How Do YOU Treat Your Dock?

[Mikuro]

A picture is worth a thousand words, right? See attachment. And now for the thousand words!

I have my Dock on the right of my screen, anchored to the top. I use the "suck" effect, because it's a little faster than the genie effect and still looks cool. I have it set to make hidden application icons semi-transparent. Aside from that, it's all default behavior. It's always shown (I find its popup behavior very frustrating). It's small enough so that it hardly ever reaches the bottom of my screen (1280x1024), where I store clippings and random junk I've yet to sort.

As for what's in my dock, I keep it reasonably trim. I have:

• Finder
• Safari
• Firefox
• BBEdit
• iTunes
• QuickTime Player
• PicBrowser (err...well, this is an app I wrote myself and have not publically released, so don't go looking for it)
• An AppleScript applet I made to quickly make a backup of an Xcode project I'm currently working on (or one I drag from the Finder onto its icon), and store it in a well-organized "backups" folder. Makes my life sooo much easier.
• StuffIt Expander
• VLC
• Script Editor
• TextEdit
• Preview

I frequently use all of those for drag-n-drop, which makes the Dock ideal for them. The only exceptions are iTunes, which is almost always loaded anyway, and the browsers, which I access so often that it benefits me to have them in the same place all the time (which is why I hate having it aligned to the center of my screen)

And then in the Folders section, I have two items:
• My second disk partition. Even though it's right on my desktop, I find this convenient.
• My REALbasic projects folder. This is the one item I frequently use the Dock's contextual menu for.

[powermac]

I am boring, my Dock on bottom of screen. No modifications. Used the auto hide feature of awhile, got so used to having the Dock there, I feel weird with out LOL.

[fryke]

It was asked, so here are the "Blank Dock Separators" I'm using. (Max rocks.) -> http://www.maxthemes.com/guistuff/?g...k%20Separators ... I'm not sure how they were created, but who cares, they work. (I guess they're some one-pixel transparent graphics or something... They have spaces as their file-names, and they're apps, kinda, or something like that, although not launchable. Strange stuff, really...)

[simbalala]

Originally Posted by fryke

It was asked, so here are the "Blank Dock Separators" I'm using. (Max rocks.) -> http://www.maxthemes.com/guistuff/?g...k%20Separators ... I'm not sure how they were created, but who cares, they work. (I guess they're some one-pixel transparent graphics or something... They have spaces as their file-names, and they're apps, kinda, or something like that, although not launchable. Strange stuff, really...)

Those aren't very special. You can accomplish the same thing by saving any file (a simple text file will do) and rename it as a space with a .app extension. Do a Get Info on it and drop a 1 x 32 (or 32 x 1 for vertical) pixel black (or any color) bar into its Icon area from Photoshop or another image editor and you have a real separator. Just drag it into the Dock.

Get fancy and you can have double lines, etc.

[Lt Major Burns]

my minimised windows still have this weird icon where by it makes an icon not of the whole scaled down window, but a scaled down version of the top left inch-square, so basically it's just the three aqua blobs. examples attatched. any reason why it does this? i reckon it's done it since about 10.4.2 or something.

also, does anyone else have trouble minimising quicktime? it always crashes in the dock when i minimise a quicktime movies, it goes down, but then i can';t get it back up again and i have to force quit.

[powermac]

What about Tabbed Dock? One could have tabs, each tab could continue certain apps. You could categorize your icons, and the dock would still use the same amount of space.

[Rhisiart]

Originally Posted by fryke

It was asked, so here are the "Blank Dock Separators" I'm using. (Max rocks.) -> http://www.maxthemes.com/guistuff/?g...k%20Separators

Thanks for this.

Originally Posted by simbalala

Those aren't very special. You can accomplish the same thing by saving any file (a simple text file will do) and rename it as a space with a .app extension. Do a Get Info on it and drop a 1 x 32 (or 32 x 1 for vertical) pixel black (or any color) bar into its Icon area from Photoshop or another image editor and you have a real separator. Just drag it into the Dock.

I tried this. Firstly my system won't allow any application to be named " .app". Secondly, I opened Get Info on a text file as you suggested and tried dropping a 1x32 pixel vertical black bar created in Photoshop onto the icon area. It wouldn't take.

The world may be in chaos, but I just want to have real separators on my dock.

[Amie]

Hey, thanks for posting that Max Themes dock seperator link. I'm now using it as well. Great organization tool!