I'll tell you what I dislike about the Dock:
1. Magnification, while sexy, isn't really usable, because icons move around and resize, so it's very hard to target anything accurately. This is especially dangerous if you tend to drag & drop thousands of files at a time. I once accidentally dropped a few hundred files into the Dock. Faced with the prospect of dragging them off the Dock one at a time, I had to go edit XML in the prefs file to eliminate them all.
2. It's not big enough to accommodate many icons without them all becoming teeny-tiny (thereby reducing the usefulness of the icon-centric Dock). Even at the 1280x960 or 1280x854 that I normally use, the majority of my icons are on the Desktop because the Dock is full.
3. Icons aren't in predictable locations, since the Dock adds new icons as non-Dock apps are launched, and it re-centers itself. So again, hard to train your brain/hand to go to a specific place for something when it might be elsewhere. This also applies to the Trash, which cannot be optionally pinned to a corner, nor placed on the Desktop.
4. The thumbnails it makes for minimized documents are often not easy to identify visually. For images it works ok; for web pages, text, or Finder windows, not as well. Likewise, folders look identical and you must tediously mouse around and read labels to tell what's what. The color labels you can set for icons in the Finder are ignored by the Dock, showing up neither for the icon, nor their text label.
5. The Dock behavior is non-intuitive for new users. For example, click and drag an object onto the Desktop or into a Finder window and a copy of that object is made (unless it's on the same disk, another UI inconsistency). But click once and drag something onto the Dock and it creates something akin to an alias, but it's not an alias (does not have an alias icon). Normally, of course, you have to Command-Option-click and drag to create an alias. Then if you drag something off the Dock, it disappears in a puff of smoke. Oh dear, did I just delete After Effects? Having used OS X for years of course I know the answer, but I've seen plenty of new users become confused with the Dock's odd behaviors.
6. They still haven't fixed the bug where descenders are chopped off the bottom of text labels. Granted, that's minor, yet annoying and curious for a company that traditionally prides itself on details such as that.
1. Magnification, while sexy, isn't really usable, because icons move around and resize, so it's very hard to target anything accurately. This is especially dangerous if you tend to drag & drop thousands of files at a time. I once accidentally dropped a few hundred files into the Dock. Faced with the prospect of dragging them off the Dock one at a time, I had to go edit XML in the prefs file to eliminate them all.
2. It's not big enough to accommodate many icons without them all becoming teeny-tiny (thereby reducing the usefulness of the icon-centric Dock). Even at the 1280x960 or 1280x854 that I normally use, the majority of my icons are on the Desktop because the Dock is full.
3. Icons aren't in predictable locations, since the Dock adds new icons as non-Dock apps are launched, and it re-centers itself. So again, hard to train your brain/hand to go to a specific place for something when it might be elsewhere. This also applies to the Trash, which cannot be optionally pinned to a corner, nor placed on the Desktop.
4. The thumbnails it makes for minimized documents are often not easy to identify visually. For images it works ok; for web pages, text, or Finder windows, not as well. Likewise, folders look identical and you must tediously mouse around and read labels to tell what's what. The color labels you can set for icons in the Finder are ignored by the Dock, showing up neither for the icon, nor their text label.
5. The Dock behavior is non-intuitive for new users. For example, click and drag an object onto the Desktop or into a Finder window and a copy of that object is made (unless it's on the same disk, another UI inconsistency). But click once and drag something onto the Dock and it creates something akin to an alias, but it's not an alias (does not have an alias icon). Normally, of course, you have to Command-Option-click and drag to create an alias. Then if you drag something off the Dock, it disappears in a puff of smoke. Oh dear, did I just delete After Effects? Having used OS X for years of course I know the answer, but I've seen plenty of new users become confused with the Dock's odd behaviors.
6. They still haven't fixed the bug where descenders are chopped off the bottom of text labels. Granted, that's minor, yet annoying and curious for a company that traditionally prides itself on details such as that.
