Been awhile since you’ve seen a desktop that clean, eh?

Basic Goals
For this and future articles, there are few basic things to keep in mind:

• If you think Finder customization is “lightweight” then you missed the point of the college dean story: improved efficiency often comes in the most obvious places and with small steps. The Finder is the hub of your productivity environment - tuning it to your needs and wants is essential. We’ll start out slow and get more sophisticated as we go along.
• Desktop real estate is precious (especially if your primary machine is a laptop). You want to include only those things that we really need in the places where we really need them.
• Our goal is utility, not appearance. If you want to spend significant amounts of time making your desktop look pretty, by all means go for it, but don’t bother us. We’re busy being productive.
• How I do things is based on what I do and what works for me. I’ll show you what and tell you why, but do what works for you and what you do, since the way you work may be different.
• Things change. My production environment is under constant construction because I’m always looking for a better way to do things. You should be too. The Mac OS is always evolving, new productivity tips, techniques and products are constantly being introduced and projects come and go from the to-do list. Don’t change things just to change them, but don’t get stuck in place either.

Now, let’s start with the very basics: the Desktop and the Dock.

The Desktop
Everyone is familiar with the Desktop itself. It is where we all stash way too many files and folders, something we’ll talk about later.

The Desktop pattern isn’t a big thing since I usually have multiple programs open, but there are two approaches you can use that can help it work for you.

• Select a simple, subtle but distinctive desktop pattern. Subtle so that you don’t lose things on it because they are hard to read because of color or complexity, distinctive because you want to be able to tell where the Desktop is when you have multiple windows open and need to drag something to it for (hopefully) temporary placement. Also, having different color or pattern desktops can help you identify at a glance which user is logged in on a multi-user Mac.
• Make use of the capability of placing a picture of your choosing on the deskop by creating a graphic file of information you need to access frequently (and that you don’t mind having stored in a completely unsecured location). A click of the F9 Key (or a move of the cursor to a defined hot corner) and Exposé moves everything out of the way to give you access to a full screen of data. This is going to limit your ability to put things on the desktop and to find them, but it is an option.

The Dock
Now we’re getting into the meat of things. The Dock seems to be a matter of personal preference: love it or hate it, bottom or side of the screen, it is still an important part of the Mac OS and a terrific productivity tool.

You can see the default Dock above; here’s what mine looks like on an average day:

(click for full size view)

How It Looks
The Dock lives at the bottom of my screen because I keep it full and I want the space for as much as possible.Some like the Dock to hide and pop-up when you move the cursor to the bottom of the screen. That brief hesitation before it appears annoys me, so I shrink the Dock down to as small a size as is practical (fairly small, as you can see), and turn on Magnification so that the icons enlarge as I move the cursor over them or across the Dock; less screen real estate used but full function maintained.Don’t like the fact that the icons tend to move around when you’re trying to drag a file to one of them if Magnification is turned on? No problem: Just hold down the Command key while dragging and the Dock icons won’t move out from under you.

What To Keep There
Applications are the main residents of my Dock, though there are a few key folders stored there for convenient drag-to access. Those include my Desktop, Documents and Download folders, the Applications folder, occasional project-specific folders and the mysterious Black Hole.

Arrangement of your applications is a personal preference, though it helps to put the apps that you drag to most often from the left side to the center of the Dock. That seems to be where I grab the icons most of the time. The right side is filled with those apps (utilities such as Spell Catcher, Launch Bar, Default Folder, Spam Sieve, etc.) that open by themselves as well as the odd application that I have open for a specific task.

You may notice a very loose (and I do mean loose) kind of logic to the icon groupings - web authoring apps, browsers, graphics apps, etc. That helps, but don’t obsess over it - find what works for you, whether it is structured or random.

Learn to Use The Dock
Now that you’ve taken the time to customize your Dock, force yourself to use it for a couple days. Open your apps from the Dock, drag items to the folders you’ve elected to place there.

Be sure to educate yourself on what you can do from the Dock. Dragging to and from is basic, but if you click and hold on a folder, the contents pop up, allowing you to select any file or application inside:

(click for full size view)

There are several handy things to your applications right from the Dock by clicking and holding on their icon:

(click for full size view)

You can keep an open application’s icon in the Dock, opt to have the application open automatically at Login, find the application’s location in the finder, hide the application or quit the application. You will also find that, between the time you start an application and when it is fully launched the “Quit” entry changes to “Force Quit,” allowing you to quit an application you launched accidentally.Note also the list of open windows for Safari - selecting one of them from the list takes you directly to that window.Some applications and utilities have special functionality built into them, such as Default Folder X from St. Clair Software:

(click for full size view)

Third Party Applications
There are a million of them. Turn your Dock transparent, make volumes automatically appear there, enhance application messages and even controls right in the Dock and more. I’ve played with many of them but none have lasted more than a week, at least in their current incarnations.There are also a number of Dock replacement utilities out there, some that draw high marks from users. None have been worth the money for me, and with something as basic as the Dock, I am not anxious to rely on something that might break with the next OS upgrade. Besides, with just a little thought, the Dock set-up described does everything I need it to do.For now. Never say never.

The Bottom Line:
The Dock has plenty of function built into it if you learn how to use it and integrate it into your work flow. Think about how you access your file folders, launch your applications and find the best way to make the Dock work for you.