Dock OS X Guide

The dock is the icon bar at the bottom of your screen. It includes shortcuts to your applications, files, folders, download and the also the trash can. The dock can be placed to the left, right or bottom of the screen. To move it, right click on the bar between the application and the folders/trash. Go to position on screen and choose which one suits you.

Opening and Closing Applications in the Dock

To open an application, click on its icon in the dock and it will start to hop up and down. When the application is opened and ready to use, it will stop bouncing and a blue light will appear under it. To hide an application window, right click or click and hold its icon in the dock and choose hide. To get it back, simply click on its icon.

If you want to completely close an application, right click of click and hold its icon in the dock and choose "quit". simply pressing the red button at the top left of an application will not always completely close it. If there's a blue light under the icon in the dock, the application is still opened.

Adding/Removing icons in the Dock

To add an application to the Mac OS X Dock, drag the .app from the applications folder to the dock in between 2 other icons. You can move the icons from left to right by simply dragging them around.

To remove any icon from the dock, drag it out, drop it anywhere else and it goes away in smoke making a "poof" sound. Don't worry about its content, the application still exists, you just deleted the shortcut icon.

To add a file or folder, drag it to the right the dock. There is a separation between the applications and the files, folders and trash. Clicking on a file in the dock will simply open it. When you put a folder, it will create a stack. This is a new feature of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. When clicking on a folder, a stack will pop up in the form of a fan or grid depending on the number of files in the folder. You can modify stacks options by right clicking/click and holding a folder in the dock. By default, the downloads folder from Safari is in your dock as a stack.