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 1-22 shows, the Dock can contain many different kinds of icons, several of which are described in the list that follows.

Figure 1-22. The Dock
The Finder icon
Application icons
An active application
An inactive application
The Divider
Folders that have been placed in the Dock
A Quick Link
Minimized windows
The Trash icon
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 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).
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