How Do YOU Treat Your Dock?

Amie

Amie

Mac Convert for Life
Share your Dock idiosyncrasies, modifier app extensions, position, etc. Here's mine:

I love ClearDock and use it all the time, constantly matching and modifying the app triangle with whatever theme I'm using to suit my mood. I also use it to remove the opaque background of the Dock and give it that 3D floating appearance (very cool!). I keep my Dock in the bottom position and "hidden" until I mouse over it, then it pops up; when I take my pointer away, the Dock disappears again. I like this feature because it maximizes screen space. I keep all my frequently used apps in my Dock, and I have it centered on the bottom with icons fairly large (Dock expanded), and I use the genie effect.

That's my Dock. How 'bout yours?
 
on a 12" pb:
left side, set to hide, starts very small with magnification to a medium size. (i keep it on the left as at the bottom it interferes with application windows which use status bars at the bottom, like word or safari).

I also activate the setting to make hidden apps semi transparent, so i know what is hidden and what just has no open windows.
 
Dock is
bottom
left
~36 px
set to hide, of course.

I'm using three "separators" (invisible icons with spaces as their names so they create some width between icons) to create four icon groups:

- Finder
- Dashboard
- Safari
- Mail.app
- Fetch
- Terminal
- NetNewsWire
- iChat
- TVbrowser

- BBEdit
- Pages
- TextEdit
- Bluetooth Transfer

- VLC
- Quicktime Player
- iTunes

- InDesign
- Illustrator
- Photoshop
- Golive
- Acrobat
- Distiller

... and then the apps launched but not fixed in the Dock.
 
Funny, in all my time I've had my dock down the bottom and always showing. last night I put it onto the right side, then today it's on my left. Guess I'm just playing at this time, then this post came up, so be interesting to see what the majority are doing, should of been a poll LOL
 
fryke said:
I'm using three "separators" (invisible icons with spaces as their names so they create some width between icons) to create four icon groups.
Click to expand...
How do you create these invisible icons?
 
The G5 .. 21" display has dock on left, not hiding (somehting I do only when space on screen is not an issue), with a bunch of apps. Normally I have far less apps on it. ([work] = applications used for work, not specified names)
So that has
finder - terminal - adium - [work] - mail - safari - [work] - [work] - address book - ical - [work] - stickies - dictionary - sys prefs - [work] - console - network utility - disk utility - final cut - photoshop - filemaker pro - devonagent - airport admin utility - ichat - [work] - neo office - shiira - camino - [work] - [work] - itunes - dashboard (which i never use from the dock) - [work] - flock -iphoto - preview - a folder with shortcuts to all of the apps - trash. And looks like time to clean the dock ...
eMac has less; down and hiding, far less than on the other mac - yet even there time to clean a bit. :-/
 
bottom, pretty standard. ~36px icons, a bit of mgnification (not much), and there the whole time.

it goes finder....internet-things....music/media/ilife etc....office....creative suite...studio mx2004.....utilities and other apps.
 
I usually don't use the dock - i have it set to the top, which "permanently" hides it.

I use Quicksilver to launch my apps/progs/files - they launch quicker because no mouse is needed with this method, which is even more convenient on my Powerbook.

The rare times i need the dock, i use the
"option/control/D" key sequence to unhide it.
 
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.
 

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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.
 
It was asked, so here are the "Blank Dock Separators" I'm using. (Max rocks.) -> http://www.maxthemes.com/guistuff/?guistuff=Blank Dock Separators ... 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...)
 
fryke said:
It was asked, so here are the "Blank Dock Separators" I'm using. (Max rocks.) -> http://www.maxthemes.com/guistuff/?guistuff=Blank Dock Separators ... 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...)
Click to expand...
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.
 
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.
 

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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.
 
fryke said:
It was asked, so here are the "Blank Dock Separators" I'm using. (Max rocks.) -> http://www.maxthemes.com/guistuff/?guistuff=Blank Dock Separators
Click to expand...
Thanks for this.

simbalala said:
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.
Click to expand...
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.
 

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Hey, thanks for posting that Max Themes dock seperator link. I'm now using it as well. Great organization tool! :)
 
rhisiart said:
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.
Click to expand...
Works for me...

It's a text file with the text "spacer only" as content. I created it in TextEdit and saved it then changed the name, I can still open it in TextEdit. I do have "show extensions" set in my preferences.

Dropping a graphic into the icon area is the same as for any other file. Just make sure the icon is selected (blue outline) then paste into the area.

Photoshop -> copy, Get Info -> select icon -> paste

I keep the Dock really tiny, just big enough that I can distinguish the Icons clearly, about 1/4 inch high. If you're using a larger format you might want to make the bar larger, say 1 x 64 or 1 x 128.

You can also take one of those empty folders named " .app" and drop a bar into its icon area. I just did.
 
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