Tài liệu Setting Up the Dock phần 1 pptx

4.2. Setting Up the Dock

Apple starts the Dock off with a few icons it thinks you'll enjoy: Dashboard, QuickTime

Player, iTunes, iChat, Mail, the Safari Web browser, and so on. But using your Mac

without putting your own favorite icons in the Dock is like buying an expensive suit and

turning down the free alteration service. At the first opportunity, you should make the

Dock your own.

The concept of the Dock is simple: Any icon you drag onto it (Figure 4-1) is installed

there as a button. (You can even drag an open window onto the Dock—a Microsoft Word

document you're editing, say—using its proxy icon [Section 1.2.4] as a handle.)

A single click, not a double-click, opens the corresponding icon. In other words, the Dock

is an ideal parking lot for the icons of disks, folders, documents, programs, and Internet

bookmarks that you access frequently.

Tip: You can install batches of icons onto the Dock all at once—just drag them as a

group. That's something you can't do with the other parking places for favorite icons, like

the Sidebar and the Finder toolbar.

Figure 4-1. To add an icon to the Dock, simply drag it there. You haven't moved the

original file; when you release the mouse, it remains where it was. You've just

installed a pointer—like a Macintosh alias or Windows shortcut.

Here are a few aspects of the Dock that may throw you at first:

• It has two sides. See the whitish dotted line running down the Dock? That's the

divider (Figure 4-1). Everything on the left side is an application—a program.

Everything else goes on the right side: files, documents, folders, disks, and

minimized windows.

It's important to understand this division. If you try to drag an application to the

right of the line, for example, Mac OS X teasingly refuses to accept it. (Even

aliases observe that distinction. Aliases of applications can go only on the left side,

and vice versa.)