Animated icons in the Dock.

[VGZ]

I was just thinking that the Print Center icon in the dock should animate when printing so that you could have visual feedback when something is printing. This would be useful for situations where the printer is in another room like on a network. In 9 the desktop printer icon would put a document on it to indicate it was printing. The Print Center's Dock icon could actually show the printer printing .

What do you think? I'm sending this as feedback to Apple.

[EhksMan]

Good idea

[monty]

Great idea! Animating stuff like this is one of the many excellent features of the dock that apple needs to take more advantage of.

peter

[plaidpjs]

Do we even know if the Dock will support an animation? I mean, the bounces are just icon positioning adjustments, not an actual animation. And, it's the same thing with the hide all move. About the only thing I think might justify as an actual animation is the genie, but i think even that is just a shift pixel redraw trick.

Anyway, i do think it's a good idea, and I'm not trying to bash it, but I am curious to know if there is even support for it.

[flash]

NekkoOnDesktop is a small application which puts cartoon cats on your screen. They romp and play. It's a cute diversion.

When the app is active, its Dock icon is animated.

It shows a statistical graph for each cat; when it switches cats the graphs scroll vertically.

What with this app's scrolling / animation, Mail.app's changing icon, launching icons' bouncing, and CPU Monitor's scrolling system state -- it's pretty clear that Dock icons can be totally cool.

[VGZ]

Fire flashes it icon when you get a message. When you minimize a QT movie it plays in the dock. If you minimize a terminal window it will update it self in the dock (noticed this when I minimized a term window that was running dnetc). The Dock is more than capable. Apple might implement my idea if they get enough feedback; however, I doubt it would be at the top of the list of things to do ,

[rharder]

The coolest dock animating is the quicktime player. If you minimize a movie while it's playing, it continues to play in the dock. Cool.

Hmmm. That's not exactly the same thing as having the app icon be animated.

Oh, and the Mail app updates its icon to reflect the number of unread messages--very nice. Not exactly animation either, come to think of it.

I'm 0 for 2.

-Rob

[Matrix Agent]

how about having dock icons that are thumbnails redraw or refresh ever 20 seconds or so. Every day, when i use omniweb, when i tell a page to load, ill minimize so that i can do other things while i load it, but when i minimize the thumbnail is of the old screen , so i don't know which one is my browser window. This is would also be helpful with minimizing installation bars.