So this is how the left side of my Mac screen looks these days. Dock on the left—the bottom, with the 3D shelving, is for sheep—with is shifted up to the left, with hidden dock items transparent. At a glance, I know my system state. Here’s how it’s done and what’s there:
Dock shifting and transparency: TinkerTool is how I pull that one off. As new programs are opened, the Dock lengthens towards the bottom of the screen.
Dock apps: Finder, Drobo Dashboard, Mail, iTunes, Safari, Seasonality, TweetDeck [sigh], and a Fluid instance for Fever. If my machine is up and running, that’s what’s booted.
That shiny thing next to the Dock: that would be iPulse, which despite not being updated for a couple of years now still works great. It beats the hell out of any other “What’s my Mac doing?” apps that I’ve found. The only thing that I haven’t been able to consistently do is live in that spot on the Desktop, but not exist as a window, like …
That album art thingy at the bottom left: CoverSutra. That shows me, at a glance, what song is playing in iTunes. Also, it pushes data to Last.fm for me.
The blank space in between is stocked, during the workday, with a slide-out Adium instance: if I hover over the left edge halfway between the Dock and CoverSutra, I get my Contact List for Adium. I mainly use Adium as a status awareness tool for Matt and Nathan using my on-the-phone AppleScript. The co-workers all look at my IM status to know if I’m on the phone or not before calling me, transferring people to me, or deciding to take the incoming phonecall themselves. It’s pretty fun.
What’s in your Dock? How do you manage it? Windows (l)users need not respond.
I position my dock on the side as well, however I recommend putting it on the right instead of the left. The reason is that apps want to create windows from the top/left of the screen, and sometimes they don’t respect the dock properly; things just don’t go as smoothly. By placing the dock on the right, you avoid the entire issue.
I’ve been a dock-on-right person in the past, for that main reason. This is working for me right now, mainly because of the game that I’m leaving between the dock and the left edge of the windows.
I’ve tried again and again the dock on one side or another, but can’t get myself to like it at all. I have it small on the bottom center – nothing fancy.
On my work machine that I’m sitting at, have finder, safari, mail.app, address book, ical, ichat, itunes, vmware fusion, terminal, ms terminal server client, tweetdeck, textedit, editra, downloads and trash.
I’m a dock on the left person. I even have my Windows bar at work (not all of us are cool enough to have Macs as our work computers) on the left side of my screen. I wish I could put things like the iPulse on my computer, but right now with such a tiny screen (12 inches), every centimeter of my desktop is previous. Perhaps when I finally upgrade to a desktop with a decent sized monitor I’ll start using things like that.