10 Things You Can Do With Apps In the Dock Besides Launching Them

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here are some things that you can do with the apps in your Dock besides just launching them. 

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Now the main thing that people use the Dock for is to simply launch apps. You can just move your pointer over the app icon, click it, and it will launch that app. The Dock can do a lot more than that for each app icon. For instance you can use the Dock as an App Switcher. Now you may typically use Command Tab to switch between apps. This works great. But the Dock is a good alternative because it not only shows you the apps that you currently have running but also apps that you might frequently use but aren't running right now. Like, for instance, here's Reminders. I can just as easily launch Reminders as switch to Calendar. You could do this with the keyboard as well. All you need to do is hold down the fn or Globe Key on your keyboard and press A. Then it will go to the Dock and now you can use the arrow keys, left and right, to select the appsthat you want and then Spacebar will switch to it. 

So whereas the App Switcher only lets you switch between apps that are currently running, the Dock lets you switch between apps running and also launch apps that maybe you don't happen to be running right now. 

Most of the things you can do in the Dock that I'm going to talk about are done through the Context Menu. You can bring up the Context Menu for anyone of these icons by simply holding down the Control Key on your keyboard and clicking. But you could also do it with a click and then a hold and then the Context Menu appears. Or you can use two-fingers on a trackpad or mouse and it will bring it up as well. Now the Context Menu will allow you to Quit any app. So you can launch apps and quit apps using the Dock. You can also Force Quit an app. If you bring up the Context Menu and then hold down the Option Key, Quit changes to Force Quit. So if some app is misbehaving and you need to force quit it you can do so from the Dock. You can even do that for the Finder. But if you bring up the Context Menu the regular way here you don't get a Quit option as you wouldn't typically quit the Finder. It should be running at all times. But if you hold the Option Key down and then bring up the Context Menu then you get Relaunch at the bottom which is essentially force quit for the Finder since it needs to be running. So Relaunch is the same as Force Quit. This could come in very handy if the Finder is misbehaving in some way. 

Now another thing you can do in the Context Menu is to Hide the app. So you can hide all windows using the Dock. This is the same as using Command H. But sometimes it could be more convenient to use the Dock for this. Now if you want to use that keyboard shortcut, fn or Globe Key and then A and go to one of these apps you can actually use the Up Arrow key to access the Context Menu and you can then Hide or if the app is already hidden you can Show the app. Notice if you are in the Context Menu and you simply use the right or left arrow keys it just goes to the next item. So it is easy to go through and use the arrow keys to access all sorts of functionality. 

You can also use the Dock to show a specific Window. So, for instance here in Pages I have two windows open. I could use the window switcher which is Command and then   the backtick key to switch between them. I could go to the Window Menu and see the open windows and switch to the one I want. But I could also use the Dock to do that. Just bring up the Context Menu like this and you'll see the windows with the little window icon next to them. Just select the one you want and it will jump to that window. 

Now if you have ever used the yellow button here at the top or Window Minimize to minimize a window you know it goes into the Dock. Then you could click on the minimized window on the right side of the Dock to bring it back. But you could also use the Context Menu for that app. Then you could see Minimize windows with the little diamond next to them. Then you could just select them there to bring them back. In fact if you go to System Settings and then you go to Desktop & Dock and then under Dock you select Minimize Windows Application Icon, now when you minimize a window it goes into the app icon there. Then the only way to bring it back is to select the item in the list. 

Now also notice in the Context Menu you not only get the currently opened documents in a window but you also get recent documents. These are documents that are not now opened but can select one and go right to it. It's really handy to get to a recent document without having to open the app first. For instance I'm not even running Numbers now but I could go to the Context Menu here. I could select one of these and it will launch Numbers and open that document. 

Here's something that is pretty much completely hidden because there is no mention in the Context Menu or any other way to know this works unless you actually just know this trick. You can drag and drop a file from the Finder into one of the icons in the Dock and it will open that file with that app, that's providing the app will handle that type of document. So, for instance, if I were to double click a text file it should open up in TextEdit by default. But other apps can open TextEdit as well. I could drag this file into the Dock and any app that handles it, like for instance the Notes App or Mail, will highlight. Here's Pages. I could drop it onto Pages and you can see it opens up that text document. If I were to take this image here and drag and drop it into Mail it would open up a new message composition window and put that image there as an attachment. If I were to drag it into Notes it would create a new Note and include that photo. 

You can also sometimes control apps using the Context Menu and the Dock. For instance, if I go to the Context Menu from Mail you could see I can choose Get New Mail, New Viewer Window, or Compose New Message. Now what you see here often depends on whether the app is running or not. So I'm going to Quit Mail and now when I look you could see I don't have those options there. For some apps you get a ton of control. Like, for instance, for Music if I launch the Music App and then I Control Click here you could see I have a whole list of different commands for controlling the Music App right in the Dock. If you do it with the Launchpad app you actually get an alphabetical list of all of your apps and you can easily launch any app even though it is not in the Dock. If you do it for System Settings you get the list of all the different sections of System Settings. If you were to select one it would go right to that section. 

Now one of the most common things you can do is create a new item using the Dock Context Menu. So, for instance, in Pages if I bring this up you could see there's a new document there, It would launch Pages or switch to it if it is already running and it would start creating a new Document. The app usually needs to be running for this. So, for instance, you can see you don't see it here in Numbers because Numbers isn't running. You don't see it here in Keynote because Keynote isn't running. But if I were to launch Keynote then I could Control Click here and I could see New Presentation. A lot of apps use this. For instance, Freeform here, New Board. Notes, New Note. Mail, has Compose New Message. Even third party apps, like here's Pixelmator Pro and you could see I've got New and then if I had something in my clipboard that would be an image I also have New From Clipboard. 

Now the last item I want to mention isn't something you actually do with the Dock but information you get from it. There are two types. The first is Badges. So notice here I've got a red circle with a 1 over the Mail App icon. That's called a Badge. It's telling me I have one unread message. I get the same thing for Messages or any app that wants to send Notifications or if the app developer has decided to use those badges in some way. It is really up to the app what the badge shows or whether or not it is used at all. Sometimes you have Settings. For instance in Mail if you go to Mail, Settings you can see under General there's Dock Unread Count and I could set it to Inbox Only, All Messages, Just Messages from Today, or the Last 30 Days. 

The last piece of information you see is the indicator at the bottom. You can see that black dot underneath the apps that are currently running. So I can really quickly know what apps I currently have running by looking in the Dock. There is a setting for that in System Settings. Then you go to Desktop & Dock and you could see it here. Show Indicators for Open Applications. 

So I hope now that you know these things you get the most from the Dock on your Mac. Thanks for watching.