Old Dock tips that are still useful

I ran across a list of tips I wrote when Leopard shipped a million years ago. Most of them still work and are useful. And best of all, I’ve found that most people are unaware that they exist.

1. Dock springing. If you drag a file and hover over Dock items, various useful things happen which are similar to Finder springing. Note you have to have springing ON in Finder Preferences (or use spacebar).

   • If it’s a window, the window un-minimizes from the Dock.

   • If it’s a folder/stack, the corresponding folder in the Finder opens.

   • If it’s the Finder, it brings the Finder to the foreground and opens a window if one doesn’t exist already.

   • The coolest springing trick is if you hover over an application while dragging a file The application comes to the foreground and then you can hover over the window you want and that springs to the front. Note that you can also hit space bar to trigger the springing. This is great for things like dragging files into open windows of hidden or obscured applications.

2. You c…