Tip: Quick hard drive access from the Dock

This "shortcut" makes the Dock as clunky as Windows' Start Menu. I can see the value if you're doing a Photoshop tutorial and don't want to remove the program from your screen. However, if you have expose, just hit F11 to show the desktop and search your Hard Drive with Finder. This is a much faster solution.

as somebody already mentioned, i as well use this "trick" for applications folder. who needs a dock? well, you must like quicksilver a lot. i tried it and never used it again. spot light kind of handles my needs. what sucks is that Spotlight isnt a stand alone app like iCal or what ever else out there. i mean id love to MAC TAB myself to spotlight, but it doesnt work this way. why Apple, why o why? ;) offtopic: on my brand new imac the OS X went nuts. it replaced its system font with courier new or smth :( i dont know how to fix it. then everything i open in spotlight opens in a random app. i always have to user Reveal funktion... again, OS X is so new and complex enough for me, that i dont know how to work this problem out. anybody else has this?

This is a fantastic tip. Every time I set up a Mac for someone, I put the applications folder in their dock. For most people moving from Windows the loss of the Start Menu is one of the most common complaints I come across. Having a list of all applications available at a click is pretty handy, and is a close analogue to the Start Menu

I recently converted to all Mac after being PC since 1988. Its been a month so far. I kinda discovered this trick on my own by accident one day with my Apps folder. Whats funny is that a friend of mine, she never knew of this and shes been using the Mac since the IIGs days.

A note for people who are pointing out that this is in fact an old trick: Not everyone using a Mac today has been using one for five years. And so what if you've been doing this for five years? Do YOU know every tip and trick there is to know? I certainly don't make the claim, and I've been a Mac user since 1990 (and an Apple 2 user since 1979. I didn't know you could do this. If I didn't know about this, how is someone who just got his first Mac last week going to know it? This is useful information, and I'm glad it was posted.

I always thought doing this was kind of silly for huge sets of nested folders like you have on a hard drive -- just open a Finder window. But for things like Applications it makes sense. I also wanted to point out that after you get the pop-up of the folder hierarchy, the list responds to keyboard entry, just like in the Finder. So if you want to jump to something in a long list, just type the first few letters in the name of the file, and you're there. You can also navigate subfolders with the arrow keys.

Like some of the commenters above, I have been putting the Applications folder in the dock for as long as popups have been working there. I don't really like putting the HD in the dock for a couple of reasons- 1) no access to other hard drives unless you have aliases to them already on the first hard drive; 2) makes it too easy to leave files and folders in odd places, especially if the user is an admin account; 3) why would you even want to see the System folder? Stay the hell out of there! Apple used to have a special folder named Favorites with a cute little heart badge on it in earlier versions of OS X- it was very easy to make an alias of any file or folder by dropping it on the toolbar icon for the Favorites folder. Apparently it wasn't appreciated, cuz now you have to manually create the aliases (alii?) and maybe even the Favorites folder (no steenkin' cute badge anymore, either.) But a Favorites folder (name it whatever you like) still is the best way to put easy access on the Dock, imho. As for pre OS X and the Apple Menu- the submenus could only go 5 levels deep. Enough for most, but sooner or later this would keep you from seeing what you needed...

Oh big deal, someone was already doing this! It's a tip, and useful for those new to OS X.

Use the same process with any driver or folder for easy access.

Seriously. It took THIS long for some people to figure that out? tsk. As to the overloaded Dock issue... yeah I liken that to the windows folks who have their desktop so covered with stuff you can't see desktop let alone FIND anything. And I thought *I* was unorganized.