Parking it at the Dock
Here are some cool things you can do with your dock.
Notice the dividing line on your dock and roll your mouse over it. You see your mouse turns into a different icon. If you click on that dividing line and drag up, or drag down, you can resize your dock super fast.
Now put the mouse over the dividing line again and hit the CTRL KEY and click. A mini menu pops up to give you additional options for controlling your dock.
TURN HIDING ON - This temporarily gets rid of your dock completely. This will come in handy if you want to use that space at the bottom of your screen to open an application a little bit wider. I use this trick a lot when I have multiple design applications open so I can have a little more real estate on the screen. To get your dock back, hover your mouse down where it normally is and it will pop back up. Then hit the CTRL key and click again while on the dividing line and select TURN HIDING OFF. Your dock has returned to its normal position.
TURN MAGNIFICATION ON - If you select this, then anytime you roll over an icon in the dock, it will magnify a little, standing out from the rest of the icons.
POSITION ON SCREEN - Hover over this option and you get three choices - bottom, left and right. This tells the computer where you want your dock positioned on the screen. The preference is yours entirely, based on how you work and where you will find your dock to be the least intrusive.
MINIMIZE USING - This gives you two choices - GENIE EFFECT or SCALE EFFECT. This tells your computer which way to minimize open screens. It's simply an aesthetic choice. Give it a go be selecting each, and then clicking the yellow button on any open window to see the difference. The default is the GENIE EFFECT and frankly, there's no reason I can think of to change it, but again, just knowing it will make you the coolest Mac user in Banning, California.
There's another way to select your dock preferences, and that's by clicking on apple icon at the top of the screen and scrolling down to DOCK. You'll get the exact same menu.
Finally, there's the selection of DOCK PREFERENCES and this gives you more precise control over your dock. You can scale the dock size to any preference by moving the slider between SMALL and LARGE.
You can turn on magnification, but here you can control the actual size of the magnification (you can make the icons huge). The rest of the preferences are the same as what you pulled up by CTRL clicking on the dividing line at your dock.
