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Do you prefer your dock indicator lights on or off?

Do you prefer your dock indicator lights on or off?

  • On

    Votes: 107 77.5%

  • Off

    Votes: 22 15.9%
  • Total voters
    138
B

Branskins

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Dec 8, 2008
1,235
180
Edit: So clean installs of Lion have the indicator lights off by default. I have changed course and am now interested in whether people actually keep them on or off!

Original post:
I thought it was a pretty substantial change when the lights defaulted to off. It was simple but it showed where they are going with the future of OS X.

What happened to make them change it back to the old way? I think a lot of people would appreciate it but will not even think to look for it in the settings
 
Last edited:
Branskins said:
I thought it was a pretty substantial change when the lights defaulted to off. It was simple but it showed where they are going with the future of OS X.

What happened to make them change it back to the old way? I think a lot of people would appreciate it but will not even think to look for it in the settings
Click to expand...

Perhaps user feedback.
 
I might be wrong, but it might be a side-effect of upgrading from SL. Perhaps on a fresh install they default to off.
 
WiBu said:
I might be wrong, but it might be a side-effect of upgrading from SL. Perhaps on a fresh install they default to off.
Click to expand...

Does anyone know this to be true? When I explained Lion to my uncle I also told him about the "no more indicator lights" and he was happy because he is always OCD about seeing all the blue dots in the dock, making him close them just to get rid of them. That is what I always did so I welcomed the change
 
davedude said:
Fresh install here. No indicators.
Click to expand...

Thanks! I added a poll to see if people have turned them on or off.

I wish a moderator could change my thread title to reflect the change in course of this discussion! I take interest in what people are leaning towards!
 
ddyihl.png


Found the option.
 
I have really mangled this thread! I didn't want to make a new one so close to this one.

If it is possible, is there a way to change the poll title and the thread title?

I would like it to be: Do you prefer your dock indicator lights on or off?
 
Haha!

Yes, it is quite mangled :p

As a semi-power user, I prefer them on. I'm kind of OCD about things running in the background.
 
I've chosen to keep the Dock hidden and indicator lights turned off. Now that the indicator lights aren't actually telling you anymore whether a process is running or not, I find them to be mostly distracting. It looks much cleaner without them. Hopefully a lot of programs will quickly adopt Automatic Termination so that I simply don't have to worry about quitting apps anymore. In the meantime, I've resorted to command-tabbing for checking on currently running applications when I feel that I might be in need of free RAM. And I'll probably continue to spend too much time in Activity Monitor :/
 
Mine are off. I don't think I need to baby-sit my running apps anymore. With RAM cheap and plentiful I'm good with letting Lion manage my memory.
 
davedude said:
Haha!

Yes, it is quite mangled :p

As a semi-power user, I prefer them on. I'm kind of OCD about things running in the background.
Click to expand...

I know :O! How can I grab the attention of a moderator haha!

I was too OCD about keeping them all closed, so it is nice not having to see all the dots!
 
Branskins said:
I know :O! How can I grab the attention of a moderator haha!

I was too OCD about keeping them all closed, so it is nice not having to see all the dots!
Click to expand...

I've always hated those dots... right from Leopard. I much prefer the triangles... but then I went with these little circle indicators...

15hc1sh.png


But I think it DOES look neater without indicators... I'll try that for awhile.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
I don't have Lion yet, but I can already tell that I'm going to turn them off. At first I didn't like it, but I just read the really long Ars review of Lion here. They talk about why the application lights are off and how Lion handles its processes this time around and it's very interesting to me.
 
podsorcerer09 said:
I don't have Lion yet, but I can already tell that I'm going to turn them off. At first I didn't like it, but I just read the really long Ars review of Lion here. They talk about why the application lights are off and how Lion handles its processes this time around and it's very interesting to me.
Click to expand...

->Direct link to the relevant section. Awesome review! :)
 
Having a sense of how many processes you have running just seems like a very basic thing and I'm not longing for any paradigm shifts as far as that is concerned.

I just hope that despite of Apple's obsession of dumbing everything down I'll still be afforded some control over this in future versions of the OS.
 
SlappyWhite said:
Having a sense of how many processes you have running just seems like a very basic thing and I'm not longing for any paradigm shifts as far as that is concerned.
Click to expand...

The dock and its indicator lights tell you almost nothing about that though?! Try going into Activity Monitor. :)
 
tkermit said:
The dock and its indicator lights tell you almost nothing about that though?! Try going into Activity Monitor. :)
Click to expand...

The implication is that if you start to think that your computer is running low on memory, you can look at the lights to get an overview of what is going on process wise. It's understandable and It made sense in SL when we would want to close applications that we weren't using in order to keep our computers snappy and not tie up resources. Now that Lion does this for us (with caveats) it's a little bit unnecessary, but understandable all the same.
 
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