Comments on: Dock Survey Results

By: macsterdam

macsterdam — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 23:04:29 +0000

just curious as to your plans regarding developing a new Dock.

By: Blacktiger

Blacktiger — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 23:00:57 +0000

I think most people don’t use magnification because it actually shifts all of the other dock icons around, messing up your spatial memory. One way you might consider resolving this is if the magnification zoomed the icon, but only enlarged the click target vertically so that all the other icons stayed in the same place. There is some amount of space between each of the dock icons anyway, so maybe if you only magnified it to take up that in-between space?

By: Ben Perry

Ben Perry — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 14:10:36 +0000

Just wondering if you’ve made any further progress with your Dock replacement app.

By: macsterdam

macsterdam — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 18:11:43 +0000

may I suggest you have a look at Workstrip X. Unfortunately it’s no longer under active development, but it had some really nice features, such as built-in preview, pop-up folders, workspaces etc. Also, I think Fantasktik is a nice window-utility. Wouldn’t mind something like that in the next dock.

By: LKM

LKM — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 19:00:09 +0000

The problem with Magnification is that it only magnifies the icon visually, the actual click target remains small. If you scrub your mouse through the icons, the magnified icons move in the opposite direction of the mouse; essentially, the area where you can click stays the same size as in the unmagnified Dock. It actually feels wrong, as if the icons where trying to escape your mouse if you overshoot them.

So magnification doesn’t help you click on icons, it merely helps you see them if they’re very small, which is not something most people need.

By: John Gallagher (Synaptic Mishap)

John Gallagher (Synaptic Mishap) — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 17:27:28 +0000

These results are interesting indeed. I’m always fascinated by how people use their computers, and to hear how people use the dock specifically is particularly interesting to me, as Apple have made such a hash of it in Leopard.

I mainly completed the study because I was interested in keeping up to date with what products you were developing. I’m not a big fan of customising everything in sight – I’ve got too many distractions as it is. And some third party tools are a bit hackish for my liking.

But from the sounds of this post, you may be making something that I’d seriously consider buying and using regularly.

A dock which was fast, could be navigated via the keyboard and had a nice square minimal appearance (I love the aesthetics of the NEXTSTEP dock) would actually start to get me rather excited.

Viva la Dock Revolutione. Or something.

By: Jamie Phelps

Jamie Phelps — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 15:11:00 +0000

Re: magnification, I think that the problem is with the defaults. I hate the everything-is-small-and-a-hover-turns-it-into-a-giant behavior, but a subtle magnification is enough for me to have a visual cue that I’m in the right place to click whatever dock tile I’m after.

By: Joachim Bengtsson

Joachim Bengtsson — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 12:07:21 +0000

Re context clicking on the dock: I only do it when I’m on the laptop with the trackpad; since the trackpad and keyboard are so close together, it’s actually very very fast to use the thumb to get the cursor to the dock, and two-finger tap to open the context menu, and then typeahead to get to the choice I’m after, and then enter. (Yes, I’ve remapped right-opt to be enter…)

By: Mark Aufflick

Mark Aufflick — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 00:46:01 +0000

The amount of mouse use shouldn’t be surprising, it is after all one of only two dominant input devices – the keyboard and the mouse.

One thing that jumps out at me in relation to the high level of mouse usage is the size of screen real estate. Big wide screen monitors means a lot of mousing to get to the dock (ok so having the dock on the left side when I have two screens doesn’t help…).

A solution that dealt with that would be awesome. Firstly, you could have a dock per screen along the idea of one per space.

Or, you could have a keyboard shortcut which popped the dock temporarily under the mouse so there is a fixed (small) amount of mousing no matter where your mouse is, and you only need to remember one shortcut to quickly access all dock functionality.

Perhaps something along the lines of the dartboard menu ui people played with in the 80s, but I think a tiled design will be less freaky to users than a round one.

By: Matt Legend Gemmell

Matt Legend Gemmell — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 23:39:17 +0000

Hi Sven (ssp),

Agreed re slowness of the Dock’s unhiding animation. I don’t necessarily propose to replace the existing Dock; I don’t believe it’s entirely possible to do so in any non-hacky way. A “replacement” in this context need not remove or disable the original, particularly as the OS expects it to be there.

Regarding dock positioning, I didn’t feel the need to include a question on where people put their dock because I believe that freedom of position is such an essential feature that it’s not even worth discussing. I can’t conceive of a dock that doesn’t let you choose whether it’s vertical or horizontal, and which screen-edge it lives on, and such – so I didn’t think it was relevant ask people which one they’d use.