AMITIAE - Wednesday 15 August 2012
System Preferences in OS X 10.8, Mountain Lion: Dock |
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By Graham K. Rogers
There have several major changes to System Preferences in OS X 10.8, Mountain Lion. Some preferences seem to be unchanged, although a close look may find subtle differences. The Dock preferences seems at first glance to be the same as before although a couple of changes have been made.
Three radio buttons are provided in the middle of the panel to position the Dock on the screen.The default is Bottom. Also available are Left or Right. It was once possible to place the Dock at the top of the screen by editing a hidden file, or by accessing the feature via Marcel Bresink's Tinker Tool (now version 4.9). This placement is no longer possible. A button below these three selectors is available to decide the effect used when a Window is minimized. Checking old screen shots, I see that the button is slightly less wide than before. The default effect is Genie, which makes a file appear to shrink as if it were going into a bottle-neck. The reverse happens when it is clicked in the Dock and becomes large again. The Scale effect uses less processing power and as the panel becomes smaller, the width and height are kept in proportion. Both effects may be slowed by pressing the Shift key at the same time.
NoteTinker Tool, which accesses preferences not usually available (for the Dock and other Preferences), also provides an effect called, "Suck in" which -- as the name suggests -- sucks the minimized panel towards the Dock in a manner halfway between Genie and Scale. For this and other effects to be applied, the Dock needs to be relaunched, which may take around a minute.
Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs. |
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