But you can force a certain Dock folder to sprout a fan or a grid all the time, rather than
letting Mac OS X decide. From the Dock folder's shortcut menu (Section 4.2.2
), choose
View As Fan or View As Grid.
From now on, you'll always get the fan, or always get the grid.

Note: When your Dock is positioned on a side of the screen instead of the bottom, you
alwaysget the grid, never the fan. The View As command doesn't even appear in the
shortcut menu.

Both the grid and the fan have limited storage space for icons. (The exact number
depends on your monitor size. In any case, if there are too many icons to display at once,
the last icon says, "24 more in Finder" (or whatever the number is). Click that icon to
open the folder's regular window, where all the contents are available.
Of course, then you've defeated the fan's step-saving purpose.

Tip: The ideal solution, of course, would be what Mac OS X had in 10.0 through 10.4: a
simple pop-up list of everything in a Dock folder. That's exactly what you get with the
free program Quay, available for download from this book's "Missing CD" at
www.missingmanuals.com4.2.2.2. Ready-made stacks
When you first install Mac OS X 10.5, you get a couple of starter stacks just to get you
psyched. One is called Downloads; the other is Documents. (Both of these folders are
physically inside your Home folder. But you may well do most of your interacting with
them on the Dock.)
The Downloads folder, new in Leopard, collects three kinds of Internet arrivals:
• Files you download from the Web using Safari
• Files you receive in an iChat file-transfer session
• File attachments you get via email using Mail.

If you just want to see what's in a folder, without all the graphic overkill of the fan or
thegrid, choose Open "Applications" (or whatever the folder's name is) from the Dock
folder's shortcut menu (Section 4.2.2
). You go straight to the corresponding window.
Another possibility: -click the folder's icon. You jump immediately to the window
that contains that folder's icon. That's not exactly the same thing as opening the Dock
folder, but it's sometimes even more useful.

Tip: Actually, this trick has nothing to do with stacks. -clicking any icon on the
Dock (or any listing in the Spotlight menu, for that matter) opens to its enclosing folder,
so you can see it in its natural habitat.

4.2.3. Three Ways to Get the Dock Out of Your Hair
The bottom of the screen isn't necessarily the ideal location for the Dock. All Mac
screens are wider than they are tall, so the Dock eats into your limited vertical screen
space. You have three ways out: Hide the Dock, shrink it, or rotate it 90 degrees.
4.2.3.1. Auto-hiding the Dock
To turn on the Dock's auto-hiding feature, choose Dock Turn Hiding On (or
press Option- -D).

Tip: You also find this on/off switch when you choose Dock Dock
Preferences (Figure 4-3
), or when you click the System Preferences icon in the Dock, and
then the Dock icon. (Section 4.5.1
contains much more about the System Preferences
program.)

When the Dock is hidden, it doesn't slide into view until you move the cursor to the
Dock's edge of the screen. When you move the cursor back to the middle of the screen,
the Dock slithers out of view once again. (Individual Dock icons may occasionally shoot

Tip: If you press Option as you drag, the Dock snaps to certain canned icon
sizes+0151those that the programmer actually drew. (You won't see the in-between sizes
that Mac OS X generally calculates on the fly.)

As noted in Figure 4-4
, you may not be able to enlarge the Dock, especially if it contains
a lot of icons. But you can make it almost infinitely smaller. This may make you wonder:
How can you distinguish between icons if they're the size of molecules?
The answer lies in the Dock Turn Magnification On command. What you've
just done is trigger the swelling effect shown in Figure 4-3
. Now your Dock icons balloon
to a much larger size as your cursor passes over them. It's a weird, magnetic, rippling,
animated effect that takes some getting used to. But it's another spectacular
demonstration of the graphics technology in Mac OS X, and it can actually come in
handy when you find your icons shrinking away to nothing.

Tip: New in Leopard: on-the-fly magnifying!If you press Shift-Control as your cursor
approaches the Dock, the icons swell into magnification mode even if magnification is
turned off in the Dock menu. (The icons swell to whatever maximum size you
specified in System Preferences (Figure 4-3
).

4.2.3.3. Moving the Dock to the sides of the screen
Yet another approach to getting the Dock out of your way is to rotate it, so that it sits
vertically against a side of your screen. You can rotate it in either of two ways:
• The menu way. From the Dock submenu, choose "Positionon Left,"
"Position on Right," or "Position on Bottom," as you see fit.
TROUBLESHOOTING MOMENT
Recovering from a MicroDock
What is a MicroDock? It's what you get when you try to store 300 JPEG files by