MacMost Now 216: Mac OS X Dock Tricks

Learn how to control the appearance of the Dock and how it works. Lots of tips.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi This is Gary with MacMost Now brought to you by squarespace for a great way to create your own website check out MacMost.com/squarespace. On this episode let's take a closer look at some of the ways you can customize the mac os x dock. So a lot of people like to stick to the defaults when using the dock and that's okay but there's a lot of good options you should check out and see what one works best for you, the best way to see all of the is either go to system preferences and choose dock or just in the apple menu go to dock, dock preferences, once there the first setting you could change is the size of the icons so you could make them larger or smaller. You could also change the magnification that happens when you roll over icons, so I'll turn that on and as I roll over you can see there's a slight enlargement of the icons as I roll them over I can exaggerate that by turning it bigger. You can also choose to have the dock on the left or the right rather than just the bottom, for instance to the left right here it appears right here. You can also choose either the genie affect or the scale affect for when you hide or show items,so for the genie effect here's a text edit window and it will zap down there and it will come back up but I can change it to scale effect for much simpler effect right there and that's useful if you have a slower computer. Also you've got the ability to turn off animation on opening an application if this is on the icon will bounce up and down as it's launching turn it off and it just won't do anything. You can also automatically hide and show the dock this is one of the most useful features click that and the dock goes away if you go down to the bottom of the screen and it will pop up and the same thing happens if you set it to the left or right which can be very useful I recommend turning that one on. Now these options are so useful in fact that you may want to switch quickly between them and there's tons of ways to do that, for instance in the apple menu you can go to dock and quickly switch between left bottom and right turning, hiding on and magnification on very easily well there's some even other short cuts for instance if you want to change the scale you notice that if you roll over the little dotted line there that separates your regular applications from folders and other items you can go ahead and do lots of things with you click on it and drag up or down to change the size of the icons in the dock, in addition if you shift and click on it you can drag to the right or to the left or back to the bottom to quickly change the position where the dock is located. Another aspect of the dock is of course the icons that you can find in it, now if you control click or right click on an icon it doesn't simply launch it will do a variety of different things for instance for a typical application you can remove from the dock you can set it to open at login or show it in the finder where it will show you where the application is located or you can also just select open. Also for something like a stack which is really just a folder that has been placed in to the right side of the dock here, you can go and click on it and do a bunch of different things you can change the sort order you can change the type from a stack or folder the type of stack fan, grid list you can also remove from the dock show and finder and open it so there I go I got it in that mode but I can go ahead and change it to the fan like that. Also for documents that are open you can close them right from the dock as well. Now if you click on a application that has open documents so I'm gonna control click on it here, I can jump to a particular document opened by the application I can also go ahead and quit the application show it or finder open or login do a bunch of different things. Now if I go over to the dashboard I get some different options I get some more widgets dashboard preferences as well as show the dashboard the finder has a bunch of different things like go to folder and connect to a new server you can also create a new finder window new smart window and go directly to any window that's open in the finder so there's a bunch of new things that you can do the trash of course has empty trash associated with it as well. You can also go and access all of these contextual menus by just clicking and holding until the contextual menu pops up. Now of course a lot of people also wonder about how to add items to the dock, it's real easy you can just drag anything you want. So if I wanted to put the dictionary in the dock I go to my application folder I'd find the dictionary and drag it to any location I want in the dock, I can move it around later by clicking and dragging it again. Now if I wanted to open up a folder and put that in a dock so for instance I can put this folder here in the dock that won't go on the left side that's for applications only but it will go in the right side and being a folder it will go ahead and take a icon that is one of the ones used in there and it will appear as a stack or folder pop up when I select it, I  can go ahead and change how it appears by control clicking on it. So it's a quick look at some of the different dock options that are available since the dock is probably something you use constantly while using Mac OS X I recommend you look into them and customize it a little bit more to your liking, till next time this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.

Comments: 3 Responses to “MacMost Now 216: Mac OS X Dock Tricks”

Glen Farmer

16 years ago

I enjoyed the episode. The only problem with it was that the video box with you talking covered a number of the things you were talking about.
Anyways, I did get enough information to understand what you were talking about and did get some good tips.
Thanks..

On a different note have you done an episode on how to create a video cast using a Mac.
I know you have done one on editing but I'm thinking more along the lines of what equipment to use.

rosenz

Check out episodes 119 and 121. Hard to answer a question about equipment -- it really depends on your goals and budget. Even then, there are too many options for me to know about them all and make a good recommendation.

Thanks Gary. I did check out the 2 podcasts you directed me to.
Lots of good tips for me to think about..

Comments Closed.

MacMost Now 216: Mac OS X Dock Tricks

Comments: 3 Responses to “MacMost Now 216: Mac OS X Dock Tricks”

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