Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Second Edition

Chapter 3. Dock, Desktop, and Toolbar

You can’t help reacting, one way or another, to the futuristic, sleek, cool looks of Mac OS X the first time you arrive at its desktop. When you stop to think about it, though, the environment owes most of its different, photo-realistic looks to three key elements: the Dock at the bottom edge of the screen, the toolbar at the top of every Finder window, and the shimmering, sometimes animated backdrop of the desktop itself. This chapter shows you how to use and control these most dramatic elements of Mac OS X.

The Dock

In the old days, the optimists saw the doughnut, and the pessimists saw the hole.

If you’re a Mac fan, the debate doesn’t concern the doughnut so much as the Dock. This strip of icons at the bottom of the Mac OS X desktop combines the functions of what Mac fans once knew as the Application menu,

menu, Launcher, Control Strip, and pop-up windows—all in a single new onscreen gadget. (If you’re a former Windows user, the Dock is less of a shock, because some of its functions resemble the Windows taskbar.)

The pessimist thinks that’s ridiculous. “You’ve just combined the Launcher function, which stores unopened programs until you need them, with the Application menu function, which is supposed to show you which programs are currently running.”

The optimist says, “Well, yeah—isn’t that great?”

Apple’s thinking goes like this: Why must you ...