I would like there to be <b>tabbed sections</b> on the Dock so that icons can be grouped together to exand the possibilities of storage.
Imagine, if the aqua navigation tabs used on Apple's own web site could be copied to the OS X Dock, it would prevent abundant icons being squished to the size of a pea! But still give one-click access to many other groups of organized icons.
I really like this idea! I'm a long-time user of DragThing and have always thought that a tabbed launcher system works rather well. I'm not happy that Apple has forced us to use one system as both a launcher and manager of current applications and documents, but your idea seems to be a nice way of dealing with it all.
I think it's useful how the Active tab differentiates from items in the Application tab(s).... I agree with your complaint that in the current OS X dock it's hard (impossible) to tell which of the running applications are actually aliased in the dock as well. I can also imagine the Active tab as being customizable to show Minimized Windows or All Windows (addressing my gripe with not being able to keep track of all of your windows if you hide an app).
Your mockup makes me miss the OS 9 tabbed popup Finder windows even more... though even if you were able to drag a Finder folder onto this tabbed dock, which would in many cases be useful, it wouldn't be very friendly if you had a large number of items in that folder. (*thinking of horizontally mousing over the 800 mp3s in one of my popup Finder windows*)
Although I really HATED the launcher in Mac OS < X (read as mac OSs less than 10 )I really loved the pop up folders in OS 9, it was a good way to organize things.
I did not notice if a tab was included that had something like "Active apps" as it title but that would be a good addition to it
how would this respond to the dock's auto-magnification feature? it seems the tabs would get in the way. in my screenshots (at http://www.mimicry.org/img/sshots/ - sorry if anyone's getting sick of seeing that posted) I have the tabs underneath thedock so as not to interfere. Although I do like how you've layed it outwiththe desktop & trash icons. I was also thinking about having different view options for different layers - icons w/o names, small icons with names, etc.. it'd be very useful to have documents showing names, for example.
