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something annoying about leopard's dock perspective:

I

instupituous

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 24, 2007
7
0
i see a lot of complaints about the shadows, reflection, and height of the new dock, but has anyone noticed the bad perspective of that little crosswalk divider? does that only irritate people that understand perspective? doesn't it look off to the rest of you?

1731230173_29bdc4c7cb_b.jpg


1731230631_83b9fe9af3_b.jpg



as the dock gets wider, the divider would need to lean more so it still points to the center. remember the graphics in Street Fighter II? all the floors moved in perspective, which i thought was amazing at the time. i know leopard can handle this type of thing.

also, i don't know what is up with that coca cola style wave on the dock, but it doesnt defy perspective, so i can leave it alone. i was thinking apple was going to fix the divider before the release, but since nobody notices, maybe they are not worried.
 
I'm an art student, so I noticed that too. The problem is that even though it is in perspective, it looks funky on the dock. There isn't enough vanishing of it. Technically, Apple's way of doing it could be considered "correct" if we imagine the line to be skewed in the first place, and not a straight divider. Even if the perspective is off, Apple's aesthetic looks good. And when it comes down to it, that is a good enough point to argue for it I suppose.
 
Veritas&Equitas said:
Wow, you really need a girlfriend :p
Click to expand...

have girlfriend, job, car, health, etc . . .
my first post here and i already am getting the "get a life" response. its the most common sentiment seen on forums, all the way down to youtube comments. any time some one wants to go in depth on something they care about, and its further than some one else is comfortable with, then that person clearly has no life.

isnt this site macrumors, where we speculate on products for consumers? where we salivate over knowing something a week before we're supposed to? technically, none of us have lives.
 
instupituous said:
have girlfriend, job, car, health, etc . . .
my first post here and i already am getting the "get a life" response. its the most common sentiment seen on forums, all the way down to youtube comments. any time some one wants to go in depth on something they care about, and its further than some one else is comfortable with, then that person clearly has no life.

isnt this site macrumors, where we speculate on products for consumers? where we salivate over knowing something a week before we're supposed to? technically, none of us have lives.
Click to expand...

Learn to take a punch man. You'll get this often enough here, and it's mainly cause there has been so much griping over the new dock design.

Perhaps we don't 'understand perspective' as you do (cause I could care less), but thankfully it has been shown that the 10.4 dock design is available in Leopard so that you don't have to be bothered by the vanishing point stuff.

EDIT: For the record, I have a life.
 
AaronHeth said:
I'm an art student, so I noticed that too. The problem is that even though it is in perspective, it looks funky on the dock. There isn't enough vanishing of it. Technically, Apple's way of doing it could be considered "correct" if we imagine the line to be skewed in the first place, and not a straight divider. Even if the perspective is off, Apple's aesthetic looks good. And when it comes down to it, that is a good enough point to argue for it I suppose.
Click to expand...

i am a professional artist too. maybe thats whay apple's separator bugged me with the first 10 seconds of seeing it. i didnt need to take measurements, but i think the showing the lines may help a lot of others see.

in art school, you may see other students in a figure drawing class avoid drawing the hands properly. they sorta just imply them with a sketch, often because they are too hard to draw. some day, they will actually have to learn the anatomy of hands to draw them. apple implied perspective here, but its like a badly drawn hand.
 
instupituous said:
my first post here and i already am getting the "get a life" response.
Click to expand...

Don't worry, I'm sure it was a joke. We all realize that we're geeks for being on these forums, but we don't care. All that matters is waiting for Friday to come. :D

Oh, and welcome to the forums!
 
instupituous said:
i see a lot of complaints about the shadows, reflection, and height of the new dock, but has anyone noticed the bad perspective of that little crosswalk divider? does that only irritate people that understand perspective? doesn't it look off to the rest of you?

1731230173_29bdc4c7cb_b.jpg


1731230631_83b9fe9af3_b.jpg



as the dock gets wider, the divider would need to lean more so it still points to the center. remember the graphics in Street Fighter II? all the floors moved in perspective, which i thought was amazing at the time. i know leopard can handle this type of thing.

also, i don't know what is up with that coca cola style wave on the dock, but it doesnt defy perspective, so i can leave it alone. i was thinking apple was going to fix the divider before the release, but since nobody notices, maybe they are not worried.
Click to expand...

I agree with you. The divider does not match the rest of the Dock. If you notice though, the Dock perspective actually changed depending on how wide the Dock is so you'd think that it would also affect the divider. By the way, the wave is just a PNG file or something (so I've heard). The 3D Dock does not belong and they should have left the window shadows alone or make the Windows enlarge or get smaller depending on how close they are to you.

By the way... you don't have to be a designer or an engineer to see that something doesn't look "correct". We all have eyes and know what things look like up close and far away... we all see in the same 3D world so it wouldn't take much to make our brains go "huh?" Some people may notice something's wrong and also know why and some people may sense that something's wrong but, don't really know how or why and some people just don't care. If this divider is a PNG or something, I will be deleting it completely so that there is NOTHING there. There's enough space to separate the trash from the other icons left.
 
TheSpaz said:
By the way... you don't have to be a designer or an engineer to see that something doesn't look "correct". We all have eyes and know what things look like up close and far away... we all see in the same 3D world so it wouldn't take much to make our brains go "huh?" Some people may notice something's wrong and also know why and some people may sense that something's wrong but, don't really know how or why and some people just don't care. If this divider is a PNG or something, I will be deleting it completely so that there is NOTHING there. There's enough space to separate the trash from the other icons left.
Click to expand...

right, its like a singer hitting the wrong note. we may not know the right note ourselves, but we can tell when something is off.
 
rmh said:
Don't worry, I'm sure it was a joke. We all realize that we're geeks for being on these forums, but we don't care.
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No kidding it was a joke, hence my smiling sticking tongue out smiley guy.

Once you stick around these forums for awhile, you'll see there are always silly comments, and then in-depth ones, and perhaps a few more silly ones thrown in. Us MacRumorians don't take ourselves too seriously.

It's part of the fun; just relax my friend :D
 
Look, here's the deal. I do know a little bit about perspective and the OP has a point, but I am fairly confident that Apple thought long and hard about this. If he really wants to dig into it, the icons don't follow the same perspective either. The dotted divider is put the way it is because it looks the best with the icons. I am no visual artist, but I am a musician, and the two "arts" are similar in several different ways. One similarity is that there is no black and white rule book for how art should be. In music, if it is appealing to the ears, it doesn't really matter if every note is in the same key. When it comes down to it, its the sound that matters. I feel its the same here, just because the line, AND THE ICONS, don't have the same perspective as the plane that they appear to rest on, doesn't change the fact that they are set up in the most visually appealing way. The OP's edit of the dotted divider where the divider is more slanted is just all wrong. It stands out like a sore thumb. But thats just my opinion. Like i said, I'm no visual artist, but I think the way Apple did it is the best way it could have been done.


Just my $.02


EDIT: Upon looking again, both ways look fine to me. One has the line in perspective with the dock surface, and one has it in perspective with the icons. The OP's edit doesn't look as bad as I thought it did the first time I looked.
 
http://images.apple.com/macosx/image...ro20071026.png

Check out the 3D Dock. Depending on how you view the screen, the Dock will look really out of place (perspective-wise). From the pictures, it looks like the Dock is leaning toward you and the icons can slide off any time. Why do we need a 3D shelf for our icons to sit on? I think this is a classic example of "look what Leopard can do with Core Animation". I think the Dock in Panther/Tiger is perfect... it's simple and it does what it needs to do. Sure, I like visual changes every now and again but, don't you think the 3D-ness is over the top?
 
You are assuming that the dock divider has a constant width. If the divider decreases in width, then it can appear to be on a different plane when in fact it is on the same plane.

In reality, I believe that apple mistakenly, or ignorantly didn't bother to check the perspective of the doc divider. However, you can't say something is incorrect just by analyzing how it looks, without knowing how it was intended to look.
 
TheSpaz said:
http://images.apple.com/macosx/image...ro20071026.png

Check out the 3D Dock. Depending on how you view the screen, the Dock will look really out of place (perspective-wise). From the pictures, it looks like the Dock is leaning toward you and the icons can slide off any time. Why do we need a 3D shelf for our icons to sit on? I think this is a classic example of "look what Leopard can do with Core Animation". I think the Dock in Panther/Tiger is perfect... it's simple and it does what it needs to do. Sure, I like visual changes every now and again but, don't you think the 3D-ness is over the top?
Click to expand...
Link doesn't work BTW. But yes, the 3D Dock is mainly pointless, luckily you can turn it off if it bothers you.
 
Veritas&Equitas said:
Wow, you really need a girlfriend :p
Click to expand...

Haha...i love the comments here sometimes. I agree totally with the OP. This is the kind of detail Apple loves to brag about. Now file a bug report!

illicium said:
If he really wants to dig into it, the icons don't follow the same perspective either.
Click to expand...

The icons aren't supposed to have perspective. They are perpendicular to the viewing plane.
 
I don't like the divider either way.

I propose an anti-divider lawsuit.
 
If it bothers you that much you can simply change it to 2D by editing com.apple.dock... then you don't have to worry about annoying 3D perspectives at all.
 
ur right the should have dabbed a little happy blue on it and the middle of the divider at exactly the 603rd pixel of the dock!! and the separator seems to be a few pixels wider than a normal separator!!! what was apple thinking???????????:eek::eek::eek::eek::eek:
</sarcasm>
 
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