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Apple Awarded Patent for Mac OS X Dock
by , 5:35 PM EDT, October 8th, 2008
It took almost nine years, but Apple Inc. was awarded a patent for the Mac OS X Dock Tuesday. Apple applied for the patent on December 20, 1999, and focused on the magnification feature in its abstract. The patent lists Bas Ording, Steve Jobs, and Donald Lindsay as the inventors.
From the patent's Abstract description: "To provide greater access and consolidation to frequently used items in the graphical user interface, a userbar is established which includes a plurality of item representations. To permit a greater number of items to reside in the userbar, a magnification function can be provided which magnifies items within the userbar when they are proximate the cursor associated with the graphical user interface."
It's that focus on the magnification feature that is likely key to Apple being granted a patent. Mac OS X's Dock was itself based on the NeXTSTEP Dock, which AppleInsider noted in its coverage of the patent was first introduced in 1989, well ahead of either the Taskbar of Windows and other docking metaphors used in various flavors of Unix and Linux.
The current dock in Mac OS X "Leopard" 10.5.5 includes a 3Dish perspective, a translucent tray, and other features that are different from the original Dock introduced with Mac OS X. It does, however, still include the magnification feature as demonstrated in the screenshot below.

The current Dock in Mac OS X "Leopard" 10.5.5.
Observer Comments
95% of the time, it just gets in my way. If it's not hidden, it wastes a bunch of space. If it is hidden, it makes one edge of the screen prone to errors (for example, moving to the bottom of the screen to adjust the scroll bar, the dock pops up, blocking what I want to do).
I would love it if the dock would only become visible if I am holding a modifier key down...
Oh yeah, DragThing kicks the docks ass!
Thu Oct 09, 2008 8:57 am Subject: What size monitor?
QuoteGuest wrote:
95% of the time, it just gets in my way. If it's not hidden, it wastes a bunch of space. If it is hidden, it makes one edge of the screen prone to errors (for example, moving to the bottom of the screen to adjust the scroll bar, the dock pops up, blocking what I want to do).
I would love it if the dock would only become visible if I am holding a modifier key down...
Oh yeah, DragThing kicks the docks ass!
I am not being snarky here, but if you have the "Automatically hide and show the dock" setting checked in the System Preferences then you need to drag the mouse off of the bottom of the monitor to show the dock. Of course it can be easy to mouse past the scroll bar of a full screen window and activate the dock.
I have a lot of screen real estate on my iMac and almost always have the dock showing. What size monitor are you using?
Thu Oct 09, 2008 9:49 am Subject:
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