Today on Part 3 of our ten part series of switching from the Pc to the Mac, we’re going to look at the Dock. So here is the Dock down here. The Dock is a place we can put icons for the programs you use most, so you can access them quickly but the Dock is equivalent to he Quick Launch bar in Windows and so, for your reference, here is a Windows virtual machine and here is the Quick Launch bar down here.
The Dock is a place where I put icons to programs I use all the time like Firefox but at the same time, the Dock holds icons to programs that are currently running. Now you can see the string of programs here all have that little lights underneath them and the lights indicate the program is running even though if it’s not visible.
If I wanted to make—load those programs like Safari a part of the Dock, I can right click, say Keep in Dock and then even thought I Quit the program, you see the light will go out, the icon stays in the Dock. If I want to remove an icon from the Dock, I could right click and say Remove from the Dock but a more fun way is to click the icon, drag it to the Desktop and it disappears.
There are other options for the Dock and to show you those, I am going to move up here to the Apple menu, select Dock and then select Dock Preferences. Now you can see here that you can change the size of the Dock, so you can make it larger or smaller.
You can also turn on some different effects for minimizing, you can have the Dock at the bottom, at the left or on the right hand side of the screen and you can also turn on Magnification and for the biggest effect, I have this at maximum and so as you move the cursor over the Dock, it maximizes, it magnifies all of the icons as you move along.
The other thing that you can do with the Dock is hide it. And to do that, you can go the Apple menu, go to Dock, say Turn Hiding On and you can see here that you can also access some of the other options from this part of the menu, you Turn Hiding On, now Dock is gone. It’s not on my screen but if move the mouse down, there is my dock.
So, that’s the Dock on the Mac and that concludes Part 3.
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