Mac OS X in a Nutshell

The Dock

One of Mac OS X’s most visually distinctive features is its Dock, a highly customizable strip of icons found (by default) along the bottom of the screen. Even if you choose to temporarily hide or change its location, the Dock remains active and always available.

As Figure 1-18 shows, the Dock can contain many different kinds of icons, including:

1. The Finder icon

2. Application icons

3. An active application

4. An inactive application

5. The Divider

6. A Finder folder

7. Minimized windows

8. The Trash icon

Figure 1-18. The Dock

The icons found in the Dock allow you to quickly launch and maneuver among applications, as well as provide shortcuts to frequently used folders and documents. These icons also sometimes act as applications in their own right. The Dock is the new home of the Trash, which used to reside at the lower-right corner of the Desktop in earlier versions of the Mac OS.

Application Icons

Application icons live to the left of the Dock’s divider bar. Each one represents an application, either one that is currently running or one that’s idle but “docked” (meaning that you’ve chosen to let its icon have a permanent home on the Dock).

Not Every Program Gets an Icon

Like any other Unix system, Mac OS X is usually running dozens of programs—more correctly known as processes—at any given time. Many of them, however, receive no representation in the Dock. These programs have no Aqua-based user ...