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Going Down the Docks

One of the snazziest features of the Mac operating system (OSX for the uninitiated) is the dock. It sits at the bottom of the screen like the colourful, simple, undulating program launcher that it is. It has remained more or less unchanged since OSX first burst onto the scene and gave Windows a kick in the pants in early 2001. Well, I say a kick in the pants but I probably just mean a series of slightly irritating commercials which Microsoft managed to make look pretty foolish after two years of ignoring them. For most of its life the dock looked more or less like this.

With the most recent version of OSX – Big Cat or something like that – it got a slight makeover and now looks like this.

The idea of the dock is that it lets you put all your favourite applications in one place and launch them as and when you see fit. But – and this is the clever bit – it doesn’t just launch the programs. Oh no. It makes the icon jump up and down with joy before launching the program. I like to feel that Firefox is happy to serve me before it gets down to the business of football scores, witless opinions and bikini models.

The other half of the Mac screen lay out is the bar at the top of the screen. This is actually cleverer and more useful than the dock but gets none of the press. The dock must have a better agent. The bar actually changes to the menu of whatever program you’re in. So if you’re in Word it is the Word menu. If you’re in Firefox it is the Firefox menu. If you’re just on the desktop it is the basic OSX menu. It takes a bit of getting used to but once you do, you’ll find it functional if bland. One thing it doesn’t do is let you minimise programs to it as the Windows bar does. No – you minimise applications to the dock. They slither down like a genie going back in its bottle when you click to minimise them, emerging like the same genie who has just realised why he left the bottle in the first place when you maximise again.

The problem I had when I used a Mac is that the dock quickly becomes limited and annoying. Macs – as much as PCs – quickly get sluggish and bored with the job of being computers and ignore you half the time. So what was an initial couple of bounces of the application icon soon become five or six bounces before Firefox or iTunes can be bothered to join you for tea and scones. The bouncing goes from endearingly cute to rubbing your face in it. It also takes up a lot of screen space. Or "real estate" if you’re a pretentious twat. I had a 17 inch 4:3 Mac and the dock just seemed to dominate it. Because it sits on top and stops you clicking anything underneath, the amount of screen space I could use was restricted. You get used to Windows owning the bottom centimetre of the monitor but OSX wanted an inch and that was that. It also fills up very quickly. You only need a dozen or so programs and the dock is full, things go off the screen when you make the thing ripple like an ocean and you have to start dragging them off. Which makes the icons burst in a puff of smoke. Again, cute but if you didn’t mean to do it you’re not going to be cheared up by a cloudy little animation.

It is only with the boom in widescreen monitors that the dock has really started to be something useful. Finally there is room to use it properly. Bigger screens in general mean the inch it wants, and the width it needs, are no longer such a big deal.

I’d tried Rocket Dock for Windows a couple of times and found it was a pointless gimmick. But I’ve had another go – thanks to an article on Digger – and now I’m sold on it. My desktop has gone from this (last year shortly after joining Vista) –

To this after a couple of hours tinkering –

Zoë Telford if you’re wondering.

Rocket Dock attempts to replicate the Mac dock on Windows and it does a pretty good job considering its limitations. The dock is a fundamental part of OSX and is built into the very heart of the operating system. Rocket Dock must operate on the outside and sit on top of a Windows operating system which doesn’t really want it there in the first place. Although Windows often seems like it doesn’t want anything to run on it. I sometimes picture the Windows kernel in the basement of Paradise Towers, bitterly resenting all the non-MS applications living within its walls and killing them off one by damned one.

Although it looks like the OSX dock it can’t do everything the latter can. You can’t close programs from the dock by right clicking. I’ve just tried – it closes the entire dock. Not great. Likewise, it isn’t as good at displaying useful thumbnails of minimised windows. OSX is good enough that you can actually watch minimised video clips from the dock (if you don’t mind a square inch of screen). Rocket Dock doesn’t quite go that far. Videos will play but it mimics the shape of the player window you have open rather than the video itself. An incredibly minor quibble but it reminds the user that this isn’t the real thing. It also can’t update icons with news – so the mail application doesn’t get a little envelope when you’ve got post. Ditto it doesn’t have anything like Apple’s stacks, folder contents preview or any of that jazz. So it looks the same but doesn’t do everything the real thing can.

Adding Rocket Dock means I could get rid of the Windows sidebar. I raved about it at the time but I’ve grown a bit bored of it. It takes resources, it takes screen space and it kept throwing up a line 82 debug error every time I started the computer. All I really used it for was the program launcher and I’ve got my new dock to do that.

The first thing I did – at the prompting of the article – was move my Windows task bar to the top of the screen (a la OSX). It takes a bit of getting used to but it looks quite good up there. I haven't made the mistake of auto-hiding it this time. I’ve done that before and I hate it. I literally hate having the task bar auto-hidden. How tragic is that?

Next I made sure the dock had all the icons from my sidebar before closing the latter. I’ve made that mistake before too. I then used some Rocket Dock icons to replace those which looked rubbish. A bit of tinkering with colour, size and animation later and I had a useable program launcher.

So what are the pros and cons of this new approach? Well, on the plus side my computer does seem a little faster now I’ve closed the sidebar and its gadgets. I’ve also got full use of my widescreen monitor without the sidebar basically making it 4:3 with knobs on. And I’ve got a bit of a new look to stop me getting bored or envious when I walk past (into) the Apple store. There aren’t any real downsides aside from teething troubles. For example, if I click on the Firefox icon and Firefox is already open, instead of switching to my Firefox window it will open a new one. I can’t remember what the Mac dock does if you do that – I’m doing it because clicking there is what I’d do on the Windows task bar and I’m on autopilot.

You can get Rocket Dock (funnily enough) at www.rocketdock.com and it’s entirely free. It’ll take a couple of hours to configure and a few days to get used to but it is fun if you like that sort of thing and have a big enough screen for it not to get massively in the way.