Tip: What to do if you mistakenly drag out of the dock

[Doctor Q]

Oops! You tried to resize a Mac OS X window and ended up dragging an icon out of the dock by mistake. If you let go of it outside the dock, it'll disappear from the dock. You can drag it back into the dock, but you don't remember where it was among your dock icons and you want it just where it was before.

I wanted a mindless way to solve this problem, without having to remember where my icons were.

I found a solution. Drag the icon to the side of the dock that it didn't come from. In other words, if it came from the left side of the dock, drag it to the right side, and vice versa. (You can tell which side it came from because that's the side in which the icons will rearrange themselves to make room for it. Drag it to the other side.)

If your dock is vertical, we're talking about top and bottom instead of left and right.

When you drag the icon to the "other" side of the dock and drop it on the background (not on an icon that highlights), it will move back to its original position on the other side of the dock.

Note: For Mac OS 9 and earlier, you can "cancel" a drag action simply by dropping the item on the menu bar.