In this week’s installment of “My First Mac” we’ll continue our top-to-bottom tour of the Mac desktop. We’ll focus on an integral part of the Mac called “the Dock”.

As a refugee from Windows tyranny, you’re certainly familiar with the Task Bar. Your Mac’s Dock performs many of the same functions as the Task Bar, with a bit of Apple’s visual flair thrown in for good measure.

The Dock is an opaque bar that contains icons that represent programs (we call them “applications” on the Mac). Clicking once on an application’s icon in the Dock opens that application. You’ll notice that when you click an application’s icon in the Dock, the icon will bounce up and down for a moment while the application is opening. A little black triangle will also appear below the icon showing you that the application is running. If you open an application that doesn’t have an icon in the Dock by, say, double clicking its icon within the Applications folder, the open application’s icon will appear in the Dock until you close the application.

You can customize the Dock by going to its “control panel” in System Preferences. Click on the little blue Apple icon in the menu bar in the upper left corner of your display, then select “System Preferences”. In the “Personal” pane of the resulting window, click on the “Dock” icon. Note that you can change the size of the Dock and its icons with the “Dock Size” slider.

You can enable “Magnification” by selecting the check box. Move the slider to “Max”. Then, move your pointer down and move it horizontally over the icons in the Dock. As you hover over each of the icons, the corresponding application’s name appears and the icons grow in size. This helps you keep the Dock small and out of the way until you need to use it, and is easy on the eyes. I keep a pretty small Dock and set the magnification about halfway, to give icons just a bit of a boost in size as I move over them.

Below “Magnification” in the Dock preferences you can select the Dock’s “Position on screen”. Left, right, or bottom. It’s up to you which position serves you best. I like my Dock on the bottom.

Next you can choose which Effect is used when you minimize an open window. On the Mac you click the yellow button at the top left corner of the window to minimize. When you minimize, the window moves down into the Dock using either a genie-returning-to-the-bottle animated effect or a scale effect similar to Windows. Choose the one you like from the pop-up window. You can also turn off the opening application’s “bouncing” animation (which I do, cause it delays the application launch by a fraction of a second – but, hey, who’s counting), and choose to “Automatically hide and show the Dock” as you can with the Windows Task Bar.

So, how do you put an application into the Dock? Simply open your Applications folder, click on an application’s icon, and drag it over the Dock. You can then place it anywhere in the Dock you wish, and let go. As with the Windows Task Bar, you’ve not moved the actual application. You’ve merely created a shortcut to it.

To remove an icon from the Dock, click and drag it out of the Dock onto the desktop. Let it go, and it will disappear in a little animated puff of smoke.

Next time: more on customizing the Dock, and why you don’t need a Start menu on a Mac.