This post was inspired by The B&B Podcast Episode 6: Wonderful People where Ben Brooks and Shawn Blanc talk about a survey they ran asking people about their Mac OS X Dock, Menu Bar, Desktop Wallpaper, and more. This post replaces a previous article entitled “My Dock.”

The Macintosh brought the desktop metaphor to the masses in 1984. Before then computers were manipulated using text commands spun across a black emotionless void. The Mac changed all that and gave users choices on how to customize their workspaces. Mac OS X carries on the tradition of the first Mac’s control panel by giving users preference over how they setup their desktops.

This is how I setup mine.

My Dock

The Dock has been surrounded by controversy ever since the Mac faithful took the inaugural plunge into OS X’s aqua waters. Replacing the classic Mac OS Launcher, Application Switcher, Control Strip, customizable Apple Menu, and WindowShade the Dock left users with little more than a ever widening landing strip to manage their applications, shortcuts and windows. Later releases of Mac OS X would give users the choice of Menu Bar icons, Exposé, Dashboard, Spaces, and a new Application Switcher but the Dock remains a central part of the Mac’s user interface. It cannot be turned off, easily ignored, or completely replaced. The Dock is here to stay, and as a Mac OS X user I have come to accept the Docks strengths and weaknesses in my daily workflow.

The default position for Mac OS X’s Dock is at the bottom of the screen. Beginning in the Summer of 1999 Apple began taking a fancy for widescreen displays with the introduction of the original Cinema Display and Titanium PowerBook G4. A widescreen monitor provides more room for toolbars and pallets to be anchored on the left and right sides of the display freeing up critical vertical workspace for documents in the middle. Ever since Apple went widescreen my Dock has been perched on the left, away from desktop icons to the right and closer to the cursor I control with my left hand.

In addition to being pinned on the left my Dock is also hidden from view. This gives me even more screen real-estate to work with and less bouncing icon distraction. If I need to launch an application or know the number of unread items in Mail’s inbox I just move my cursor to the left of my screen and reveal my dock temporally.

My dock never magnifies. Magnification was a neat trick back in 2001 when Mac OS X first debuted, but it has gotten old in recent years. Instead I keep my Dock large all of the time. I am visually blind and smaller icons are harder to click no matter how well you see.

I am a big fan of Exposé, but never engage it from my Dock and always from an active screen corner. I use the top left corner to show the Desktop, and the bottom left corner to show all Windows. Showing all of an Application’s Windows using Exposé has never made much sense to me, but now that Lion shows the application’s most recent documents along with its windows I might have to give it a try.

My Dock is filled with as few permanent applications as possible. Starting from the top…

• At the top of my Dock is the Finder. From it I do all of my file management and browsing. I will let the pros live up to the potential of such tools as Path Finder and the Terminal.
• Firefox is where I do all of my browsing these days. What can I say I am addicted to the Awesome Bar, the plugins, the customization, the syncing, and the Firefox icon.
• I use Mail.app for email only, never RSS, notes, todo lists, or HTML templates.
• [NetNewsWire Lite] for all things RSS. I love the minimal simplicity of this app, and was able to give up Google Reader once and for all after syncing NetNewsWire with Dropbox.
• iTunes, although not always running, is just another blue icon in my Dock for playing Audible books, Podcasts, and Music.
• BBEdit is where I write, where I code, and where I publish. It is more than just another blue icon on my Dock, “it doesn’t suck.”
• I gave up on the Twitter web page when #newTwitter arrived, and choose Twitterrific instead of the official Twitter app because it conforms nicely to the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines. I keep it in my dock so I can easily switch to is using the Command + Tab Applications Switcher.

Finally I never store any files or folders in my Dock nor do I minimizes many windows there. The bottom half of my dock is usually empty except for the Trash can which I used to empty immediately but now routinely ignore.

My Menu Bar

Mac OS 9 had the Control Strip, Mac OS X 10.0 had Docklings, and in later versions of Mac OS X we have the right side of the Menu Bar to customize with application shortcuts, and system preference widgets. From the survey a small minority prefer the added ease of access and additional functionality a magnitude of Menu Bar icons provides. I find myself in the much larger majority where only what must be there is present in my Menu Bar. Starting from the right… - Spotlight is present dutifully indexing my files as is a requirement on any modern Mac. Ever since NEXTSTEP I used to use LaunchBar to launch my applications from the keyboard, but Spotlight has become more mature replacement with every release. - Next is the twelve hour clock with date, day of the week, and a.m. and p.m. markers absent. (Unlike Ben Brooks I can tell if it is after midday without converting to twenty-four hour time. ZING!) Remember in the classic Mac OS where you used to look towards the flashing time separator to see if your Mac had frozen? Oh the good old days. - Following the time is the Airport status which is present on my Home iMac, but not on my ethernet enabled Office Mac mini. - Second to last is theTime Machine status suitable to beginning an out of schedule backup, or stopping Time Machine in its tracks if it gets overly protective. - Finally there is Dropbox which shows me when my files are syncing to the cloud, how many are remaining to be uploaded, (when to grab a snickers), and how much space I have left. Even with over 100GBs of space I am always precariously perched near my limit.

My Desktop

My Desktop is where all the action happens, and by action I mean all the windows floating above it. My Desktop is pretty much empty all of the time. Over the course of a day a couple odd icons might accumulate as I work on my latest project, but these remnants of productivity are quickly swept away into my Dropbox as soon as I am done piecing things together. External drives, iPods, mounted optical media and connected servers might make an appearance on my Desktop, but I am far more likely to interact with these items from the Finder’s sidebar.

If my Desktop serves a single purpose it is a frame for my growing wallpaper collection which I have set to rotate randomly every thirty minutes. Almost all of my desktop wallpapers comes from InterfaceLift and cover a wide variety of images downloaded in a 16:10 format for increased compatibility. I also have a extensive Nine Inch Nails wallpaper collection if you are into that sort of thing.

So there you have it, my Dock, my Menu Bar, and my Desktop each customized the way I like where less is more.