Reinventing the dock

Apple introduced the OS 10 dock to the masses almost 6 years ago and aside from adding support for folders, URLs and smoothing out the magnification effect, our dock has remained unchanged and I believe it has not been perfected yet. Apple spends a lot of time perfecting their finder by making it multithreaded, reworking the UI and adding Spotlight but the application you use more than the Finder has continued to sit at the same spot, doing the same tasks day after day.

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Apple has added some features but looking back at the dock system preference from OS 10.1 to 10.4 I see the same features and that�s just sad. Aside from what shareware developers have released like uptime monitors, making the dock transparent and so on, Apple has made small strides to increase the functionality and the only feature Windows vista can compete with Apple is its new taskbar and paired with it�s �Glass� interface can give aqua a run for its money.

Let�s not assume I will be making a switch to Vista when it arrives sometimes in the next decade but Apple�s main focus in Mac OS 10.5 will be yet another rendition of the Finder and our beloved dock. I hate speculating on such enhancements because I�m always wrong but what�s a few more rumors to feed the fire?

I anticipate being able to access my entire address book, safari bookmarks and other information as well as finally being able to group application windows together similar to the windows taskbar. If I minimize three iChat messages they will all go on the right side of the dock in an iChatesque icon like a blue OS folder with a small iChat icon that when clicked will reveal a translucent list hovering over my desktop of those three chats and a list of how many received messages each has received since I minimized the window. I click that chat and the window appears on my desk. This is just one of the enhancements I would like to see since the last enhancement to minimized applications was adding an icon of the application to the minimized document.

I would like smart folders in the dock grouping applications on the fly that are frequently used or perhaps my frequently listened to songs and for the love of god, allow me to place folders and URLs anywhere in the dock and not just on the left hand side. I leave it to you, the readers to give me your feedback on the future of the dock and where it needs to go. Apple needs to know where we use it for and not how the internal Apple developers use it.