thoughton:digitallife Dock icon visual feedback

Dock icon visual feedback

The OS X Dock has been the subject of a love-hate relationship from many Mac users since the launch of OS X. The 'magnification' effect has been dismissed by many who, claiming it does nothing to make the Dock more usable, dismiss it as marketing-department eye candy designed to wow would-be customers at Apple Stores. I must admit that despite initially loving the magnification effect, I have long since disabled it after getting fed up of dock icons magnifying themselves out of my way while I was trying to drop a document on them.

Another widely condemned "feature" is the Dock's cute bouncing behaviour when a program is launching or a background program needs your attention. While both behaviours do serve a limited purpose, there needs to be some configurability for those who desire it. I know that I for one would appreciate a setting to stop an attention-seeking background application's icon bouncing after a certain number of bounces. Toast 6, when it is hidden, commits this bouncing sin at the end of a disc burn and is a prime example of a situation where this setting would be a blessing.

Finally, there is the 'puff of smoke animation when removing Dock icons'. The less said about that the better.

"So", I hear you say, "is there anything good about the Dock?" The answer is yes! As amply demonstrated by the rotating 3-D cube of the CPU monitor X3, the Dock is capable of significant graphical gymnastics and is not limited to manipulation of the original program icon. The image to the left doesn't do X3 justice, the cube (X3 comes with a variety of icons) rotates through several dimensions and the speed of rotation correlates to CPU activity.

While X3 with its significant CPU drain may be overkill (somewhere around 10% on a 667MHz G4), the majority of Dock icons could still do with some sort of visual feedback, showing relevant information whenever an application is hidden. Irrespective of any other failings the OS might have, some Windows programs do this very well by displaying relevant information in the taskbar button when minimised. The amazing wish-there-was-a-Mac-version DVDShrink is a great example, showing elapsed and remaining time in its button.

Having said that, a few select OS X applications do make good use of the Dock's abilities. Prime amongst these is Apple's own Activity Monitor app, which has no less than 5 different animated Dock icons for displaying CPU, hard disk, and network activity. These icons display several different items of information each in the form of charts, but at a cost of measurable CPU drain. A further drawback is that the more frequently updated charts, for instance the CPU history meter, the Disk activity meter and Network activity meter, can be visually distracting.

Less intrusive but still useful is the 'display a single variable' approach used by Apple's Mail, and Ranchero's NetNewsWire. Both use their Dock icons to show unread material in the form of a number displayed on the icon. This approach is more than adequate for these types of programs, although some sort of font size control (particularly in Mail), would be nice.

A different approach is to use the Dock icon to display a progress bar, as seen in Toast and DVD2OneX. This is in my opinion the best use of Dock icon feedback and should really be mandatory behaviour for any program which has lengthy delays when processing data. MacTheRipper will apparently have a similar Dock icon progress bar in its next revision, but interestingly the DVD2OneX readme includes thanks to the MacTheRipper author for the progress bar code!

Finally we have Dock icons which merely display whether a certain state is true or false, for instance Virtual PC's Dock icon shows an OS X style spinning wheel on the PC monitor when saving a session, while Transmit's Dock icon shows a small arrow to indicate if it is uploading or downloading. In both cases a progress bar would make so much more sense, but I guess any feedback is better than none at all and I should be happy the authors have at least made an effort!

And that is, to the best of my knowledge, all of them. It seems like such a paltry selection given the thousands of OS X applications out there. Can anyone add any other programs to this list?

Update: I forgot about the fantastic BluePhoneElite. I usually have the Dock icon disabled so I had forgotten the feedback it gives (I use the menubar feedback instead). The Dock icon shows a signal meter and a battery meter consisting of graduated blocks similar to Nokia phones.

Update: I also forgot iCal! The Apple calendar program's Dock icon is deceptively sophisticated and displays an image of a paper desktop calendar which shows the correct month and date. Luckily most of us don't need a calendar to know what month it currently is - the month on the iCal icon can be very difficult to read.