Mac OS X Lion includes more iOS style notifications on apps Dock icons. In this screenshot you can see them on the iChat app, showing how many unread messages are available. There are a lot of neat features appearing in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion (at least in the Developer Preview), and although some people … Read More

You can add blank spacers to the Mac OS X Dock by issuing a defaults write command in the Terminal, you can see the effect in the screenshot above with the space between the Firefox icon and iChat icon. To get a spacer paste the following command into the Terminal: defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-apps -array-add … Read More

The Dock is one of those staple features of Mac OS X, it’s popular and intuitive enough for it to be a core UI element in iOS, and for Windows to take a variation of it into Vista and Win7 (Android and Ubuntu too for that matter). Hide and show the Dock with a keyboard … Read More

One of the features of Windows 7 that gets pretty good reviews is the window preview, you access these by hovering over items in the Windows task/start bar and a little preview of the minimized window is shown as a pop-up. With a little utility called HyperDock, you can get this same functionality on your … Read More

You probably knew that you can navigate around music from the iTunes Dock icon, but did you know that it also includes a list of the ten most recently played songs? Just right-click on the iTunes dock icon and you’ll see a “Play Recent” list with the songs that you can then select from to … Read More

Notice anything different about that Dock? Some of the icons are translucent, and that is because they are hidden apps. You can enable this great feature yourself by entering the following command into the Terminal: defaults write com.apple.Dock showhidden -bool YES Then you have to kill the Dock for the changes to take effect killall … Read More

You can make save a lot of clutter from the Dock by making applications minimize into their own Dock icon. Here’s how to enable this: * Launch System Preferences * Click on the “Dock” icon * Select the checkbox next to “Minimize windows into application icon” * Close System Preferences Changes take effect immediately, all … Read More

Dock.prefPane “The document ‘Dock.prefPane’ could not be opened. System Preferences cannot open files in the ‘Mac OS X Preference Pane’ format.” Oh that makes perfect sense, a default preference pane can’t be opened by the System Preferences? What?? Maybe this is an April Fools joke from System Preferences… but a reboot fixed it.

If you’re tired of having your Dock full of thumbnailed versions of minimized windows, you can change the Dock’s minimize behavior with a simple Terminal command that will minimize windows into the parent applications Dock icon. You can then tell which windows are minimized by looking for the diamond next to the window name (see … Read More

The bouncing Dock icons are a nice GUI feature but for some people they’re just really annoying. You can disable the Dock icon bounce notifications in Mac OS X by using the command line, so launch Terminal and enter the following: Disable Dock Bouncing: defaults write com.apple.dock no-bouncing -bool TRUE killall Dock Re-enable Dock bouncing … Read More