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Dockapps Arrive at the OS X Dock
An anonymous reader writes "Many of us have fallen in love with the convenience of dockapps through fvwm2, Windowmaker and Afterstep. Now, it looks like dockapps are finally coming to OS X at last. It's not Dashboard, but it is very cool."
Indeed. GPL'd libraries are useless to the realistic-thinking world.
I would suggest that, while there are certain times when a dockapp is a great idea in OS X (the little red dot that shows how much new mail you have in Mail.app, for instance), and certain times when it's not perfect, but it is the only thing that will really do in some cases (Activity Monitor), for the most part dockapps have no place in OS X.
In the various X11 windowmanagers that have them, they work well because they afford you a great deal of control over where the dockapp can be placed onscreen, and because they provide that degree of freedom with everything else, too.
OS X, on the other hand, gives you a menubar that is already firmly attatched to the top of the screen which already contains a clock, battery monitor, and various other useful indicators and controls. The menubar alone simultaneously makes 3/8 of the good places for random dockapps (corners and sides) off-limits, and severely reduces their usefulness by providing most of the most popular dockapp functionality in a much more compact form.
It also gives you an incredibly cramped and inflexible dock. All the user gets to control is how large its icons are, whether it is on the left, right, or bottom edge of the screen, and partial control of icons within the dock. The dock then decides where the icon's physical location on the screen is, makes adjustments to the ordering of apps by throwing new apps you run in the bottom of the first compartment (i.e., the middle), and resizes the dock as needed. And there is only one dock - no dock and clip like in WM, no whatevertheheckyouwant like in fvwm2. OS X just doesn't really leave much room for the dockapp author and its user to implement and place the dockapp's interface in such a way that it serves to be both useful and something more than ugly clutter.
While I realize there are major differences between dockapps and the "desktop widgets" model of random useful crap, I gotta say that in general it's a much better idea to buy a copy of Konfabulator or Tiger and make use of that system. Enjoy the way it allows you to put more information up there, and get used to the way it only shows that information when you want it to. (I haven't used either much, but it could be that they allow you to design widgets that "pop up" on the screen briefly when they need to tell you something right away. . . I have used other OS X apps that will do that.) In the end, the desktop widgets model just meshes much better with Aqua.