Rock with your dock out

by Adam Gillitt, July 25, 2001

So, now that we have all been tinkering around with Mac OS X for a while, what was once a furor of squabbling and squawking from the pundits-at-large over the Dock seems to have died down.

What gives? Did people stop caring about it, or did they get used to it, or did the sun, moon and stars align to turn the Much Maligned Interface Widget into something that is Actually Useful?

Since I installed OS X I have been playing with the Dock – customizing it, realigning it, distilling it, remaking it and generally molesting it in unspeakable ways – and with some reservations, I have come to the conclusion that the Dock is proving to be more useful than I first thought. And it has clearly come a long way since it first appeared.

In this column, I am going to explore available Docklings and applications that are Dock-aware; next column I will discuss how to customize the Dock, what is to come and what should be to come.

There are now a couple dozen Docklings and Dock-aware applications, whose icons display dynamic information in the Dock. At best, these applications and Docklings provide exciting new features. Others compensate for familiar features present in OS 9 heretofore neglected in OS X, and a few don’t do much of anything useful.

Apple supplies four Docklings of their own for AirPort, displays, a portable’s battery levels and iTunes. None of these are real show-stoppers: all perform similar functions to their OS 9 counterparts in the Control Strip, although I confess to having neither AirPort nor a portable that can run OS X. And, to be honest, I wish the Displays Dockling would let me access all my monitor settings, so I don’t have to open up the Preferences app to adjust my third-party graphics card and monitor settings whenever I log in or come back from my screensaver. (Hell, I wish OS X would just remember the damn settings in the first place.)

Where Apple showed the most innovation was with the Mail application, the icon of which dynamically updates to show how much mail is waiting in the user’s inbox. I was so excited the first time I saw this work – I knew how many mails were waiting for me without having to open my inbox!

Suddenly I realized that the Dock could give as much as it could take. If it was going to demand desktop landscape, I was gonna make sure it worked hard for the space. If Apple wanted it to be a catch-all, by gum that’s what it would be.

I had tasted the sweet power that the KDE and Gnome toolbars in Linux (and other OSes) provide their users. I had seen the load meters, the virtual desktops, the funky clocks – and I wanted them too.

What I admired most was the efficiency with which the space was being used, to inform me about what was going on and to allow me to control it. Several developers have tapped into that need for information about what is going on under the hood of OS X.

There are several load meters available which display in the Dock, including my favorite, Xload (I like the way it shows my dual processors the best), Apple’s CPU Monitor, LoadInDock and the more abstract Flame. I don’t know why I like seeing my CPU load graphically – I find it soothing to be in touch with my computer’s inner workings, I guess. I also added the Dockling NetworkStatistics to display my inbound and outbound traffic on my Ethernet port. Unfortunately, this Dockling is designed to work best at maximum magnification, and I am not willing to give up the space.

In the same command center theme, there are ThermoInDock and Gmem! which display the CPU temperature and the amount of active, free or used memory, respectively. There is also SETI Dockling to let you monitor your SETI statistics, and SlashDock, which will give you Slashdot and MacSlash headlines.

Two developers came up with entirely different solutions for displaying weather in the Dock. Weatherling shows conditions when you click in the Dockling, while Son of Weather Grok minimizes windows into dynamically updating icons. And, despite Apple’s inclusion of both a clock app and a menu bar clock, many Docklings provide their own unique interpretations, including an alarm clock, DockAlarmTheClock and one that displays Internet Time (measured in Swatch ".beats"), WebTime. Another useful Dockling, Calindock, displays a customizable calendar.

Other Docklings are devoted to controlling system functions in addition to providing information. Prefling allows you to select which System Preference module you want, as it launches, and it gets you to your choice faster than you could manually. Classic Dockling allows you to control the Classic environment and which sets of extensions it starts up with. (Unfortunately, it is one of the handful of Docklings that has not yet been updated to eliminate that annoying "May be incompatible with this version of OS X" warning that I have grown to loathe.)

For those of you who use those arcane compact discs instead of MP3s, there is the slick AudioCD Dockling which will control the drive, look up the tracks in the CDDB and includes a simple volume control.

Oops, there’s a sore spot. Volume Docklings.

I don’t like any of the volume controller Docklings I have found so far. They are all too clunky or imprecise. I find it easier to use the volume keys on my keyboard than any of these – I really admire the simplicity of how the Sound Volume control strip module works under OS 9. Of all the volume Docklings for OS X, I think Muter is the simplest and the one that works best.

The Dock is also supposed to be a rudimentary file launcher. Instead of displaying volumes on the Desktop, I put aliases to them in my Dock. Boo to Apple, though, for making it impossible so far to customize individual volume icons á la OS 9. This little touch would make it so much easier to distinguish between volumes at a glance. In addition, it seems somewhat confusing to have application icons and directory icons confined to opposing sides of the Dock, while Docklings are allowed to populate either side willy-nilly.

At least the Dock now allows hierarchical navigation within directories and folders that have aliases in the Dock; that’s a big improvement over the Public Beta. Nevertheless, pop-up windows are one of the best features of OS 9 and are more than worthy of porting to OS X. Several third-party applications are trying to add this functionality to OS X, but it would be a real boon to have drawer functionality built into the Dock.

Snard is a Dockling that tries to incorporate this idea within the constraints of the Dock. On its own, it acts as a launcher of files, Sherlock and System Preferences, and the extremely useful feature of launching an application as an administrator. I admit to not being a fan of earlier releases of this Dockling, preferring to create my own launcher by putting a folder of aliases in the Dock. With the latest release, however, I have to give Snard its props and acknowledge that it lives in my Dock now.

There are a few other Docklings and Dock-aware programs of interest as well. For those of you who lack adequate desktop real estate, Space provides multiple virtual workspaces. Those of you susceptible to carpal tunnel syndrome and other stress-related injuries will appreciate RSIDock, which reminds you to take a break at timed intervals.

Some fun diversions for the Dock include the Magic EightBall, which was recently featured on Apple’s Web site prognosticating about forthcoming hardware, and the amusing Cat-in-the-Dock, from the feline-obsessed folks at Stimpsoft, which is my favorite nearly useless program since SimPiglet.

One of the more innovative concepts for a Dockling, brought to us by the Massinova Project, is a radio station that lives in the Dock. It connects to their servers and plays trance music through the audio player of your choice. It even lets you request songs and provides current track information in the icon.

There is also a rudimentary framework available from Stepwise.com for those adventurous enough to roll their own Docklings, and another package that is currently under development called Everyday Dockling, which allows for plug-ins.

The Dock may be inching closer to being a really useful interface feature. Unfortunately, despite the flurry of development of Docklings, most other applications for OS X are as slow to be Dock-aware as they are to be developed for OS X in the first place. Recently, innovator (?!?) AOL brought out the latest version of AIM for OS X, which, although still feature-crippled compared to builds for other platforms, uses the Dock icon to notify users when they have received an instant message.

Furthermore, some of my favorite widgets that I have seen for other OSes that have Dock-like utilities have yet to make their way to the Mac OS X Dock, especially direct terminal or URL access, and my favorite brain-buster, the binary clock.

Nevertheless, if you put all of these Docklings and Dock-aware applications together in the Dock, all their icons would be really small and their functionality would overlap each other a lot – and still other functionality would be missing. But you would know a lot more about what was going on with your computer and have handy shortcuts for control, if not multiple sources of amusement.

As more developers learn to program for Mac OS X and how to take advantage of what the Dock has to offer, the second wave of offerings will innovate and extend the usefulness of the Dock – and, I hope, in ways that haven’t even occurred to me yet.

I will cover customizing the Dock, where the Dock is headed and where I would like to see it going in my next column.

—Adam Gillitt previously covered Mac OS X for ZDNet News. He works as a graphic designer, maintains his own site at http://adam.gillitt.com and has as many fish tanks as he has Macintoshes. Email him at adam@gillitt.com

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