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Dockapps Arrive at the OS X Dock

Posted by timothy on from the passengers-stream-out-in-panic dept.

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."

7 of 27 comments (clear)

  1. So what? by Redshift · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Activity Monitor has been working in my dock for years, showing me my bandwidth utilisation. What's new about this?

    Looks like a shameless plug from the site author for his GPL library.

    1. Re:So what? by amonredotorg · · Score: 5, Informative

      Agreed. In fact, Dockapps (usually called Docklings) are being deprecated in newer versions of Mac OS X. There were quite a few Docklings in 10.0 and 10.1 (including SlashDock), but there's very, very few Docklings left for 10.2 and later.

      This article at CocoaDev has a tutorial on making Docklings. Really easy.

      Dockapps aren't exactly the same as Docklings though, it seems... they have animated icons. Doing that is very easy as well, you just call NSApplication's -setApplicationIconImage: method every second or so. I don't need a framework for that.

  2. Re:System-Friendly? by Chucker23N · · Score: 4, Informative

    "...and Dashboard's widgets only update when you pull them into view, which is sort of lame and not at all keeping with the 'dash' idea."

    Not true.

    Widgets /can/ enter sleep mode when the Dashboard hides (onHide{sleep;}) and then later refresh once Dashboard comes back, but they don't need to. The normal case is that a widget continuusly gets updated, whether the Dashboard is visible or not.

    Furthermore, there's a somewhat hidden feature to show a particular Dashboard widget while the rest of the Dashboard is invisible, i.e. make the widget sticky.

  3. Re:System-Friendly? by trendyhendy · · Score: 5, Informative

    Instructions for having a widget always visible are at Mac OS X Hints

  4. GNDN by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    Dockapps/docklings haven't "arrived" -- they've been here all along. This framework just makes certain kinds slightly easier. Namely network monitors/graphs -- you know, like the Activity Monitor that comes with the OS -- the one that does exactly the same thing as the one existing app that uses this framework.

    Oh, and by the way, it's GPL, so you can forget about using it in your real projects. Why not LGPL? Why not BSD? Because that might be useful!

    Anybody else get the feeling that the "anonymous reader" happens to be the guy that wrote the framework? It's totally "post your homework" season, isn't it?

  5. For future reference by Lally+Singh · · Score: 4, Funny

    If you're coming in from fvwm2 and get on a mac, for the love of God, don't try to make the mac more like fvwm2.

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  6. Not compatible with Tiger! by cypherz · · Score: 3, Informative

    It seems like it isn't compatible with Tiger. Installed but no-workee.

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