mmmm. 11 hours of sleep.
off the top of my head, here are some reasons why os x's dock is better than the windows (or kde/gnome) taskbar/tasklist:
- since you place the apps you want on the dock, their location in the docks is consistent between restarts of your system. this aides in selecting (and running) apps.
- since the icons are tied to an applications, rather than a window, there are fewer choices to select from, which speeds up use when switching between applications.
- the grouping in windows and gnome's (old) tasklist is similar to this, however the dock doesn't have two "modes" - grouped and ungrouped - so the user doesn't have to figure out if it's in grouped mode or not. if an app has multiple windows, the dock icon's context menu will contain a list of windows to choose from, just like the grouping option in the other lists.
- the tab order in the dock is more consistent - the first Alt-tab brings you to the most recently used app, but after that it goes from left-to-right in the dock. since you can always see the dock, you can have some extra perception of the tab order, rather than with windows which just pops up the window when you press Alt-tab. this goes with #1 above, but is slightly different.
- because clicking on an app's icon in the dock will launch it if it's not running, you don't have to remember if the app is open or not - just click on the icon and if it's running, it will be focused. if not, it will show up in a few seconds. [ although this doesn't work with alt-tab (by alt i of course mean Cmd) ]
fortunately, i don't actually know anything so you probably should have been ignoring this. i should have distracted you with this picture:
shaver enjoys helping us eat meat
<tm3> that is the most beautiful error message I've ever seen.
* * *
i thought this was funny:
me: does cherry jam stain?
joe: everything stains
me: i don't mean metaphorically
joe: oh