So Apple cannot really expect the user to log out and log back in just in order to put the icons for his most frequently used applications (the ones included in his Startup Items) back in the right order.
Since Mac OS X Is a fairly stable system, you don’t log out and log back in every day.
But if any of these applications happen to crash at some point and need relaunching, then their icons will no longer be in their original location, because they were now launched “later on” and will appear further to the right.
In other words, in theory these startup applications should all appear in the same location in the Dock at all times (starting from the Finder icon at the extreme left). You might, like me, have a number of items in your “Startup Items” list (formerly known as “Login Items”), which are launched in a specific order when you first log in, before any other application is launched (and added to the Dock). This means that, depending on what you launched first or subsequently quit and relaunched, icons for individual programs are not likely to stay in the same location in the Dock. They will simply appear in the order in which they were launched. But it won’t sort them in alphabetical order. icons that were manually added by dragging them to the Dock or by choosing “Keep in Dock” while the corresponding application was open) from the Dock, it will only contain the icons of the applications that are currently open. The problem is that there is no way to organize the Dock properly for this. something that indicates at all times which applications are open, lets you switch between them, and provides some information about the status of applications running in the background. The logical thing then is to use it as a substitute for the Application menu or palette of the classic Mac OS, i.e.
This means that I do not use the Dock as a launcher. It tries to do too many different things, and does none of them right.Īs regular readers of this blog know, I am seriously addicted to LaunchBar, which I use as my primary user interface for launching applications (and other items). After all these years of fiddling and experimenting with various configurations, I find that it is still a struggle to use Mac OS X’s Dock in a satisfactory fashion.