23Feb/07
Macintosh Dock running on Windows
One thing that I find Macintosh people are attached to, is the Dock... which is funny since its a new concept for OS X. There are a couple free solutions that provide a 'simular' featureset for Windows Users. I find its a bit annoying because besides LOOKING like the one on the Macintosh it doesn't do some of the key 'usability' things that the Macintosh one does.
The key issue here is that its not hooked into the OS.
- So it doesn't know when you launch an application. It does if you tell it that you started it, but thats it.
- You can't see launched apps show up in the Dock, and then Drag them to a section of the Dock for them to stay there perminantly.
- There is good support for dragging icons from the start menu to the Dock
- I right click on a running app in the dock to kill the application... um... it just killed the Dock, not the application
- Um, only the Apple applications (iTunes) seem to have hi-res graphics... unless you run Vista then things like Windows Media Player have hi-res application icons.
- No dynamic resizing of the Dock size, so that the icons appear smaller... they just start pushing off the side of the screen.
- What does work is dragging a word document to the Word application and it launches like expected.
My current favorite is Rocket Dock
http://www.punksoftware.com/rocketdock
Other Docks