News & Views

As soon as Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer publicly demonstrated some UI concepts for the upcoming Windows 7, I saw comments all over the Internet about how Microsoft had copied the Mac OSX 3D dock. It proved to me, once again, that there are a vast number of victims of the "Jobs Reality Distortion Field" running around on this planet. I like Apple, but come on people. Stop giving them more credit than they have earned. Let's take a look at reality.

Apple didn't invent the 3D dock in OSX Leopard. It is a copy of the 3D Sun Looking Glass dock, which was created earlier than the UI for OSX Leopard. Looking Glass wasn't viewed by the public until 2003, but remember that the pretty 3D dock finally appeared in Leopard in 2007. A Sun programmer (Hideya Kawahara) developed Looking Glass in his spare time. When Sun executives saw the first version, they gave him the full-time job of developing it further. They showed it to the public in 2003, and made it Open Source in 2004. It seemed to fizzle out in 2006. 

Giving Apple credit for inventing the 3D dock shown in the Windows 7 demo is just like believing Apple invented the windowed, mouse-driven OS, which was created by Xerox PARC labs years before Apple copied it in their Mac. If Microsoft did anything, they copied Sun (and Xerox), just like Apple did.

While Apple definitely uses innovative technology in products they create, they rarely invent it. It amazes me when people even forget that portable MP3 players existed for a while before the iPod ever came out. What made the iPod so popular was iTunes. I keep wondering what psychological trickery is involved that keeps making Apple's otherwise intelligent users think Apple invented all of this stuff. Apple innovates by using cool technology invented by others.

Here's another reality that gets overlooked. Microsoft's early work for some of the 3D desktop features of both Vista and Windows 7 was done many years ago. Microsoft has been working on various 3D desktops for almost a decade. For example, "The TaskGallery" was a project they did back in 1999. It allowed users to display normal Windows programs running in "paintings" hanging on the walls of a 3D virtual office environment.

For more reading, head to "Project Looking Glass" and look at the screen shots. Overall, it makes our current UI's look bad. Taken as a whole, it is much more advanced than Windows or even OSX. Actually, you may think you are looking at OSX Leopard on some of the screen shots. It's a shame Looking Glass never took off. Back when I first saw it (2003), I hoped Microsoft would purchase the rights and make it the new Windows standard UI. As usual, Apple beat them to the punch by folding some of the concepts into Leopard. Seeing the demo of Windows 7 with a Looking Glass dock gives me hope that Microsoft may be headed that same direction.

Labels: Apple, Microsoft, OSX, UI, User Interface, Vista, Windows, Windows 7