FREAKY MOVIE DOCK TRICK

FREAKY MOVIE DOCK TRICK

This is one of those “show off your Mac” tricks that really amaze people but outside of that I haven’t found a real use for it. You start by opening a Quick Time movie, hitting the play button and watching it for a second or two. Then, click the yellow center button in the title bar to shrink the movie to the Dock (it appears down by the Trash). Here’s the cool thing: you’ll notice the movie continues to play even while in the Dock. You can even hear the audio! Only ants can really enjoy it at this size (in fatc ants love this effect because to them, they’re seeing your movie on the “big screen”) but the naked human eye can see the movie too.

YELLOW MINIMIZE BUTTON TOO SMALL? TRY THIS?

Sometimes, hitting that tiny middle yellow button (to minimize your current window to the Dock) is tricky, especially if you’re using a Titanium PowerBook or Cinema Display set at its native resolution, in which everything is smaller than a gnat’s nose. If you’d like something bigger to aim at than that tiny yellow button, go under the Apple menu, under System Preferences and click on the Appearance icon and then click on the checkbox for Minimize when Double Clicking a Window Title Bar. Now, you can just double-click anywhere on the window’s title bar and that window immediately minimizes to the Dock, just as if you had clicked the tiny yellow button. Of course, you could skip the clicking altogether and press Command-M but that just seems like cheating, doesn’t it?

AUTOMATICALLY HIDING THE DOCK

The smaller your screen, the more important the ability to hide the Dock from view becomes (as you might imagine, this is a very popular feature for PowerBook users). Basically, with this feature active, the Dock hides off screen and only reappears when your cursor moves over the area where the Dock used to be. It kind of “pops up” so you can work in the Dock until you move away, and then it hides again. To turn this Dock feature on, go under the Apple menu, under Dock and choose Turn Hiding On. If you think you might use this function often, you’ll probably want to memorize the Turn Hiding On/Off shortcut which is Option-Command-D.

EJECTING MEDIA FROM THE DOCK

Although Panther makes ejecting removable media (like CDs, DVDs and FireWire or USB drives) incredibly easy thanks to the little Eject button that appears  beside media icon in the Sidebar of every Finder window, many longtime Mac OS X users still prefer to use the Dock for ejecting media (it’s called “old dog/new tricks” syndrome). If you’re one of those (an old dog), you can drag the disc (or drive) icon to the Trash icon in your Dock, and as you approach the Dock, you see the Trash icon change into an Eject button. When you drop your CD/DVD/FireWire drive icon on the Eject button it erases the contents of your drive. Kidding! Just a joke. Actually, of course, it ejects your disc/CD/DVD or unmounts your FireWire /USB drive.