10 Secrets Of the Mac Dock

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. I'm going to show you useful features of the Mac Dock that you may not know about. 

So, of course the main purpose of the Dock is to hold your most common app icons so you can easily launch them. Some of the icons have a little bit of functionality to them. I want to draw your attention to this one, the Calendar Icon. If you look at the Calendar app in the Applications folder you'll see that it has the default app icon that stays the same all the time.  But in the Dock if you've got the Calendar App there and it shows you today's day and date. So this is another place you can view it. You can, of course, have it in the Menu Bar at the top right. I actually have it turned Off here and if you go into System Settings and then Menu Bar you can look there if you've got Clock options. So if you want to disable the date in the Menu Bar because you've already got it here in the Dock in the Calendar Icon you can do so. 

A similar app is the Clock App. You can see the icon for it here in the Applications Folder. But it doesn't show the time there. It always shows 10:09. However if you were to drag it to the Dock and add it there notice the icon in the Dock shows the actual time. So, that can be an alternative to looking in the Menu Bar for the clock. Unfortunately you can't get rid of the clock completely from the Menu Bar as it has the functionality where you click to bring up Notification Center. But when the Menu Bar isn't visible, say you have it hidden normally or you just have it hidden when you'r looking at Full Screen app windows you also can check the Dock for the time. 

Now there is another app that will actually show you information if it's in the Dock but you have to put it in the Dock and turn it on. You won't find it in the Applications Folder. You have to go down to the Utilities Folder inside the Applications Folder. Then you see it here with its regular icon. Drag that to the Dock and put it wherever you like. At first it won't show you anything. Even when you launch it it won't show you anything. But you can go to View and then go to Dock Icon and then set it to Show CPU Usage, CPU History, Network Usage, and Disc Activity. If you leave it at Show Application Icon then it just shows the default icon. So, for instance, I can do CPU History here and then the icon here will change and be this little chart here that will go from right to left showing you the current CPU Usage. Then switch it here to say Disc Activity and then you'll see a little graph there. Of course this is the same information you'll get here if you go to Disc in Activity Monitor. But you don't have to keep Activity Monitor visible now. You can hide it. I'll use Command H or Hide Activity Monitor right there and you can see it is still going to update here in the Dock. Notice if you go to Activity Monitor and you Quit it then the icon reverts back to the regular icon. So Activity Monitor has to be running but it can be hidden and still show you updated information in the icon.

Note that another place that you can change the setting for what it shows is just by Control clicking, right clicking, or two-finger clicking on the icon itself while Activity Monitor is running and there is  Dock Icon there and you can select one of these four or to show the regular icon.

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Another icon that has a little bit of functionality isn't one of the app icons but the Downloads Folder Icon. The Downloads Folder is on the right side of the Dock, of course, and if you happen to have it in there and you're downloading something it will show progress as it has a little progress bar underneath the icon. So, for instance, I'm going to download this file right here and watch the Downloads Folder. You can see the little progress bar in the Downloads Folder. It's going to show you the total amount of progress for any and all downloads going on right now. 

One element that is not an icon in the Dock is the little line that separates the right and left sides of the Dock. Actually you may have two of those lines. If in System Settings under Desktop & Dock you've got the Show Suggested and Recent Halves of the Dock. If you have that turned On you'll have two of these divider lines. One separating the apps from the Suggested and Recent Apps and then another separator before the Files, Folders, and Trash section on the right side of the Dock. It doesn't matter if you've got one or two of these. You can use this line for being more than just a visual divider. One thing you can do is right click, two-finger click on a trackpad, or just hold the Control Key down and click and you get a Context Menu. The Context Menu gives you access to some of the Dock settings without the need to go into System Settings. You can turn Hide on or off, turn Magnification on or off, position the Dock on the left, right, or bottom of the screen, or set how Animation works for Minimizing an App, whether it is the little genie shrink affect of it is regular scale. You can also get right to the Dock Settings from here. 

You can also do something else with the line. Instead of the Control Key hold the Command Key down and you can click and drag up or down to change the size of the icons. You can't go larger than the amount of space that you've got. This is as large as I can get. But I can certainly go a lot smaller. So you can adjust the size without having to go into Settings and seeing exactly what it looks like so you can try out different sizes. 

Now another thing you can do with the Dock is you can use it, not just as an app switcher, by clicking on any app here, but also as a window switcher. So, for instance, here in Pages I have three different windows open. But if I Control click, two-finger click, or simply click and hold for a second I get a list that shows me all of the current open windows. I can bring one to the front by selecting it. Even if I, say, minimize one window and then maybe hidden the app with Command H, I can still see all of these here. It shows a diamond next to the minimized window and it shows the other two windows, including which one is the currently active one, even when the app is hidden. So I can jump to any window that I want from any state using the Context Window here in a Dock App Icon. Notice it even also shows recently opened documents in some apps, like here in Pages. 

Now you notice in my Dock I've got two spots where there is a red circle with a number in it. These are called Badges. They show you how many notifications are pending. I have three notifications in Mail and one here in Reminders. Now sometimes they are useful. You may want to see that there is a notification there in Reminders. Sometimes though you may want to hide these for certain apps. You can do this by going into System Settings and then going to Notifications. Then you can go to the App that you want. For instance, let's go to Reminders here and when I look at the settings for Reminders I can see here Badge Application Icon. If I turn this Off, notice that the badge goes away. You can do this for any app. So only keep the Badge application icon settings turned On for your most important apps. Perhaps Hide it for the apps where you really don't care about a notification.

Now for Mail you can do the same thing right here. Turn Off the badge completely. But Mail has a special setting. You go into Mail and then you go into Settings here and then go into General. In General you can change the Unread Count. Here it is going to show Unread Messages in Primary. You can set it to Inbox Only and you can see I've got a different number there. Or All Mailboxes. In other words all unread mail. Even stuff that's Archived and in other folders where you save things. If it is marked as Unread then it is going to add to that number. In most cases you probably want to have Inbox Only or Primary. You can also do somethings here with Smart Mailboxes. Any Smart Mailboxes you create you can set that instead. 

Now a question I've been asked a lot is about the Dots that appear under apps. You can see one there underneath Pages. If you run some other apps, like Freeform here and Calendar here, then we can see there are dots under there. That just shows the app is currently running. So you can tell which apps are closed completely and which apps have a window or just running in the background even without a window. But if you don't like those dots, as  some people don't, you can go into System Settings and do Desktop & Dock. There is Show Indicators for Open Application setting. Switch that Off and now you have no more dots. 

Now my last tip is about arranging the app icons in the Dock. Of course you can Click and Drag and rearrange them as you like. If you want to group them together there is no way really to define a group except you can add a small space that doesn't take any icon at all. This can help with grouping. The way to do that is you have to go into Terminal. You have to use this exact command. It is going to use the Defaults Command and you're going to write to the com.apple.dockpreferences. You're going to change a setting called Persistent-apps. That has in it a list, an array. So you're going to add to it with -array-add. Then element you're going to add is this one right here. It's basically the property title type equals space or -title. So you have to type this exactly. Don't make any mistakes. I'll include something for you to Copy & Paste at the post at macmost.com for this video. So I'm going to press Return and it is not going to do anything right away because the Dock has to restart. To restart the Dock, you Killall, which is one word, then Dock which is the capital D. When you do that you'll see the Dock restart. Then you'll see this space that is now placed there. It is placed at the end. I've got some running apps there but at the end of my persistent apps there and I can click and drag this space and I can put it somewhere to create a divider. So I can use that. Now that's a pretty big space but there is an alternative. If you do the same exact thing except small dash spacer dash tile then you can add a small one. You have to do killall Dock again and you'll see the smaller space here and you can drag that and use that as a divider instead of the larger one. To get rid of either one of these just drag it like an icon up and away and you can easily remove them. 

So I hope these tips help to get you the most from the Mac Dock. Thanks for watching.