Sitting on the Dock every day

Dock, stacks, transparent this and that - personally I don't use it and instead (with the help of FruitMenu) manage to re-create the old (and much missed) Apple Menu - ie. one click and I am able to access any file on my Mac - so simple it hurts... Why the guys at NeXt felt the need to re-invent the wheel can only be guessed at (perhaps a macho pride thing with the resident Apple developers?)

For what it's worth - I still believe the Dock thing was a gimmick intended to wow PC users to defect to the Mac platform.

^o^

I have suddenly realized something. The Leopard dock actually works better on the side than it does on the bottom because when it's on the side the faux 3D look makes so little sense that your brain just dismisses it entirely. But positioned at the bottom the dock's logic problems constantly draw attention to themselves.

Now this is how you stack a vertical dock. Check this out:
http://photobase.apn.gr/photobase/data/tmp_media/LeopardDockProposal_2.jpg

Thanks Rachel the screen shots are amazing its been 17 years since I used the archimedes at school but they took me right back.

Thanks again

Gareth

@Jon H

Have you seen it? Cause you're way off base there. It shows the first icon based on your sort method up front. Right click->Sort->pick method, first icon shown in the stack's dock icon will be different, display order on the stack will be different. You can barely see the others behind, it's just eye-candy, and they're obscured entirely by the foremost icon. If you mean to imply that you can't distinguish between the folders based on the first visible icon, you must keep a ton of folders on your dock cause I'm having zero trouble. In the end, you can solve this problem hackishly by creating a file named "0" in your folder, putting whatever icon you want on it and sorting by Name. Pretty? No. Effective, yes.

@ Jon H

I'm not sure I am following your logic, because last time I checked it is easier to distinguish between a pile of preview icons, than two folders that look identical to each other.

I never used the dock for folders because once a folder is on the dock they all look the same. So in practice, I only had one key folder on the dock, my download folder, which I had customized with its own icon. All other key folders I'd rather have on the Finder sidebar. On the sidebar they are more accessible, especially from contexts like an Open Save dialog box. And I never used the hierarchical menu function - this required too much concentration for me. So its lose does not bother me a bit, but I can't see why it was not kept as an option. Maybe on a certain level there was a realization that the Dock was not successful as it was an needed to be redefined, I kinda agree and am glad to see it,

In terms of using the dock purely as a launcher, I have grown to like it in its new form. In 10.4 I had like 30 icons on my dock all very small, and kinda hard to find. Now its down to about 15 full time ones, these are the everyday ones and they are now easy to see and use. I put all of CS3 into a stack, all my office apps into a stack and all utilities into a stack, so I still have quick access to these and there is less clutter. I am finding that I am really happy with this setup - this makes the dock better than any previous launcher i've used.

""Hey, I want something in that folder on the dock. I should click it." And then you likely see your thing."

Folder? What folder? All you see on the dock is a messy pile of unintelligible icons.

If there were one thing I could change about OS X, it would be to blast the dock into smithereenees and go back to my beloved Apple menu customizations of the previous OS 9.

It either takes up too much valuable screen real estate, or if you hide it, it keeps getting in the way by popping up when you don't want it. This whole UI thing of trying to interpret what a user is doing is horrendous and should never be done in a UI, IMHO.

With UI, Apple needs to stop listening to the Unix and Windows programmers it hired 10 years ago and start listening to the System 7-type psychologists it fired 15 years ago.

Again, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.

Cheers,
FL

Stacks are no different philosophically than the "old way" that folders were on the dock. It's basically just reorganized. The default left click behavior now delivers something functionally identical to the old right click menu, which is fine with me. Right click now delivers some configuration options for the way that folder (stack) is displayed, and an Open menu item that will *gasp* open the window in Finder. I can still drag icons to it on the dock and they copy to it. It still acts like a folder in all the important ways, but now there are some fancy view options. It seems to me like they decided that the "menu" behavior was much more useful than the "open" behavior and swapped the mouse buttons accordingly. I happen to agree. The only thing I miss is the cascading folders in the menu, but it's about time I overcame that Windows-ism anyway.

In the end, the default behavior is for the neat organic stack to only happen if you have 7 or less files in the folder. Over 7 it turns into a grid that shows you up to 62 of the folder contents, and then over 62 items you get a button in the corner of the grid that opens the folder in Finder. It's really pretty intuitive. "Hey, I want something in that folder on the dock. I should click it." And then you likely see your thing. If not, you click the "See More" button. That's it. Not revolutionary, not a brain buster either, and the flashy is nice. The grid and stack expansion is pretty snappy, even on an aging Powerbook.

Besides the somewhat "off" floating look the Dock gets when you go vertical, you lose the organic curved stack thing as well, it's all grid all the time. You also lose reflections on the icons. In the end, and as an OSD (that's original side docker), I can still put the dock on the side and function, but it's clearly intended to stay on the bottom, and that's where most will people leave it.