By Graham K. Rogers

There have several major changes to System Preferences in OS X 10.8, Mountain Lion. Some preferences seem to be unchanged, although a close look may find subtle differences. The Dock preferences seems at first glance to be the same as before although a couple of changes have been made.

There had been a number of small changes to the Dock preferences panel when OS X, 10.7, Lion arrived. With OS X 10.8, Mountain Lion, the single panel appears at first glance to be the same. It provides a number of ways to make adjustments to the Dock feature. Some of the changes may be made directly in the Dock by clicking on the divider line (towards the right side) and using the Control key. The divider is almost invisible, but as the cursor nears the spot a double vertical arrow will appear.

Near the top of the preferences panel is a slider marked Size (Small to Large). Below this is a check box for Magnification. When this is selected, we may use the adjacent slider (Min to Max) to increase or decrease the level of magnification. When the box is unchecked, the slider is greyed out.

Three radio buttons are provided in the middle of the panel to position the Dock on the screen.The default is Bottom. Also available are Left or Right. It was once possible to place the Dock at the top of the screen by editing a hidden file, or by accessing the feature via Marcel Bresink's Tinker Tool (now version 4.9). This placement is no longer possible.

A button below these three selectors is available to decide the effect used when a Window is minimized. Checking old screen shots, I see that the button is slightly less wide than before.

The default effect is Genie, which makes a file appear to shrink as if it were going into a bottle-neck. The reverse happens when it is clicked in the Dock and becomes large again. The Scale effect uses less processing power and as the panel becomes smaller, the width and height are kept in proportion. Both effects may be slowed by pressing the Shift key at the same time.

The bottom of the panel now has 5 checkboxes (4 with Lion). The first of these is a new option.

• Double-click a window's title bar to minimize. While this was previously always available by default in the Finder, it is now turned off, but is made active by checking this box. As soon as the box is checked, the feature becomes available: no restarting is needed.

• Minimize windows into application icon. When a file is minimized it is not visible on the Dock as a separate file. When the application icon in the Dock is clicked, a list of files related to the application are shown. A minimized file is marked with a diamond.

• Animate opening applications. When checked, an application that is started (whether permanently in the Dock or not) will bounce a number of times while opening. When unchecked, the icon remains still.

• Automatically hide and show the Dock. When checked, the Dock appears from the bottom (or sides, if so located) as the cursor is moved near the edge of the screen. When this is unchecked, the Dock is visible at all times.

• Show indicator lights for open applications. When an application is active, a small blue icon appears below the Dock icon. When this is unchecked there is no indication in the Dock.

Note

Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs.