Macintosh Lesson #4
The Dock
The Dock is normally situated along the bottom of the screen. The Dock is an iconic list of applications, folders and files. It also holds the trash can. The left side of the dotted divider is for applications, while the right side holds files, folders, minimized windows, and the trash can.
The primary use of the dock is to grant you easy access to commonly used programs, files and folders.
Applications in the Dock
The first time you logged on to your Mac, the dock contained a list including; the Basic Mac OS X programs. Finder, Dashboard, Mail, Safari, etc. The first thing to know about these icons is how to remove icons that you don’t need in the dock—why have Dashboard in the dock, when the F4 key brings it up just as easily. To remove an item from the dock, just click-hold then drag the icon out of the dock. You will see a “poof” cloud and if you now release the mouse, you hear Apple’s “poof” sound and the icon is gone.
The second important piece of knowledge is where the original is stored, allowing you to replace that item you just removed. To replace an application in the dock, first open a Finder window (click the Finder’s icon in the dock). Click Applications in the sidebar (see Tip #2b). You are now presented with all the applications on your computer (unless you moved some). Select the application you need and drag it to the dock. The existing icons will slide apart to allow you to add the selected application. Notice that the application is still in its original place as well. What you have done is to add its name to the iconic list of the dock. You can of course follow the same procedure to add any program to the dock.
If you launch a program that is not in the dock, its icon is added, even if it was not in the dock originally. It will be added to the right of the existing applications, just to the left of the divider. There are a few reasons this happens. The first is that each running application has a glowing blue light underneath it, allowing you to see at a glance which applications are running. This also gives you one of many ways to switch between running applications, just click once on the icon of the program you wish to switch to.
The application icons in the dock have many other uses. If you want to open a file in a different program—for instance a jpeg file in Photoshop instead of Preview—you can drag the icon for the file onto the chosen application. When you are over the application, it should “highlight” or darken. Then just release the mouse and the file will open in the chosen application. If the icon doesn’t highlight, the chosen application cannot open the selected file. If you want to force a program to open a file—you tried the aforementioned trick, but the icon would not highlight—you can hold down the command and option keys and force the program to open the file. This will usually result in an error message from the application stating that it cannot read the file, but sometimes it works. For instance, Excel will open a text file this way. Some icons will do unique things when you use this trick. If you drag a file onto the Mail icon, it will create a new email message with the chosen file as an attachment.
There is one more trick to application icons in the dock. They have menus associated with them. To access the menus, just click and hold the mouse button on any application icon.
The menus that appear will vary depending on the application and its current status. The first image shows what a standard menu would look like if the application is not running. Notice that you have just a few options. The second image shows the menu from the Safari icon with two windows open. Here you have the added choices to select a window, open a new window, hide the application or quit it. Some menus have even more functionality. For instance the third image shows the menu for System Preferences if it is running. You have the same Quit, Hide, etc., but the added ability to select any System Preference you would like to open. The iTunes menu adds the ability to pause, play, skip tracks and shuffle, among other commands.
In Snow Leopard (10.6), there were some changes and additions to the dock icons.
Menus have a new heads-up-display (HUD) appearance, white text on a transparent black background. If you click and hold on a application that is not running the choices are virtually unchanged, albeit in a slightly different layout. If the application is running a standard click and hold, is very different. Click-hold a running application will now active Exposé and show you a miniature view of each open window from that application. If you prefer the older type dock menus, they are still available, well almost, you can’t get back the old layout of options. To activate the older style menus and disable Exposé, hold the control key when clicking the icon, or use a right-click.
Files and Folders in the Dock
On the right side of the divider, you will find files, folders the trash and any windows that you have minimized. You add items to this side by dragging them to the position you wish, the existing icons will move to give space for the new item. The icons work much the same way as application icons. Click the icon of a file, trash or minimized window and it opens. Folders have traditionally opened the folder, or with a click-hold to see a list of the contents, and allowed traversing any sub-folders. Apple has made some extensive changes in the behavior of folders in the dock since OS X 10.4 (Tiger). Stacks were introduced 10.5. This gave us a more visual way to access the contents of folders in the dock. Click the icon, and up pops a graphic list of the files in the folder, either in a “fan” where roughly 10 items, or as a “grid”. 10.6 brings back the ability to view a text based list of the contents, and traverse sub-folders.
You change these settings folder by folder. Control or right-click on a folder in the dock to access the settings.
Here you can change the sort order. This is valuable for the Fan option as the icons that appear are the items that would sort to the top of that list. The “Display as” section indicates how the icon appears in the dock. “View content as” determines what you see when you click the icon. For example, Apple places the Downloads folder in the dock. It is sorted by Date Added, displays in Stack and viewed in Fan mode. So you see an icon of the most recently downloaded file, when you click it, you see a fan of approximately 10 items and the most recent one is at the bottom.
