Lockable Dock Icons

Rhisiart

Registered
Firstly, I apologise for repeating something that I have already mentioned at the end of an earlier long thread (Lt. Major Burns will know this).

Everybody has different views on the Dock. Although it is a key feature of MacOS X, not everyone is enamoured with it.

I personally would make much more use of it if the icons could be locked in (e.g. one would have to hold down the ALT key whilst physically removing an icon from it).

On some occasions, when I have held down an icon to see its contextual menu, a slight slip of the mouse resulted in the icon disappearing from the Dock in a puff of smoke.

Perhaps any Apple designers reading this may wish to give this some thought.
 
yes, and thank you for the mention :D

i agree totally. even if it was only a haxie that was transparent (like i have translucency for hidden apps icons on), i'd probalby stil go for it
 
Why? If you drag one out, drag it back it. Simple.

Even better, just set the dock to hide when not in use.
 
By setting the owner of ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Dock.plist to root and making it read-only for your current user, you would be forced to authenticate whenever you want to change it. That way you have an option to cancel whenever you make an unwanted change. I haven't tested it myself, but give it a go. You could always change it back if it doesn't work.
 
Thanks Randman. Your suggestion would be one solution, but it is time-consuming.

Elander. I have had a go at this using GET INFO, but I don't see an option to change permissions to Root. Is this something that requires going into the Terminal and fiddling with Unix commands?
 
elander said:
By setting the owner of ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Dock.plist to root and making it read-only for your current user, you would be forced to authenticate whenever you want to change it. That way you have an option to cancel whenever you make an unwanted change. I haven't tested it myself, but give it a go. You could always change it back if it doesn't work.

The problem with that though is, the idea is to cut down mouse-time and work. lock the icons so no accidental throwing goes on, and productivity rises. yes you can put the icon back in, but it's a pain in the arse. it would be nice to have the option of "lock dock icons"
 
elander said:
By setting the owner of ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Dock.plist to root and making it read-only for your current user, you would be forced to authenticate whenever you want to change it. That way you have an option to cancel whenever you make an unwanted change. I haven't tested it myself, but give it a go. You could always change it back if it doesn't work.


Nope, didn't work was still able to drag out an app and put it back in with the com.apple.dock.plist set as read only and then again set as no access :eek:

So far I've only lost one icon on the Dock by accident, usually my mouse accidents happen else where :rolleyes:
 
Well, I tried my own suggestion (see above), and that was a total disaster. After noticing that id didn't affect the ability to alter the contents, I changed the owner back to the original. Then I restarted the Dock, and now it's in its default configuration. All the icons I put there manually are gone... :mad:
 
Messing with root and finder items like the dock are always risky.

You could always look at third-party dock-like apps such as DragThing.
 
Randman said:
Messing with root and finder items like the dock are always risky.

You could always look at third-party dock-like apps such as DragThing.

::ha:: If you don't make mistakes, you never learn. The more costly the mistake, the more you learn. I learn a lot every day... :D
 
Elander,

Sorry my query messed up your Dock. However, I agree entirely with your learning by experience approach.

The problem for me is even approaching Root sounds a bit scary to me.
 
i laughed. i hate computers so much when i do something straight forward and they do something random back at me. particularly hate pc's when you plug something in and guaranteed! probable won't work first time. i've spent a total of a about 18 hours in an attempt to get HL2 working on this dump of a dell. some thing went wrong every time, and if it wasn't that, it was the completly over-paranoid steam being silly. it took 3 1/2 hours to "de-encrypt" the files before playing. OMG
 
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