Dockey — Tweak your Mac’s dock to become (slightly) more productive

This will be a short one, but something that many could find useful if you own a Mac.

Dockey is a Mac app that makes changing some of the more advanced Dock preferences as easy as clicking a button.

The Problem

By default, your Mac is set to always display the dock. This is great for some people, but for those that need more screen real estate (developers, designers, spreadsheet users, etc…) and think they know their dock well enough to not have it on 100% of the time, you can choose to hide it util you hover over it.

In the settings page, you can click the “Automatically hide and show dock” to activate this feature.

So what is the problem? Speed.

The speed at which the dock pops up when you hover over it is a bit too slow for my taste, and actually makes me feel more inefficient overall. I turned the setting off because the extra real estate wasn’t worth the slight second it took to wait for the dock to pop up.

There are ways to speed up this animation, but the existing methods require a little bit of “technical” knowledge to make it happen. I can’t imagine someone like my parents being able to follow instructions on StackExchange like running this command in terminal:

defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-time-modifier -int 0;killall Dock

The Solution

An amazing developer by the name of Igor (@CuriousIgor) has created a simple and elegant solution to help people (especially non technical) be able to customize the speed and other aspects of their dock without having to fiddle with commands/code.

Having a faster opening dock was the deciding factor which helped me take the plunge and set my dock to auto-hide. You can see a side by side comparison of the difference that enabling this feature makes. Even though the auto-hide feature is built into MacOS, Dockey helped myself (and hopefully others!) take the plunge and take the plunge to hide the dock.

What we love

This app is very well designed. The app is so simple and clear (especially the choice of icons and colors), something that is surprisingly hard to get right. No ads or branding anywhere, just the necessities.

The preview on the left hand side is a nice touch as well.

There really isn’t much else! It gets the job done in a very well designed way. All of our software developers at Aloa have converted to the dockless lifestyle because of it.

It is safe to say that others feel the same way we do. The app was the #3 most upvoted product on ProductHunt for that day with around 400 upvotes and many positive comments.

As a side note, they also have a very good landing page implemented for the app. Take notes here if you are about to launch an app and need landing page ideas.

Conclusion

This isn’t a life changing app, but it definitely has the potentially to change your workflow in a noticeable way if you use your Mac often. Give it a download and show Igor some love on Twitter. Very cool project.

Originally published at DevRadar.