To shrink or enlarge the dock (and its icons) without opening the Dock Preferences window, follow these steps:
1 Make the Sizer appear by moving your cursor over the divider line that you find between apps and documents near the right side of the dock.
2 Drag the Sizer down to make the dock smaller, holding down the mouse button until you find the size you like.The more you drag this control down, the smaller the dock gets.
3 To enlarge the dock again, just drag the Sizer back up.Bam! Big dock! You can enlarge the dock until it fills your screen from side to side.
What should you put on your dock?
Put things on the dock that you need quick access to and that you use often, or add items that aren’t quickly available from menus or a Finder window’s sidebar. If you like using the dock better than the Finder window’s sidebar (for example), add your Documents, Movies, Pictures, Music, or even your Home folder or hard drive to the dock.
I suggest adding these items to your dock:
A word-processing application: Most people use word-processing software more than any other applications. Just drag the icon for yours to the left side of the dock, and you’re good to go. If you don’t have a word processor such as Microsoft Word or Apple Pages already, give TextEdit a try. It’s in every macOS Applications folder, and it’s more powerful than you expect from a freebie.
A project folder: You know — the folder that contains all the documents for your thesis, or all the notes for the biggest project you have at work, or your massive recipe collection … whatever. If you add that folder to the dock, you can access it more quickly than if you have to open several folders to find it.
A special utility or application: The Preview application is an essential part of my work because I receive a lot of different image files every day. You may also want to add internet-enabled programs you use (such as Skype, Spotify, and Twitter), your favorite graphics applications (such as Adobe Photoshop or Photoshop Elements), or the game you play every afternoon when you think the boss isn’t watching.
Your favorite URLs: Save links to sites that you visit every day — the ones you use in your job, your favorite Mac news sites, or your personalized page from an internet service provider (ISP). Sure, you can make one of these pages your browser’s start page or bookmark it, but the dock lets you add one or more additional URLs. (Refer to the “Adding dock icons” section, earlier in this chapter, for details.) You can add several URL icons to the dock, but bear in mind that the dock and its icons shrink to accommodate added icons, which makes them harder to see. Perhaps the best idea — if you want easy access to several URLs — is to create a folder full of URLs and put that folder on the dock. Then you can just press and hold your cursor on the folder (or Control-click the folder) to pop up a menu with all your URLs.
Figure 3-6 shows my dock, customized to my liking. Note that it’s been split in half for this figure, to make it easier for you to discern the individual icons.
FIGURE 3-6: I keep icons for the apps I use most in my dock, which is split into two parts for this illustration.
Setting your dock preferences
You can change a few things about the dock to make it look and behave just the way you want it to. First, I cover global preferences that apply to the dock itself. After that, I discuss some preferences that apply only to folder and disk icons in the dock.
Global dock preferences
To change global dock preferences, choose
FIGURE 3-7: The Dock & Menu Bar System Preferences pane (left) and the dock resizer shortcut menu (right).
Now you can adjust your dock with the following preferences:
Size: Note the slider bar here. Move this slider to the right (larger) or left (smaller) to adjust the size of the dock in your Finder. As you move the slider, watch the dock change size. (Now, there’s a fun way to spend a Saturday afternoon!) As you add items to the dock, the icons — and the dock itself — shrink to accommodate the new ones.
Magnification: This slider controls how big icons grow when you pass the arrow cursor over them. Or you can deselect this check box to turn off magnification entirely.
Position on Screen: Choose one of these three radio buttons to attach the dock to the left side, the right side, or the bottom of your screen (the default). I prefer it on the bottom, but you should probably try all three before you decide.
Double-Click a Window’s Title Bar to Minimize (or Zoom): If you select this option, double-clicking anywhere in a window’s title bar minimizes (or zooms) the window. This option achieves the same result as clicking the (usually) yellow Minimize button in a window’s upper-left corner. The difference is that the Minimize button is a tiny target and way over on the upper-left side of the window, whereas the title bar — the area to the right of the three gumdrops, which include the window’s title (Dock & Menu Bar in Figure 3-7) — is a much easier target.
Minimize Windows Using: From this handy pop-up menu (PC users would call it a drop-down list, but what the heck; there’s no gravity in a computer screen anyway), choose the animation that you see when you click a window’s Minimize (yellow by default) button. The Genie Effect is the default, but the Scale Effect seems a bit faster to me.
Minimize Windows into Application Icon: If you select this option, when you minimize a window by clicking its yellow Minimize button, you won’t see a separate dock icon for that window. If this option isn’t selected, each window you minimize gets its own personal icon on the right side of your dock.
Animate Opening Applications: macOS animates (bounces) dock icons when you click them to open an item. If you don’t like the animation, deselect (that is, uncheck) this check box, and the bouncing ceases evermore.
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