dsandler.org/wp

OK, I’ve finally given up on the Dock. It’s always irritated me for a number of little brain-nibbling reasons:

1. Muscle memory or real estate: Pick one. I really, really like things to stay in one spot over a long period of time; it’s not even muscle memory so much as spatial memory. (I use Virtue to keep major concurrent tasks on separate workspaces; in my head I have a 4096×768 monitor, workspaces side-by-side, and the GL effects I use to switch workspaces reinforce that topology.) So it bugs me that if I want apps to show up in a recognizable place, I need to pin them to the Dock, taking up valuable real estate when they’re not running.
2. No real estate? No feedback. How many emails do I have? No idea; the icon’s too small for me to read the little red badge on the Mail.app icon. Why are the icons so small? Because I have too many of them pinned in there; see #1.
3. No muscle memory for you, anyway. The Dock is centered, so it’s not like pinned applications stay in one place anyway; as soon as you open an app not on the Dock, everything shifts to accommodate. (This is “easily” addressed by magnetizing the Dock to one side of your screen, using some defaults write command I’ve used and long since forgotten.)

So, yeah, the Dock and I never really got on well. You may recall that Dave tamed the Dock; that solution never really worked for me (real estate; $ for DragThing), and I don’t know if he still uses it like that, anyway.

I finally gave up on the Dock entirely. Here’s what it looks like now:

That’s right, everything’s unpinned, and the icons (snapped to 32×32) are large enough that I can read the feedback badges.

So what about all that spatial memory crap? I gave up on that, too, at least as far as the Dock is concerned; it’s purely a status/feedback region for me now—I don’t click on it anymore. All my app-launching and open-file-with-app needs are now satisfied by Quicksilver, which is usually faster than (spatial-memory-accelerated) mousing anyway.

Now if only QS were faster on my poor little PowerBook. I know, I know, I’m never satisfied.