Section 106. Change the Dock s Position and Behavior

106. Change the Dock's Position and Behavior

BEFORE YOU BEGIN

3 Add an Application to the Dock

5 Minimize and Restore a Window

SEE ALSO

4 Control an Application from the Dock

The Dock is the centerpiece of Mac OS X, the flexible and accommodating control center for your documents and applications. Its ease of use is unprecedented, but it's also configurable in a number of key ways, a fact that you might find very welcome as you try to make the Dock work most efficiently for you.

106. Change the Dock's Position and Behavior

1.	Open the Dock Preferences Go directly to the Dock Preferences pane by Control +clicking or right-clicking the vertical separator bar in the middle of the Dock; select Dock Preferences from the contextual menu that pops up. You can also open the Dock Preferences by clicking Dock in the System Preferences , or by choosing Dock Preferences from the Dock submenu of the Apple menu.
2.	Change the Dock's Size Use the Dock Size slider to change the size of the Dock. Note that you won't be able to make the Dock larger than the largest size where all icons in the Dock can be shown at once. The Dock's size immediately changes as you move the slider, letting you see the results of your customizations right away.
3.	Configure Magnification One of the Dock's neat features is that even if you make the Dock itself very small, you can still see the individual icons in much larger sizesbecause of magnification . If you move your mouse over the icons in the Dock with magnification on, the icon you're moving over and its immediate neighbors appear much largerup to the size specified by the Magnification slider.
4.	Turn On Dock Hiding Select the Automatically hide and show the Dock check box to hide the Dock from view and regain Desktop space. If the Dock is hidden, it reappears when you move the mouse down to the bottom of the screen.
5.	Change the Minimize Effect There are two minimize effects available in Mac OS X: Genie and Scale. The Genie Effect is the default; it's where a minimized window curves and slides into its place in the Dock. The Scale Effect simply zooms the window down to its minimized position; you might prefer the Scale effect because of its faster operation.
6.	Place the Dock on the Left or Right By default, the Dock appears at the bottom of your screen. You might not like having the Dock at the bottom; you might prefer it to use up the more plentiful horizontal margin space along the left or right side of the screen (particularly if you have a widescreen display) than the comparatively scarce vertical space at the bottom of the screen. To do this, select either the Left or Right radio button.

TIP

Most of these Dock controls can also be accessed from the Dock itself. Some of the options, such as automatic hiding and left or right positioning, can be selected from the pop-up menu that appears if you Control +click (or right-click) the vertical divider bar in the middle of the Dock. You can change the Dock's size by clicking the vertical bar and dragging up and down.