Navigating with OS X Continued: The Dock

Several times now I've mentioned the all important "Dock". The Dock serves four purposes in Leopard versions of OS X. It serves as "shortcuts" to common applications, shows you which programs are "running", shows you the minimized applications, and gives you access to special "folders". Let's unpack these quickly with screen shots to help us.

But first, where is the dock? The answer is that it depends on how the machine is setup, as the location and visibility and behavior of the dock are customizable. The default setup has the dock at the bottom of the screen and visible. The default setup has icons for a web browser (Safari) and other programs that come with the Mac like iChat, iDVD, and Photobooth. Programs can be removed from the dock, added to the dock and moved along the dock. Programs can be started and stopped from the dock as well.

Starting and Stopping Programs from the Dock
To start a program from the dock, click its Icon. The icon will bounce until it displays the menubar for the program and most often opens a default window (some programs, like Adobe Photoshop don't open a window until a "file" is opened, they only change the menubar,but most programs open a default window as well and make it the active window.

Once a program is open and running a little blue light appears beneath its icon. If the program is already in the dock the light appears below it. Otherwise, the program icon is temporarily added to the dock (toward the right side) and has the blue light below it. It's possible for programs to be running without any active window opened or minimzed and the only indication of such will be the little tell-tale blue light beneath the the icon on the dock.

Clicking the icon in the dock for a running program will make it the active application. If there is a window to display that was minimized it will restore it. It will change the menubar to that program as well. You can shut applications down from the dock, but we'll address that later when we talk about accessing context sensitive menus for programs including the dock itself and the desktop.

You can remove a program from the dock by dragging it off the dock. It will disappear in a little poof of smoke. You can drag an application icon from one position on the dock to another, when you do that, the other programs will move to make room in the new spot. If you make a mistake and drag it off the dock, you'll find it's easy to drag the application on again, and I'll tell you where to find them when we discuss the Finder and the application area. You can't hurt OS X by dragging stuff off the dock or on it.

The dock has three parts to it. The left hand side of the dock is where the application shortcuts all sit that I've been discussing. As you move past the last icon you will see a series of bars (like square dots) that shows the boundary for the next part of the dock. In Leopard, the next set of icons are "special folders". By default, there are at least two of these. They are the downloads folder, the "Documents" folder. Again, like applications in the doc, they can be moved left and right (but not past the bars and not into the next section we're about to discuss. They can also be dragged off the dock (it doesn't delete the contents, just the shortcut) and can be dragged back on. Immediately after these special folder locations are icons representing minimized application windows. Clicking these will restore the window and make the menubar and application window active as discussed earlier. The last thing to the right on the dock is a trash bucket, and anything you delete goes in it. Clicking it opens it and you can restore anything from the trash. The trash has a few other things it does and we'll discuss it ... later.

I mentioned that the dock is configurable earlier and we'll talk about it when we discuss system preferences.