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Animated Dock Icons Would Be Cool

S

supermario19

macrumors member
Original poster
Aug 17, 2006
36
0
I always thought that instead of just bouncing, the dock icons should be animated. For instance the safari icon could have the needle spin, dashboard icon coul rev up the needle, mail could have the bird flying, firefox could have the fox breath fire, iCal could flip through date pages, itunes could spin the cd or have music notes come fade in and move outwards.

Theres many possiblities. I hope they add this in leopard. Any thoughts on this?

What kind of dock animatins would you like to see?

Also, I think it would be cool if the finder icon winked, or if the mouth moved while you had speakable items on like it was talking to you. That would be trippy.
 
While it's not on the top of my list of features...I'd have to say yes, this would be cool. Heck, I'd be happy if the iCal icon aways featured the correct date and iChat showed by status...but the ideas you mentioned would be cool (well, maybe not the LSD trip Finder).

You should submit this to the Apple feedback page.

Oh...and for ideas:

iTunes...the disc starts spinning.
iMovie...the clapboard "claps"
iPhoto...the picture changes as the camera clicks
Candybar...more and more bites come out of the icon
Automator...dancing robot
Preview...loupe-de-loupe
Pages...the pen moves and the ink level goes down
Address Book...@ changes to a, then b, then c
Chess...piece moves (they'd have the change the icon to a pawn though)
Compressor...vise tightens
and
Adobe CS apps...change colors and letters randomly just to mess with your head.
 
Some application's Dock icons are already animated. Adium and Toast 8 are good examples. Other applications have informational overlays that show download speeds or various things. Point is, though the apps you mentioned don't have any animations, I don't know if there's anything stopping developers, other than that it would be annoying to have an icon always animated.
 
Well I don't know what adium is and my mac doenst have a burner so I've never used toast, but if those programs utilize animations in the dock I don't see much else stopping developers from using it. It would be neat, and would be one more thing that windows could probably never do properly.
 
Yes, but the animated icons in Adium and Toast are just another form of notification. What would iTunes be notifying you of if the disc was spinning? Or if iCal's pages flipped?
 
Well really I just meant it for when the app is loading, but I suppose there could be different animations so you would know what the app was notifying you of, instead of just bouncing for a notification or error.

Oh also, I remember the first time of though of this was for system preferences, I always though the light switch should flick up and the icon should illuminate as if a lightbulb had turned on above it.
 
supermario19 said:
Oh also, I remember the first time of though of this was for system preferences, I always though the light switch should flick up and the icon should illuminate as if a lightbulb had turned on above it.
Click to expand...

Or better yet from inside it...it would turn the little Apple light on.

The other negative to this that no one has mentioned yet...is that it makes the Mac OS seem more "toy-like" which has always been a label PC-users stick on the Mac, and a label that Apple has tried to avoid.
 
TheAnswer said:
Or better yet from inside it...it would turn the little Apple light on.

The other negative to this that no one has mentioned yet...is that it makes the Mac OS seem more "toy-like" which has always been a label PC-users stick on the Mac, and a label that Apple has tried to avoid.
Click to expand...

If they did do it, I'd hope it would be optional like it is now.
 
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