I was browsing Macworld online this morning and watched Jason Snell’s video about DragThing, a utility that replaces the mac OS X dock. It can also be used in addition to the standard dock.
Half way through watching the video, I could barely wait to try it. I downloaded it before the video was over and installed it right away. It took me a little while to get it all configured, but so far it totally rocks.
I like the mac dock but I have so many things on it that they are hard to find. I run my cursor back and forth all the time trying to remember what I was looking for. Drag thing organizes dock items in several ways. There are options to create multiple docks, each with the option of tabbed sections. Many themes are included and the docks can be moved around.
I chose the blueprint theme and created one dock with 6 tabs (main, docs, folders, URLs, dev, and misc). I am also using the ‘process dock’, a dock showing all open applications. I chose to show these as drawers that need to be clicked to open (hover over is another option). One cool thing I noticed is that even with the drawers set to open on click instead of hover, I can still drag a file to a tab and the dock will open so I can drop the file onto the program I want to open it with.
Docks with drawers closed:
DragThing is shareware. It is free to download and try and $29 for a single user license. I will try it for a while before I pay for it, but even after just one day I can see how this could easily become a ‘must have’ app.
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