Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Tiger Edition

86 switching to the mac: the missing manual

Dock Features

Most of the time, you’ll use the Dock as either a launcher (click an icon once to open

the corresponding program, file, folder, or disk) or as a status indicator (the tiny black

triangles, identified in Figure 3-1, indicate which programs are running).

But the Dock has more tricks than that up its sleeve. You can use it, for example, to

pull off any of the following stunts.

Switch Applications

The Dock does much of what the Windows taskbar does—and more. For example,

it lets you:

• Jump among your open programs by clicking their icons.

• c-drag a document (such as a text file) onto a Dock application button (such as

the Microsoft Word icon) to open the former with the latter.

• Hide all windows of the program you’re in by Option-clicking another Dock

icon.

Use Secret Menus

It turns out that if you Control-click a Dock icon—or, if you’re in no hurry, hold

down the mouse button on it—a hidden menu sprouts out (Figure 3-2).

If you’ve clicked a minimized window icon, this shortcut menu usually says only

Open. But if you’ve clicked any other kind of icon, you get some very useful hidden

commands. For example:

• [Window names]. At the top of the shortcut menus of most running-application

Dock icons, you’ll find at least one tiny, neatly labeled window icon, as shown

in Figure 3-5. This useful feature means that you can jump directly ...