How to use the Dock of your MacBook


Use the Dock

The Dock is the bar at the bottom of your MacBook screen that contains icons representing applications, files, and folders on your computer. The icons on the left side of the Dock are application icons. Use these icons to quickly open an application or to switch between running applications.

Some applications have a shortcut menu that is accessible when you ctrl-click on the application's icon. The options on the menu might vary depending on whether the application is running or not. You can try this on the iTunes icon to see what additional commands are available.

If you look closely, you'll see a divider line between the application icons and document icons on the Dock. The icons on the right side of the Dock represent documents and folders. You can pin specific items to the Dock here so that you can access them instantly without having to open a folder or perform a search.

Suppose that you were writing an article about…MacBooks. Instead of opening your user folder, then your Documents folder, and then the MacBook folder, you could just pin the MacBook folder to the Dock so that when you click on its icon, the folder opens and you can access the files inside.

To do this, locate the file or folder that you want to pin and then drag it to the right side of the Dock near the Trash icon and drop it. You can change how you view a particular stack by right-clicking on the icon, selecting View Content As, and choosing the way you want the stack contents displayed, such as Grid or List.

Use Exposé

Exposé is a great tool if you're a multitasker. Multitasking is one of the things that makes modern computers so great. You can have multiple applications running simultaneously with their associated open windows. But what happens when you want to jump to one specific window quickly? It would be too time consuming to scroll and click through to each one, so Apple has provided you with Exposé on your MacBook to help.

By using Exposé, you can organize all of those open windows quickly so you can jump right to the window or application that you want to use. Exposé gives you three handy options:

Some MacBooks require that you press fn in conjunction with the preceding keys. Some Mac keyboards also have an Exposé key that you can use instead to access the functions.

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Note: This article was sent to us by: Andrew Deloney at 11012010

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