< Day Day Up > |
Apple starts the Dock off with a few icons it thinks you'll enjoy: Dashboard, QuickTime Player, iTunes, iChat, Mail, the Safari Web browser, and so on. But using your Mac without putting your own favorite icons in the Dock is like buying an expensive suit and turning down the free alteration service. At the first opportunity, you should make the Dock your own. The concept of the Dock is simple: Any icon you drag onto it (Figure 4-1) is installed there as a button. (You can even drag an open window onto the Docka Microsoft Word document you're editing, sayusing its proxy icon [Section 1.2.5] as a handle.)
A single click, not a double-click, opens the corresponding icon. In other words, the Dock is an ideal parking lot for the icons of disks, folders, documents, programs, and Internet bookmarks that you access frequently. Tip: You can install batches of icons onto the Dock all at oncejust drag them as a group . That's something you can't do with the other parking places for favorite icons, like the Sidebar and the Finder toolbar. Here are a few aspects of the Dock that may throw you at first:
Tip: The Dock already looks extremely cool, but you haven't seen the end of its tricks. Using TinkerTool, you can make the Dock translucent to a degree that you specifya great way to show off at user group meetings. See Section 18.1 for details. 4.2.1. Organizing and Removing Dock IconsYou can move the tiles of the Dock around by dragging them horizontally. As you drag, the other icons scoot aside to make room. When you're satisfied with its new position, drop the icon you've just dragged. To remove a Dock icon, just drag it away. Once your cursor has cleared the Dock, release the mouse button. The icon disappears, its passing marked by a charming little puff of animated cartoon smoke. The other Dock icons slide together to close the gap. Mac OS X won't let you remove the Finder, the Trash, the Dock icon of an open program, or any minimized document window. Tip: You can replace the "puff of smoke" animation with one of your own, as described on Section 18.2.2500. Something weird happens if you drag away a Dock program's icon while that program is running. You don't see any change immediately, because the program is still open. But when you quit the program, you'll see that its previously installed icon is no longer in the Dock. 4.2.2. Three Ways to Get the Dock out of Your HairThe bottom of the screen isn't necessarily the ideal location for the Dock. Because most screens are wider than they are tall, the Dock eats into your limited vertical screen space. You have three ways out: Hide the Dock, shrink it, or rotate it 90 degrees.
4.2.2.1. Auto-hiding the DockTo turn in the Dock's auto-hiding feature, choose Dock Turn Hiding On (or press Option- -D). Tip: You also find this on/off switch when you choose Dock Dock Preferences (Figure 4-4), or when you click the System Preferences icon in the Dock, and then the Dock icon. (Chapter 9 contains much more about the System Preferences program.) -D. This method makes the Dock pop on and off the screen without requiring you to move the cursor. 4.2.2.2. Shrinking and enlarging the DockDepending on your screen's size , you may prefer smaller or larger Dock buttons . The official way to resize them goes like this: Choose Dock Dock Preferences. In the resulting dialog box, drag the Dock Size slider, as shown in Figure 4-4. There's a much faster way to resize the Dock, however: Just position your cursor carefully in the Dock's divider line, so that it turns into a double-headed arrow (shown in Figure 4-3). Now drag up or down to shrink or enlarge the Dock. Tip: If you press Option as you drag, the Dock snaps to certain canned icon sizesthose that the programmer actually drew. (You won't see the in-between sizes that Mac OS X generally calculates on the fly.) As noted in Figure 4-3, you may not be able to enlarge the Dock, especially if it contains a lot of icons. But you can make it almost infinitely smaller . This may make you wonder : How can you distinguish between icons if they're the size of molecules?
The answer lies in the Dock Turn Magnification On command. What youve just done is trigger the swelling effect shown in Figure 4-4. Now your Dock icons balloon to a much larger size as your cursor passes over them. It's a weird, magnetic, rippling , animated effect that takes some getting used to. But it's another spectacular demonstration of the graphics technology in Mac OS X, and it can actually come in handy when you find your icons shrinking away to nothing.
4.2.2.3. Moving the Dock to the sides of the screenYet another approach to getting the Dock out of your way is to rotate it, so that it sits vertically against a side of your screen. You can rotate it in either of two ways:
You'll probably find that the right side of your screen works better than the left. Most Mac OS X programs put their document windows against the left edge of the screen, where the Dock and its labels might get in the way. Note: When you position your Dock vertically, the "right" side of the Dock becomes the bottom of the vertical Dock. In other words, the Trash now appears at the bottom of the vertical Dock. So as you read references to the Dock in this book, mentally substitute the phrase "bottom part of the Dock" when you read references to the "right side of the Dock." |
< Day Day Up > |