Arrange Your Mac’s Dock Like Your iPhone Homescreen For Better Organisation

Whether or not you’re happy about the iOS-centric changes coming with the release of Mac OS X Lion, you can still benefit from organising your current OS X dock a little bit more like your homescreen. Here’s how.

When most of my friends see my dock, the reaction I get is usualy “whoa, you have so much stuff in it!” For a while I felt like they just didn’t understand how many applications I used on a regular basis. Recently, I discovered that there are only a few core applications I use all the time, a few I use often, and tons of others that are opened briefly every other day or even less. I realised I could benefit by taking the same principles I use in organising my iOS homescreen and applying them to the Mac OS X dock.

My iPhone’s home screen consists of one page of commonly used apps and a second page containing a bunch of folders of apps I use less often. This has worked very well for me, so I applied the same idea to my dock: the left side has frequently used apps and the right side contains categorised stacks with the other apps inside.

Before:

(Click image to enlarge.)

After:

(Click image to enlarge.)

While this takes one extra click to get to these apps, I find them much faster because I know exactly where to look. A dock filled with tons of apps can make it hard to locate a small, specific icon. This method makes it much easier for me to launch what I want to launch quickly.

Got any clever tricks for organisation your dock? Let’s hear ’em in the comments.


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