Apple’s Dock is a great all-purpose tool for basic and intermediate users, but it surely falls short when working with many open applications, minimized windows, or folders. If you ever run into these situations you will quickly find yourself a mini Dock with small, hard-to-read targets.

I have written about decoupling window minimization from the Dock before, but as Unsanity has not perfected their C-level performance on WindowShade, I will be using the Apple Dock for minimizations.

My Dock’s primary limitation is folder access. I want to access too many folders either from other applications or in general not while I have an open Finder window. Quicksilver permits fast key-based access to my filesystem, but sometimes, especially for drag-and-drop, mouse-based access is superior. Finder windows have that neat sidebar, but again, I don’t always have Finder windows sitting open, and don’t want to. In fact, I’d like to use Finder windows as little as possible; it reeks of individual files with description-less icons and their silly filenames. Even if I did settle for the sidebar, you can’t right click to delve into a folder.

In an effort to improve mouse-based folder access, I have revisited DragThing. Mouse-based UI is all about easy targets. As I have described previously1, the screen corners serve as the best targets. Since these are taken, we move on to the next best: screen edges. Now how can we put them to their best use?

[Enter DragThing…]

Current Desktop setup with Apple Dock and DragThing

Top corners: Apple menu and Spotlight

Staying standard for these corners, the stock Apple menu provides quick access to high-level system settings, and Spotlight is there for full filesystem searching. If only Apple would grant us mortals an easy way to search by filename again… Alas!

Right edge: Apple Dock

Being enamored with the late NeXTSTEP OS, I wanted to employ multiple docks or floating icons around the screen corners and edges. So I moved the Apple Dock to the right wall, pinned to the top. The only folder in the Dock is the Applications folder, in case you want to launch another app.

Now for the DragThing setup.

Bottom-right corner: Quicksilver

I disagree with those calling for the Trash can’s glorious return to the Desktop, and even with those claiming it is important enough to be place in a screen corner position (see the NeXTSTEP and Symphony OS desktops). I don’t want to see the trash, and I don’t delete things that often that it should be one of the four most easily accessed UI icons. Rather I would love some kind of drop-stack or drag-and-drop hotspot. Since I use Quicksilver, what a better icon to place at the bottom right corner than Quicksilver itself. Anytime I want to move something but don’t know where, or manipulate a file, just drag it to the bottom-right corner. Voilà!

Bottom-left corner: Mounted drives

Eliminating mounted drives from the desktop was also important, since the Dock overlaps these icons, at any size. Instead I opted for DragThing’s Disk Dock, reversing mounting order so that the Home folder is the corner object. Now I have a “Start” menu of sorts to my personal filesystem hierarchy. Since I don’t want to wait for Leopard’s drag-and-drop Dock folder feature, I don’t have to. This also eliminates the need to drag your disks to the trash can/eject button; just right-click and hit eject.

Left edge: DragThing sidebar

I wanted a global folder sidebar that would more-or-less replace my need for the Finder one. So that’s where I put my most accessed folders:

• Crescere: things I am working on filing away
• Downloads: so they don’t sit on the desktop
• FTP bookmarks
• TextMate projects
• Literature: various papers and documents I want to read
• Archives: my primary document hierarchy for literature I have read
• Progressum: a Finder smart folder showing all of the documents I have marked as orange, for in progress

I find that one layer is suitable for me, but DragThing’s power lies in multiplexing; you can add new dock tabs for more and more folders.

Bottom edge: a tabbed dock for current projects, pdfs and web sites

Finally, I want a simple but powerful drop spot for anything I am currently working on, whether it’s a bunch of files for a programming project or papers and long web pages I haven’t finished reading. I have this dock pop up upon a mouse-enter event.

Consistency

Of course I want my UI experience to be as consistent and coherent as possible. So I have all of these docks displaying icons at the same 32x32 pixel icon size, with default Apple Dock background color and transparency (25% white). All docks are drawers (not windows), with tabs paralleling their screen edge. I have also set the show/hide docks hot key to Apple’s default ⌘⌥d, so that all of DragThing’s docks as well as the Apple Dock appear or disappear at the same time. Although I can’t unfloat Apple’s Dock, the others are set to float only in two circumstances, either I drag an icon onto a dock, or my mouse is at the bottom or left screen edges long enough to indicate I want to access DragThing (the default .2 s is sufficient).

So that’s what I’m working with, and it works quite well.