Speed dock and Finder window interaction

Apr 07, '02 11:55:51PM

Contributed by: nburatovich

I found a trick in Mac OS X to speed up window minimize and expand operations, and speed up general dock usage. For most users, the dock is almost always filled up. When the dock reaches the edge of the screen and another item is added, the dock's contents shrink to allocate room for the item. However, this scale operation can be quite taxing at times, even on a G4.

I found that if I make my dock 6 to 7 "ticks" smaller than the maximum, it is usually enough extra room to accommodate more dock items without having to scale the current items. The speed improvement is really noticeable, and makes using even a sometimes processor-intensive "genie effect" to shrink and expand dock items much more bearable.

[Editor's note: I don't use the dock in this manner (I'm hopelessly addicted to "hide" as opposed to "minimize"), but it does make sense -- the scaling operation can take some time, especially if you have a large number of items in your dock.]

Comments (4)


Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20020407235551698