application can stay running after you close the last document, since the menu bar will stay open. I'm I'm working on some document, then I save and close it so I can work on another document, on Windows I have to find and relaunch the program because it just quit on me (unless it's MDI; more on that below). I have to consciously remember to open the next file before closing the current one (which is also hilariously non-standard: will the open feature launch another window within the same process? Will it launch a second copy of the program? Will it open the document within the same window, overwriting what I already had open? Who knows? On the Mac it always opens a new document window within the same application).
4. If floating-window syndrome bothers you, then use Spaces. It's like MDI except more flexible. MDI is dead these days anyway since it makes poor use of space and prevents you from moving a document window to a different screen. It's kind of like how Windows 7 is starting to kill off the full-screen maximize feature since it makes horrible use of space on large/widescreen monitors. And they're killing off the old task bar design since it was unorganized and also made poor use of space.
I'm sure it's just a coincidence that all of their redesigns for those features are similar to how the Mac does things.
Nobody said everything should be forced into an MDI system. The point is that other GUIs (pretty much anything but the Mac) treat the desktop as an unlimited space. The Mac constrains that space with the one menu bar.
Aside from its sheer distance from where you're working (surprisingly no one brought up Fitt's Law and ignored the big "D" for distance in it like they usually do), a single menu bar changes its contents behind the user's back, depending on which of potentially many child windows he clicked on. Using Photoshop AND Illustrator? Woops, whose floating color wheel did I click on?
Hey, I'm done editing a document with this app, so let's minimize it and get back to what I was doing in Xcode. Oh wait, the menu has nothing to do with the app that's filling the screen. Brilliant. And to compound things, a lot of Mac apps don't put anything meaningful in the floating windows' title bars. You get "Inspector". Well WTF am I inspecting, and which app does it belong to?
So you might say, "Use Command-Tab then." I'll give credit to Apple for admitting that someone else had a good idea here and adopting it. But there are two problems:
1. This doesn't address the floating-window mess. Command-Tabbing switches focus, but you're still going to see the UI of the previous app through the holes in the one you just switched to.
2. Command-Tabbing to an app on the Mac doesn't restore its windows. Seriously, WTF on this one. You Command-Tab back to what you were working on, and it remains minimized and useless in the Dock. So you have to roll down there and click on it anyway.
"This is intentional. It's why there is so much drag and drop interactivity, floating palettes, inspector windows, sliding drawers, and other aspects specifically designed to SHARE THE SCREEN with everything you put on it and like you arrange things on an actual desktop."
I don't pile things on top of each other on my desk when I'm trying to use them concurrently. I also don't cut holes in my newspaper, put it down on top of another newspaper, and then try to read it. That's what your Mac desktop is like: a pile of overlapping UIs with holes cut out of them, through which you can see all the crap underneath.
Do you read clear-plastic books, too?
Dragging and dropping between floating windows is stymied because (as noted above) the windows' owners aren't identified. It also conflicts with the workaround for the mess that Mac apologists often offer: Oh, just hide the app. Well, now your drag-&-drop argument is out the window.
And people complaining about the Windows task bar showing lots of contents: At least it shows (or at least did, before Windows 7 or Vista) what's running. The Dock indicates running apps with a tiny "shine" underneath the icon? Come on. Five hours later, and Photoshop is still running with no UI or open documents. Great use of resources.
Using the Mac GUI is an exercise in running around and tidying up, all day long. Occasionally survey the Dock for the shines and shut down apps you don't need. Herd windows around (and let's not forget the asinine inability to resize windows from their edges on the Mac). Roll, roll, roll up to the menu bar on your 30-inch monitor. Roll, roll, roll down to the lower-right corner of any window you need to resize, then roll back up to the title bar to move it.
Other windowing GUIs allow you to work the Mac way if you want to, and if the application developer has seen fit to implement it. Witness Photoshop on Windows. In fact, witness any app with a strong Mac heritage on Windows.
The good news is that even Apple is moving away from the armada-of-windows paradigm. Aperture is one window, and more such steps forward are forthcoming.
They've also realized, at least in a few apps, that a glaring white background is a failed relic of the late '80s/early '90s, when the mania was to try to make the screen an analog for a piece of paper. That doesn't work, because a piece of paper doesn't blast light into your face all day. But sadly, Mac users are still stuck with the system-wide inverse color scheme that can't be changed, unlike other OSes that allow the user to set up any scheme he wants.
As far as Windows becoming more Mac like: There's a reason GUIs evolved away from the way the Mac is still doing things. A lot of the people who made those decisions, and those perceptive enough to defend them, aren't around anymore. Not to mention the perceived need to change things for marketing purposes. How else would you defend Apple degrading its products and user experience by switching to glossy screens under pressure from third-tier vendors at Best Buy? That's not leadership.