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you could always try drag thing...i have it set up to show tabs for each program category on the left side, the rest of the dock is hidden. kinda like a windows start menu, but moreso. i have it set so that i have to click it to unhide it, and once it's not in the foreground, it hides again. it will also highlight running programs, so you can kill them by holding left click, or right clicking them. it'll do a helluva lot, but you have to open another "dock" in order to show running windows, and unfortunately, if you use nodock.app (i.e. rename dock.app so it can't get used), you lose functionality with the hide/show function keys, which is the only thing about the dock that i actually like. another way to go about it is to use tinkertool and shrink the dock to minimum size, etc and put it up top. it works pretty well.

another one i'll second is definitely pathfinder. BAD ASS app. i could damn near get by just using that with no dock at all. unfreakingbelievable. and they have a new version coming out very soon, so if you buy, you get a free upgrade

another kinda cool little app is quicksilver...you just <ctrl><space> and it pulls up a little window, and you start typing...it pulls a list of programs, or files, etc. and you select the one you're after.
you can also set up hotkey triggers for various programs' functions (i.e. volume up/down/play/pause/stop, etc for itunes), and it has plugins for various programs (omniweb, mail, etc). it's amazing how easy it is to get used to/spoiled with.

i think someone had posted a pref file that you could replace the dock pref file with also...i think it moved the dock to a corner and shrunk it, too.

i'd kinda like to know if there's command line stuff to prevent the dock from ever showing on screen at all, but to at least give me the hotkeys for hide/show, etc...
yahoo's doing konfabulator these days for free, also...and you can assign it to use f-12 and effectively use it in place of the apple widgets.
that's just scraping the tip of the iceburg for osx tweakages!
fun stuff.

kell

The Dock is great if you place it of the right side of your second monitor. Convenient. Out of the way.

I have 2 screens and have it set out of the way to the right of the right screen. it does not bother me there at all. I hated it in my ibook so much though that I had to get rid of it.

chrispick wrote:The Dock is great if you place it of the right side of your second monitor. Convenient. Out of the way.

My second monitor is on my left. Is it okay if I put it on the left side?

James, thanks for mentioning fruit menu. I'd not heard of that program, so I'm checking it out now. I too think the dock is an annoyance and was looking for a program that would actually get the thing off my screen. I found a program called DockBlock and am checking out using this program with fruit menu to make a more OS 9 kind of feel to the menu bar. DockBlock also shows the current running applications in it's pulldown menu like OS 9 did. Here's an addy for it.

http://www.sideburn.com/dockblock/

Hope this helps

Dave Lawbaugh

PS. Thanks so much for keeping up this site. It's the best reference for MOTU products I've ever seen...not to mention overall computer references such as topics like this one.

I remembered this thread when I came across this app recently. KnockoutDock is freeware that supposedly gets rid of or minimizes the dock, though I haven't tried it myself. Also, I'm also a big fan of Fruitmenu--it's great not only for adding apps and folders to the apple menu, but for adding extremely useful contextual menu items for apps that support them.

Bill

Here's what I would like to see Apple do: make what I will call a 100 pixel "demilitarized zone" around the dock. That is to say, if the dock lives at the bottom of your screen, you would mouse to the bottom, and keep scrolling down (even though the cursor wouldn't actually sink past the bottom row of pixels). As soon as you are at -100 'virtual' pixels, the dock pops up, and normal cursor function resumes. That way, the dock would rarely pop up accidentally. If this were part of OS X, the DMZ buffer could be user-specified, and activated/deactivated from 'Dock Preferences'.

[quote="johnnyvince"]As soon as you are at -100 'virtual' pixels, the dock pops up, and normal cursor function resumes. That way, the dock would rarely pop up accidentally. If this were part of OS X, the DMZ buffer could be user-specified, and activated/deactivated from 'Dock Preferences'.[/quote]

That's a good idea. Why didn't those megabrains at Apple think of that?

'The Dock' (sounds too much like a place where g@y men hang around to get picked up by sailors) pops up like a priapic frog in the mating season if you get within half a yard of it. It looks like some kind of Fisher-Price/Sony 'My first computer' rubbish.

Designers seem to love the poxy thing••¦