Mac OS X Power Hound, Second Edition

Chapter 3. The Dock

The Dock, a central and critical component of Mac OS X, combines several important operating-system functions into a single row of icons across one edge of your screen. It’s a program launcher, a program switcher, a document-storage site, an information hub, a floor wax, and a dessert topping!

Seriously, though, the Dock can help simplify your workflow, and you can personalize it to within an inch of its life. The hints in this chapter are designed to make your time with the Dock more productive. And if you can’t stand the thing, the last hint explains how to vanquish the Dock completely.

The Dock Makeover

By now, you already know the basics of the Dock: any icon you drag onto it is installed there as a large, square button (Figure 3-1); and a single click, not a double-click, opens the corresponding icon. In other words, the Dock is an ideal parking lot for the icons of disks, folders, documents, and programs you frequently access.

Figure 3-1. Everything on the left side is an application—a program, in other words. Everything else goes on the right side—files, folders, minimized windows, and so on.

The other basic Dock information morsel is that folders and disks are hierarchical. That is, if you click a folder or disk icon on the right side of the Dock and hold down the mouse button, a list of the icon’s contents sprouts out of it. This hierarchical structure lets ...