Dock gets a spiffy new update

Things go fast in the iPhone world. Yesterday, I posted about Nate True's scrolling dock application. Today brings an entirely new generation of Dock. Dock 2.0 introduces a sunshine-bright hot spot on your iPhone's lower right corner. Drag out from there and the iPhone presents you with a curved selection arc. Move your finger along the arc to choose an application to open. The currently selected application echos just below the arc so you know which item you're selecting. It's a lot easier to use than it sounds and feels a lot like picking a name in the address book using the A-Z slide control.

And now the downside. The iPhone has little tolerance for running more than one non-Springboard application at a time. (For whatever reason, it refers to these applications as UnknownPurpleApps.) When more than one purple app attempt to launch, they conflict and the new app will not run. So what does this mean? When using Dock 2.0, you cannot use my screen shot utility or many other command-line apps.

You can easily enable and disable Dock 2.0 by using my launchctl GUI. Select com.natetrue.dock and choose unload -w to toggle it off or load -w to switch it back on.

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Source: http://cre.ations.net/creation/dock

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Things go fast in the iPhone world. Yesterday, I posted about Nate True's scrolling dock application. Today brings an entirely new...

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bmoney

Yep, Dock 2.0 is no longer available via Installer.app and I foolishly thought it had an "update". Now I don't have this cool app anymore. Dev, please repost it!

September 01 2007 at 3:26 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Will

I was really enjoying this for a while but it looks like the latest "update" reverted it to the old style. Lame!

September 01 2007 at 3:06 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

vdnyc

The purple apps thing is an error message referencing LibPurple.

September 01 2007 at 11:10 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

cameron

@Cycomachead

MobileStudio is nice but:

MobileFinder isn't very useful without MobileTextEdit and MobilePreview ... and thosedon't work very well yet. And MobileRSS crashed a lot, doesn't supprt ATOM, etc.

August 31 2007 at 11:19 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Phreak

hey erica i tried unload -w on dock 2.0 and my terminal still crashes. any idea why unload -w didn`t solve my problem?

August 31 2007 at 10:30 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

tino

isnt this this a Leopard feature?

August 31 2007 at 10:12 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

SalizarMarxx

Yes the iSkin Revo cover make this Dock unusable.. Sorry mate, I really enjoyed the 1.0 version, but sadly I had to uninstall 2.0...

August 31 2007 at 9:41 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

cycomachead

Hey TUAW what about these:

http://code.google.com/p/mobilestudio/

those seem truly useful.

August 31 2007 at 9:34 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Alex

hmmm... purple apps... EPICS! SJ and the crew have been playing too much WoW and incorporating it into their products... see the keynotes he has it in his dock.

August 31 2007 at 9:23 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Bryan Law

I've got an iSkin Revo for my iPhone, and with the case on, it is impossible to use this version of the dock. I can't touch the tiny corner because it's too small, and the corner of the case is right there. If it was a bit bigger, it'd be useful, but I can't even use it at all as it is :(

August 31 2007 at 8:51 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply