For years I have liked the Mac OS Dock and found it to be very useful. Over the last couple of months, however, I found I had too many programs in it and opening a n application took some time. So, I starting drifting towards using Spotlight to find my programs which is noticeabley faster. To find an application (or anything in Spotlight) the keys are: command+spacebar then the first few letters of the application. Over time Spotlight learns what you search for and highlights them first. I can type command+spacebar s and have Safari listed in a split second.

My next step was to move the Dock from the bottom of my screen, where I found it hard to know what was open in Leopard, to the left side and strip it of all programs except those that I set to open at login (Mail, iCal, iChat). This gives me a little more room on the bottom of the screen and by using Spotloght the ability to open up applications or contacts or documents very easily. It also helps that I have a new Apple Keyboard that makes typing almost effortless.

My new Dock set up is on the left with Finder, Main, iCal, Safari, iChat, Activity Monitor (set to display RAM usage), Eclipse, XCode, MySQL Administrator, Firefox and CSS Edit all open.