BRINGING HOME LOST SHEEP: FINDING DOCKED ORIGINALS

BRINGING HOME LOST SHEEP: FINDING DOCKED ORIGINALS

So you see the application’s (or document’s) icon in the Dock but you have no earthly idea where the app (or doc) really resides on your hard drive. It’s there somewhere but you really don’t know where and that scares you. To find where the docked application or the document really lives just Control-click on it in the Dock and choose Show in Finder. The window where it lives immediately appears on screen.

STOP THE BOUNCING. I BEG YOU!

When you launch an application, its icon begins to bounce incessantly in the Dock, in a distracting vertical Tigger-like motion until the app is just about open. I love this feature but then I enjoy having my cavities drilled. If you enjoy this animation as much as I do, you can turn it off by going to the Apple menu under Dock and choosing Dock Preferences. When the Dock preference pane appears, turn off the checkbox (it’s open by default) for Animate Opening Applications. Turning this off now can save you thousands in therapy down the road.

FREAKY GENIE EFFECT

There’s a little trick you can pull to make the Genie effect (the little animation that takes place when you minimize a window to the Dock) even freakier (we call it the “freaky genie”). Just hold Shift before you minimize the window and it puts the Genie Effect into a “super slo-mo” mode that looks kinda cool. I say “kinda” because this effect (like the Genie Effect itself) gets old kinda quick, but people who’ve never seen it before dig it. At least at first.

MAKING ONE ACTIVE AND HIDING THE REST

If you want to make just the application you’re working on visible and hide all the other running applications including any open Finder windows just hold Option-Command and then click on the application’s icon in the Dock. This is much faster than choosing your application, going under your application’s menu, and choosing Hide Others.

SNAPPING DOCK SIZES

In a previous tip, I showed how you can resize the Dock by clicking-and-dragging on the divider line, but if you hold the Option key first and then start dragging, the Dock “snaps” to some preset sizes. Who chose these preset sizes? Probably Apple’s software engineers but some feel the presets were secretly designated by high-ranking governments officials in yet another attempt to exert more “Big –Brotherly” control over our otherwise mundane lives. Personally, I tend to think it was Apple, but hey, that’s just me.