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The dock's icons are live windows.
 technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

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Secrets of OS X: A few tips to make you a dock jock


Dec. 29, 2004


By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2004, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2004, The Post-Standard

   If you switched to a modern Mac after using Windows for years, you probably did a double-take when you saw the dock, that row of icons across the bottom of the screen. It's nothing like the Windows taskbar, even though it seems to do the same thing.
   You probably could enjoy your new Mac for years without learning anything fancy about the dock. After all, it's obvious that all you do is click on an icon in the dock to run the program that icon represents. What could be easier?
   But knowing a few tricks about the OS X dock can make life with your Macintosh a lot more fun. And you'll also discover how to make your Mac do things you probably didn't know it could do.
   First, a little history. To me, the dock is the most loveable thing about OS X Macs. Unfortunately, it's also the most frustrating. It's not that Apple doesn't care. The problem is simply a question of heritage.
   The dock came straight from a computer Steve Jobs designed called NeXT. Jobs, cofounder of Apple, came up with the NeXT computer after Apple's board of directors, in a temporary fit of insanity, fired him as head of the company. When he finally came back to Apple to rescue it from certain disaster, he brought along many of the features of the NeXT computer. The one that caught everyone's eye was the dock.
   The dock is Steve's baby and nobody at Apple dares change it. At least not much. And so it continues through many revisions of OS X with its power and peculiarities intact. (In a future column I'll talk more about the deficiencies of the dock, so I'll share only a short list with you now: Icons representing folders squirm to one side or the other when you try to drag items into them; there's no built-in way of making "sub-docks" of icons, and icons for active programs look pretty much like icons that will launch programs.)
   But this is all just blather to a true dock jock. The dock is a work of genius. Here are five reasons why:
   The dock is a "twofer." You get two functions in the space of one. First, it's a launch area for applications and folders. Click once on a program icon and the program runs. Click once on a folder icon and the folder opens. Second, it's a task manager. Applications that are running show their icons in the dock, even if they didn't have an icon down there in the first place. And minimized (or hidden) windows show up at the right end of the dock. Click on them and they pop back up.
   The dock is easily customized. Want Text Edit or Calculator in the dock? Just open the Applications folder and drag their icons to the left side or middle of the dock. Want your Movies folder in the dock? Open your home folder and drag the Movies folder to the right side of the dock.
   The dock's icons are live windows. Want to see this in action? First, make sure the dock's icons get larger when you pass your mouse pointer over them. (That's the default.) Then open a Web page on a site that shows a live Webcam picture. Minimize, or hide, the Web page window. When you pass your pointer over the dock icon (at the right), the miniature window will show the live Webcam view.
   The dock's icons have menus. Just hold your mouse button down when you click on a dock icon to see them.
   The dock can be moved. Click and hold the vertical bar toward the right and drag it to the top, left side or right side.
   (Bonus items.) The doc's icons automatically expand or shrink to fit, and the entire dock can be hidden.