Aqua-Soft ForumsI always thought Object Dock Plus would be a step forward, but they totally disregarded what the Object dock makes so special... The look and the feel... There are no more animations, ok ok tabs are included now. But mostly Object Dock is an eyecatching toy for me. I dont us it cause its useful, i use it cause it looks good and i like playing around... So the question is anyone happy here with Object Dock Plus????
[Request] Object Dock Plus animations
Yeah... it's much more useful. Still looks the same and better if tweaked, in screenshots.
Originally posted by Angryman@Aug 23 2004, 05:33 AMI always thought Object Dock Plus would be a step forward, but they totally disregarded what the Object dock makes so special... The look and the feel... There are no more animations, ok ok tabs are included now. But mostly Object Dock is an eyecatching toy for me. I dont us it cause its useful, i use it cause it looks good and i like playing around... So the question is anyone happy here with Object Dock Plus????
<{POST_SNAPBACK}>
No more animations? am I missing sometheing? od plus is the same only with a bunch of stuff added. you still have everything that made odplus great... but with much more functionality.
Originally posted by bzeitler@Aug 23 2004, 12:12 PMNo more animations? am I missing sometheing? od plus is the same only with a bunch of stuff added. you still have everything that made odplus great... but with much more functionality.
<{POST_SNAPBACK}>
U got animations on Mouseover???? I am missing the magnification size <-> Normal size stuff... I have no animations i just have a dock with tabs NOTHING MORE!!!! :6
Originally posted by Angryman@Aug 23 2004, 07:18 AMU got animations on Mouseover???? I am missing the magnification size <-> Normal size stuff... I have no animations i just have a dock with tabs NOTHING MORE!!!! :6
<{POST_SNAPBACK}>
no need to stick out your tounge... docks with tabs dont have animation. Think about it... how would that work. But you can still add another normal dock to work with your dock with tabs. There no need to shout. just add another dock.
... docks with tabs dont have animation. Think about it... how would that work.
Who says, that docks with tabs have no animation!!!! Thats just a question of how to do it... Wait a second and i give u an example how this could be made....
I am still not convinced
The red area is the area where magnification starts, the tabs dont respond to magnification only in magnified status Picture 1
I don't think it would look right.
Or really see the point.
Just add another Mac like dock from the Manage Docks window and use that.
Tabs with magnification is just plain dumb.
Thread title changed to reflect content of thread.
Please don't be disrespectful to developers, if you have a request for Object Dock or an idea please state it without being insulting to the community.
Deadzombie
And yes, the CEO of Stardock and several of it's developers are long standing members of this community, FYI.
Personally I enjoy the straightforward practicality of the tabbed dock. I've tried every tabbed dock released for Windows, and Object Dock+ is the only fully skinnable dock that doesn't crash repeatedly. Features I feel deserve the "+":
Multiple docks across desktop.
Fully skinnable.
Each type of dock uses both shortcuts and docklets.
Smooth animations.
Fully configurable.
For the affordable price of a large pizza you get a fully interactive desktop utility that stays around alot longer than your next case of heartburn. As for tabbed docks showing an expanding animation, my docks expand outward when docked on the side of the screen. This is good enough for me, as the OSX mousever expansion animations on a tabbed dock seem just a little too much... there's only so much bouncing and moving around from an app I can stand before I want it to "just function" and be done with all the damn jumping around.
But thats just me.
thanks deadzombie, i appreciate.
basically the problem that we see with having zooming animations for the tabbed docks is that the tabbed docks can be multiple rows/columns at the same time, having basically a block of items. At that point, its really impossible to do the traditional zooming animation, as the one main focused item would have to get larger both length and height wise, thus pushing everything out from every direction, and it would just get very messy and confusing looking. We're taking suggestions for ideas, just haven't found any that we feel really maintain the spirit of both usefulness and nice looking.
As for the tabs themselves zooming, although sure it could be possible, there’s not much point in it. Did my best efforts to make the tabbed docks as smooth and animated as I could however, if you notice when dragging and dropping from place to place all the movements are smooth when dropping, and items kindof smoothly slide out of the way when reordering, etc etc.
-Jeff
Originally posted by JMB1984@Aug 23 2004, 09:48 PMthanks deadzombie, i appreciate.
basically the problem that we see with having zooming animations for the tabbed docks is that the tabbed docks can be multiple rows/columns at the same time, having basically a block of items. At that point, its really impossible to do the traditional zooming animation, as the one main focused item would have to get larger both length and height wise, thus pushing everything out from every direction, and it would just get very messy and confusing looking. We're taking suggestions for ideas, just haven't found any that we feel really maintain the spirit of both usefulness and nice looking.
As for the tabs themselves zooming, although sure it could be possible, there’s not much point in it. Did my best efforts to make the tabbed docks as smooth and animated as I could however, if you notice when dragging and dropping from place to place all the movements are smooth when dropping, and items kindof smoothly slide out of the way when reordering, etc etc.
-Jeff
<{POST_SNAPBACK}>
Your best effort is very nice Jeff. 
I have several criteria I put every new skin or desktop application through before I even look at it's functionality. These are standards I used to be lauded for, now I get grief from certain people in the community that like to view it as me 'dogging' artists. Whatever, I'll stick to my guns and maintain my standards.
First, are there stray pixels? Early on in Aqua skinning there was a huge issue with skinners and rounded corners. Most round corners or button control widgets looked more like 8bit Atari games; very blocky and pixellated. Icons & skins showing stray pixels, incorrect transparency transitions and a host of other problems ruin the quality and useability of an item for me.
Animations. Are they smooth and silky or does the animation look like a flip book? If I wanted to live in the 1920's watching hand cranked movies I'd sell my computer and move to Calcutta. Many, many apps with animations are little better than flip book sequences, choppy and erratic.
Jeff has met both of these initial standards VERY nicely with Object Dock+. Hide/ show animations for the dock transition nicely... it sliiiides out of my screen edge like an all female oil wrestling night at the local bar. The default skins are clean, and it presents iconic shortcuts properly, without the distortion some applications encounter when resizing .pngs or .icos. Resize the dock anywhere within it's default range and you will see what I mean... the icons stay crisp and clean.
/hats off to Jeff and the rest of Stardock. May all of our communities developers continue this tradition of quality.
I don't really mind the lack of animation in tabbed docks (I think there are far more important things to add/fix in objectdock than adding animation), but what I would suggest to solve this problem is having the option to use dock items to switch tabs instead. Let's say you have 4 tabs: main, apps, util and games. I am thinking you could have an option to turn the tabs into icons, where each one would make the tab switch to the corresponding category - one icon for Main, another for Apps, and so on. These icons are always displayed on the same part of the dock regardless of what category is selected (i.e., the top 4 icons), and the current active category would make its corresponding icon glow (or otherwise show its active state). This eliminates the need to display tabs completely.
Another option is having one icon that does the switching, either by displaying a submenu when clicked, or even better by having the icon be actually composed of a number of smaller icons, each one of them with a corresponding tab/category. This would reduce the switching to a single dock icon.
The problem with the submenu approach is that there wouldn't be a workable way to have the dock switch to a different tab/category while performing a drag. But then again, drag-and-drop is very much broken in OD anyways, so I'm not sure if anyone would miss it.
I don't think drag and drop is that broken in OD+. For example, I put multiple seperate tabbed docks each with one tab and I put some shortcuts in one but then I changed my mind and made a new category and I wanted to transfer some shortcuts from one dock to the other so I drag and dropped them to see what happens and it worked perfectly. Mobydock (no offense to anyone) is the dock I had the most issues in regards to drag and drop.
Well, by "broken" I meant that drag and drop in OD does not mirror drag and drop in Windows. Specifically, dragging, say, a PSD file from a window onto your photoshop icon in an ObjectDock tab will not execute the correct action (opening the file with the target program). Instead it will always try to add the icon to the dock. This means you can't really do a lot of the very useful things docks/launchers are good for, such as quickly putting files in docked folders or opening files with different programs by drag and drop.