Filed under: Tips and tricks
Tip: Quick hard drive access from the Dock
Photoshop guru Ben Willmore uses this OS X technique to quickly access files on his Mac while he's teaching his popular Photoshop seminars. It's caught the attention of his students, even though they're supposed to be focusing on Photoshop rather than OS X. If it can distract people from learning Photoshop from Ben, I figure it's worth passing on: Drag a copy of the hard drive icon from your Mac OS X desktop to the right of the vertical line on the right side of your Dock. (If your Dock is vertical drag the hard drive icon beneath the horizontal line near the bottom of the Dock.) Press and hold the hard drive icon on the Dock to reveal pop-up menus of your file structure. Now you can use the pop-up menus to quickly navigate your hard drive and access your files.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Adam said 7:09PM on 9-23-2005
Control-Clicking (or Right-Clicking with a 2 button mouse) the icon has the same effect as clicking and holding. I actually have my Applications folder and my Documents folder there instead of the hard drive. That way I can quickly launch apps that aren't used enough to warrant dock space. I can also quickly access my documents. Those are really the only two categories of things that I need to access without resorting to Spotlight, or a straight Finder run.
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ivan said 7:22PM on 9-23-2005
I've been doing that for quite some time.
http://creativebits.org/2004/08/os-x-applications-folder-pop-up.html
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bloodthirstyrobot said 7:35PM on 9-23-2005
It's a great tip...but one that many of us have been doing since OS X 10.0
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narco said 7:35PM on 9-23-2005
I've also been doing this for a while with my applications folder. I could never understand why people have a billion items in their dock, especially when they only use a few programs on a regular basis.
The only programs I keep in the dock now are programs that allow me to drag documents over their icon to open them in that particular application. That, and programs like Safari and Word that crash on a regular basis.
Fishes,
narco.
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Steve Forrest said 7:48PM on 9-23-2005
Since OS X 10.0? Um, does anyone remember the "Apple menu" in, oh, say OS 8 or 9. You just had to drag an alias of your hard drive to the Apple menu, then (after a few seconds of CPU activity while, I always assumed, it generated the submenu setup) you had the same feature. One of those basic good ideas that now seem pretty instinctive.
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macfanboy said 10:49PM on 9-23-2005
Who needs a dock when you can use Quicksilver?
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Andrew Burke said 12:55AM on 9-24-2005
Butler (http://andrewsmactips.cjb.cc/butler.htm) has a great feature where you can drop any folder onto a hot corner to bring up the Butler configuration menu. From there you can assign a hot key to show the contents of that folder as a menu from now on. From the menu that pops up you can also open the folder.
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AV said 5:10AM on 9-24-2005
It's a shame that you can't drag things to the dock icon for the HD and have it pop up the subfolders the way the desktop icon works. Now THAT would be handy..
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darleen Michael-Baker said 12:19PM on 9-24-2005
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.
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iFelix said 12:51PM on 9-24-2005
Use the same process with any driver or folder for easy access.
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systemsboy said 3:42PM on 9-24-2005
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.
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Sir Not Appearing in this Blog said 4:52PM on 9-24-2005
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.
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Bob said 6:10PM on 9-24-2005
Oh big deal, someone was already doing this! It's a tip, and useful for those new to OS X.
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Paul said 6:10PM on 9-24-2005
Well I thought it was a handy hint. I've just got a new apple and things like this can be really helpful. Keep 'em coming.
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al said 11:42PM on 9-24-2005
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...
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TheDoode said 8:04AM on 9-25-2005
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.
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mike said 7:17PM on 9-25-2005
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?
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Pedro said 11:38PM on 9-25-2005
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
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Michael Collins said 4:46AM on 10-03-2005
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.
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