Use the Mac OS X Dock more effectively. Place your hard drive icon in the dock (to the right line of the Dock). Leave it there. Forever. Apple should ship all Macs this way, by the way. Are you listening Cupertino? Click and hold on it to bring up a hierarchical menu of your drives’s entire contents.
(The “5 levels deep” default limitation of Mac OS X can be overcome. We used a nice little application called, “TransparentDock” to set our hierarchical level depth to “unlimited.” This setting is at the bottom of the “Dock Setup” tab in the application. At MacDailyNews, we use fully transparent Docks, but you don’t have to use this feature if you don’t want to, just use the application to set the hierarchy to “Unlimited Levels.”)
Then you can turn off “Show hard disks on the desktop” in the Finder’s Preferences if you like. (If you are a long time Mac user, you may not be able to bring yourself to do this, so leave the hard drive icon on the desktop, too, if you can’t bear it not being there.) We know we can’t do it; our hard drive icons are all in the dock and on the desktop, too.
Place your Desktop folder in the dock, too. Especially if you use the Desktop a lot, like you did in the Classic Mac OS. Place other commonly-used folders in the dock, too!
One last piece of advice: turn OFF Magnification in the Dock and make the Dock as small as possible – the text labels of the icons should be enough to identify the icons, if you can’t seem to remember which icon is which. Without magnification, it’s a lot easier to click a static icon than trying to click a moving target all day long. OS X will seem a lot less tiring this way.
I do have my HD in my dock – and you’re right, Apple should ship ’em this way. Thanks for breaking my “5 levels deep” problem FINALLY! I downloaded TransparentDock and it worked as advertised, plus I like my dock transparent better, too!
Magnification in the Dock is EVIL. Turn it off.
I try to drag the harddisk (system) icon into the dock, but it just bounces back.. Any ideas on what I am doing wrong?
slf,
You just need to drag the HD icon to the right side of the Dock Separator.
I, also, cannot drag my HD to the dock. What gives? A Permission thing maybe?
Ken – thx, that worked!
FYI:
To add an icon to the Dock, just drag it from a Finder window to the Dock. Put application icons to the left of the line in the Dock, all other icons to the right.
There are two must-have that relate to this, number one – LaunchBar. Number two – DragThing. Both are available via macupdate.com or versiontracker.com, both are wonderful tools.
I always keep the Applications folder on my Dock, since 95% of the time that’s the folder I want access to on my boot drive. I also like moving the Dock to the left-side of the screen, turning off magnification, and making the icons as LARGE as possible. One of the GUI guidelines – besides static location of icons – is that it’s easier to click on a larger object. But hey, whatever works. I have frequently used folders on my Finder windows instead of my Dock. Your mileage may vary.
I use TigerLaunch to start less frequently used apps from the menu bar. Also load Launcher and Disk Space widgets (via Konfabulator) to access drives and important folders. My dock is on the right — on the left it kept getting covered by opening windows (since most default to upper left). Plus that puts the trash icon in its proper place!
Dock tips are useful, but I find Proteron’s MaxMenus invaluable! It allows me all the customization I need in one app and is completely non-intrusive when working. In it’s prefs I’ve made all text small (to allow me to see more folders and items) and it allows me to drag-n-drop files onto any OS X or OS 9 app to launch immediately. I was a DragThing user for years, but MaxMenus does so much more and takes no screen real estate. [url=http://www.proteron.com]http://www.proteron.com[/url]
i’ve been a long time mac user…and the day i made mac os x my primary operating system (since 10.1) i’ve had it configured the way they are FINALLY advising
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I’ve been using that trick since OS 9 – drop an alia of HD into Apple Menu Folder… then it was ADock – a mock OS X dock which I got used to before going into X, now I just use two opened (Command + N on desktop) windows in column view – and drag and drop most used folders etc. into Tool bar – including trash can, now I don’t even have to drag my mouse very far to access EVERYTHING, I can move files from these two fils and really, anything else – I find it much better than any dock activity – it takes time to go to the dock you see ;o)
Try XShelf. It holds folders, files, or apps. You can place it on anyside of the screen. It acts like the old OS9 pop up folders. With a little more writing from the author this will be the app to have.
If you will organize your apps in related folders you won’t need to do this. For example, all of my graphics/photo apps are in 1 folder, all my music/audio are in one folder, all my games are in one folder. Then drag these folders to the dock & when you right-mouse (or control click) on them, the contents will appear as a menu. This way you don’t need to screw around with the size of the dock, which should ALWAYS be on the left side of the screen. I don’t know how people can stand to use their Macs with the dock hogging up the bottom of the screen.
I’ve been using that trick since OS 9 – drop an alias of HD into Apple Menu Folder… then it was ADock – a mock OS X dock which I got used to before moving onto X, now I just use two opened (Command + N on desktop) windows in column view – and drag and drop most used folders etc. into Tool bar (Command + B) – including trash can, now I don’t even have to drag my mouse very far to access EVERYTHING, I can move files from these two “folders” and really, prtty much anything else – I find it much better than any dock activity – it takes time to go to the dock – especially if you have a big screen.
It’s stupid to put the HD in the dock. Apple should not ship their computers this way. Put your home directory and your Applications directory in the dock. Leave the rest of your HD alone! Why in the world would Apple want people to click on an icon in the dock and immediately see their Library and System folders? That would be very stupid of them, it would only cause problems. I like and use TransparentDock, but not for breaking the 5 levels deep barrier. With my home directory and Applications directory in the dock, I don’t have that problem.
I create a folder in My Home directory. It has folders of “+Hard Drives/All Apps/AV & Audio/Graphics/Web & Dev/Etc” and of course frequent accessed folders and Utilities. Inside these folders, place aliases to the actual application or folder. Now get rid of your other aliases to drives and anything else that links directly to a folder (unless you must have it). The reason? This opens in an eyeblink because the OS will not have to scan and recurse subdirectories. This will make even more difference on a slower computer. Once it hits an alias, it quits scanning. Putting an alias to your main hard drive, will cause a penalty to the pop-up and will show a lot of folders you shouldn’t be using.
Overall, use less in the dock. Don’t put links to directories onless they only have aliases in them to reduce the directory scanning. Your dock will be lightning fast and organized.
Well, there are times when the dock is just annoying when it pops up in a program (like photoshop) when you are working at the edge of the screen. And frankly, with launch bar to launch any folder or program and quick keys I am happy to hide my dock and hardly ever use it. So, here is a big question: is there a program that will stop dock popup? I can keystroke it to appear but would love to not have it pop up unless specifically called for. Is this too much of a customization to ask for???????
Putting the Application folder in the Dock, or other AppleMenu-like or Dock-like programmes is not efficient. About half the applications are hidden with a folder in the Application folder. Also, not all applications are used with equal frequency.
I use FruitMenu to get at my files and folders. I create a folder named Applications, and put it in the Fruitmenu. In this folder I put aliases of all frequently used applications, and an alias of the Application folder named “more Applications”.
I also created a folder named Utilities, and put it in Fruitmenu. In it I put not only aliases of most Apple utilities, but also aliases of those applications which I consider utilities, such as Toast, Retrospect, Carbon Copy Cloner, etc. This folder also contains an alias of the Utilities folder in the Applications folder named “more Utilities”.
I found that this is the best compromise between speed, and still having access to all applications