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Help, Guides, and News on making the Switch To Apple Macintosh Computers
Customize the Dock via Preferences
Your Dock Your Customizations
Apple starts you off with a pre-configured Dock. For some users this is sufficient but for others, they wish to configure it to suit their unique needs. Thus, if you want to take your Mac OS X experience to another level, customize the Dock. No two customized Docks are identical. The focus of this guide is the Dock Behavior and effects.
Apple starts you off with a pre-configured Dock. For some users this is sufficient but for others, they wish to configure it to suit their unique needs. Thus, if you want to take your Mac OS X experience to another level, customize the Dock. No two customized Docks are identical. The focus of this guide is the Dock Behavior and effects.
Customize the Dock Behavior
There several ways to customize the behavior of the Dock. We'll discuss a few.
Method One: The Apple Menu
A few items can be enabled directly as indicated in the image. For example, you can reposition the Dock to the left of the Desktop by simple selecting "Position on Left". If you click on "Dock Preferences" the Dock Preferences screen will appear as follows:
Method Two: System Preferences
You will then see the same "Dock Preferences" as indicated in Method One
Method Three Control-click on the Dock.
What Can you modify in Dock Preferences?
If you look at the second image above, you can see that within Dock Preferences one can modify parameters to adjust the size of the Dock, enable magnification (a scrolling option), its position on the screen, its minimizing behavior, animation effects, and allow it to automatically hide when it's not in use.
Updates
There several ways to customize the behavior of the Dock. We'll discuss a few.
Method One: The Apple Menu
- Click on the Apple icon on the upper left corner of the screen
- Scroll down and select Dock
A few items can be enabled directly as indicated in the image. For example, you can reposition the Dock to the left of the Desktop by simple selecting "Position on Left". If you click on "Dock Preferences" the Dock Preferences screen will appear as follows:Method Two: System Preferences
- Launch System Preferences
- Click on Dock
You will then see the same "Dock Preferences" as indicated in Method OneMethod Three Control-click on the Dock.
- Place your mouse over the divider in the Dock.
- Once you see the mouse pointer change to something with a solid line in the middle with an up and down arrow, press the control key on your keyboard
- As you keep the control key pressed click the mouse button to show the following pop-up as shown to the right:
What Can you modify in Dock Preferences?
If you look at the second image above, you can see that within Dock Preferences one can modify parameters to adjust the size of the Dock, enable magnification (a scrolling option), its position on the screen, its minimizing behavior, animation effects, and allow it to automatically hide when it's not in use.
Updates
- February 27, 2009 - content revision, updated images
By: switchtoamac
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