Make the Mac Dock More Powerful By Adding Special Folders

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can make the Dock much more useful by adding a collection of folders to the right side.

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So you probably have your most frequently used apps in the Dock already. But did you know that you could add folders to the right side of the Dock to make it much more useful. These could be specific folders. They could be smart folders. They could be folders filled with aliases. There are all sorts of ways to get quick access to applications and all sorts of files by using the right side of the Dock.

By default you should already see a Downloads folders in the right side of your Dock. This is very useful as you can click on it and you can see which files you've recently downloaded and you could even drag and drop out of here to some other place or click on them to open them up. Now to make this more useful you could Control click on it and I like switching from Fan to Grid view which I think is a little bit better for downloads. You can still drag and drop from it. List View, which you'd think would be the ultimate because you can display a lot more stuff, you have a lot more room, but you can't drag and drop from it unfortunately. 

The other thing I like to do is to switch to Display as Folder because instead of seeing the most recent document icon there I'm going to see a folder and the Downloads folder actually is a pretty nice looking icon. We can add so much more to the right side of the Dock. One of my favorites is the Applications folder. So let's go to File, New File Window, and then Go. Then let's go to the Computer Level. From there let's dig down into the hard drive level where we see our Applications folder. Let's drag that Applications folder over here and drop it in. 

Now the Applications folder is there. If I click on it I'm going to see my Applications but it's a lot more useful if I set it to List View. Now you click on it and get this list here that even allows you to go down into subfolders. So you literally have access to every single application in your Application's folder. So your Dock shows you the applications you like to use the most but if you want to use anything else you click on this Applications folder on the right and now you can launch any application you want. I also like to change this to display as Folder View since the Applications folder has a nice icon as well and there's no reason I should be looking at the very first application in alphabetically order as the icon here. 

Now you can use this same idea to create something where you can get all of your documents. So I can create a new finder window and you could see I'm in the Documents folder. Let me Control click here and go up one level in Icon Drive and there is the Documents folder. I could drag and drop that into here. I'm going to also change that to display as a folder and I'm going to change it to List View. Now I can access any document inside my Document's folder. So it's pretty handy. But if there are certain folders that you access all the time you may want to go to and have those there as well or instead. So, for instance, say if the My Projects folder is the one I use a lot. I can put that one in there. Let me change that to Display as Folder. Let me change it to List View and I now have a handy way to access files in this folder.

The next step would be to add folders that do specific things. Like, for instance, let's say we want to see the most recent document that we've been working with. So let's create a new Finder window and go to a good starting point for a search. What we're going to do is create a new Smart Folder. So we want to start at the location where we're going to do the search for the Smart Folder. So let's say we want things in my Document folders. We start at the Document's folder level. Now we'll go to File, New Smart Folder and you could see it says Search, Documents. So we're in the right place. Now we want to hit the Plus button to give some criteria. So what we want to do now is say Last Open Date is within the last, let's say, thirty days. That's our most recent document. Now we can further go in and modify this. I'm going to hit the Plus button. Let's say Kind is a Document. 

Now we'll save this Smart Folder. You can see it's going to save it in a place called Saved Searches which is in your Home directory under Library under Saved Searches. That's fine. Let's give it a name such as Recent Documents. Make sure Add to Sidebar is not checked because that's not what we want. Save it here but not before I select here and do Command R which is going to open up a Finder window looking at Saved Searches. I can go into there and see the Saved Searches. Let's finish saving here. We'll save and you'll see Recent Documents has been added there. 

Now we can close the rest of these windows. We're still looking in Saved Searches. I can shrink this down a bit. Let's drag and drop Recent Documents in here. Put it there. If I click on it now I'm going to see recent documents. I can modify that by Control clicking on it. Let's display as Folder. It's going to give us this cool little Look For A Saved Search or Smart Folder. So I'm going to do List View here so everything is sorted in a nice order. Control click on it and make sure Sort By is set to Last Opened. 

Now we can create other saved searches to do other things as well. For instance I can do a New Finder Window. There I am in Documents. Let's say I want to do a Smart Folder that shows me my most recent images because I work with images a lot. So I will add a criteria there. I'll do the Last Opened date is within the last, let's say, 365 days. Then I'll say the Kind is an Image. I get to pick the type of image as well. I'll just do Save here and I'll save this one as Recent Images. Now when I look in the Saved Searches folder I can see a Recent Images folder there now. I can drag that there and I'll set it up the same way. Display as a Folder. I'll have it do List View and I'll make sure it's Sorted By last opened. Or maybe in this case I want it sorted by Name instead. I can click here and I can see all the images I've opened in the last year and access anyone by clicking on it. Maybe I want to set this one to a Grid View instead because now I can see nice previews of these images and I can scroll through them pretty easily.

You may also want to have a Smart Folder that shows you all the documents made by a certain application. So we can go to New Finder Window and start at the Documents level or even up higher if you want. We can do New Smart Folder and then say add the criteria that the Kind is Other and then type the name of the application. So say if you wanted all our Numbers documents. We'll hit Save and we'll save this as All Numbers Documents. Now we'll close these. Here's the All Numbers Documents Smart Folder. We can drag and drop that into the Dock as well and set it up like we want. Now we can see all our Numbers documents in one place regardless of which folder that they're in.

In addition you may want to have things that are not the result of Smart searches. So let's go to the Documents folder and let's create a new folder here and this is just a place to hold some of the folders that we're going to create that are going to be placed in the Dock. So I'll call this Dock Folders. We'll go in there and there's nothing in there. But I'm going to add a new folder and I'm going to call this Special Projects. Then I'm going to open up a New Finder Window here. Then pick some files that I want to be in the Special Projects folder. Let's go into this Project A folder here and say I want the My Shared File in there. I'm going to drag it but hold the Command and Option keys down. You'll see the arrow changes to a curved arrow there and drop that in. Now when I look in Special Projects I see I've got an icon but it has got this curved arrow which means it's an alias or shortcut to the original file. So the original file is still there. This is just a shortcut to it. I could go and add more files to it if I want. So let's add this one, again holding Option and Command, put that one in there. Put this one in here. Maybe go into another one and do this one. Now I have four shortcuts to four different files in different places. 

Let's go up a level here so we have that Special Projects folder. I'll add that to the Dock as well. Change it to Folder. Change it to a List View. I click on it and now I have quick access to any of those files. If I want to add more files to that I don't need to do anything to the Dock. I could simply go and add another shortcut here into this folder and now that appears here as well.

You could do this with other things as well. For instance you can create a folder here called Graphics Apps and then use the Option and Command keys to drag aliases from Applications into there and have a group of ten different graphic's apps here that you can easily now access in a folder in the Dock.

So really the sky is the limit here. You can create folders and fill them with aliases to all sorts of things. You can have folders inside of folders. You could have folders with Smart Folders in them. So it's all a matter of learning these simple skills and then applying them to your workflows to make the Dock that much more useful.