OS X: How Fixing The Dock Doesn’t Fix The Dock.

I’m one of those who does not really mind the Dock in Mac OS X Leopard. Except for all the things that are broken in the Dock, I think it works fine.

The Dock is one area of Leopard which divides Mac users. It’s love or hate. The Dock. There’s promise. There’s hope. But some of the Dock fixes come up short.

How about that chrome-looking aluminum shelf with the reflections of the icons? Granted, it’s a colorful change from the boring Dock of Panther and Tiger. But is it better? Probably not.

The little blue light buried in the reflection below the icon of an open application or utility seems to blend in too much to all the glitter of the dock itself. For most Mac users the Dock is probably just fine. Some of us who follow the doings of Macdom and the intricacies of Mac OS X have opinions that go beyond. Perhaps to infinity.

Mac users to the rescue. If necessity is the mother of invention, then Apple created a feature in OS X which is wholly needy, hence little inventions to improve the Dock.

I’m a big fan of DragThing, so I didn’t use the Dock’s builti-in hierarchical navigation system. For example, in Tiger, you could drag a folder to the right section of the Dock, then right click and hold, and up popped a hierarchical menu of the folder’s contents. Dozens of Mac360 readers have pointed out that they loved that feature, and it’s gone from Leopard’s Dock.

Mac user Charles O’Rourke to the resuce. Almost. Charles noticed the same problem that astute Mac360 writers noticed, and decided to do something about. His creation is called Hierarchy.

His little invention brings hierarchical navigation back—but not to the Dock.

Hierarchy is a freeware palette that brings hierarchical navigation back to your Mac, but it’s another floating palette rather than embedded into the Dock. A fix yes, but not to the Dock. Still, if you’re perturbed about Apple’s omission of such navigation from the Dock, Hierarchy gets you some of the functionality, just not in the Dock.

It used to be that Mac OS X had a handful of features that we loved to hate. The Finder. There’s not much about the Finder that I don’t like in Leopard. I stopped using Path Finder once I installed Leopard and I haven’t bothered to use it since. I miss the tabbed Finder browsing, though, but it’s not a deal breaker.

However, the Dock is ever present, always beckoning me to roll my eyes across the visual cues it makes available. There’s just too much glittery going on. I finally got the Dock’s folder section to work half way well because of Mac360 readers who contributed various solutions. Click Here for details.

I’m more convinced than ever that Apple leaves things out from some features just to help spur development of add on utilities and features from the Mac developer community.

What’s your opinion about the Dock and the Finder? Got a gripe or a praise? Share your knowledge or rant and Talk Back to Mac360 in the Comments section below.