[Miniryu]

Here is a little set up I made on my Mac to make things easier to navigate. Create a folder (I created mine in my Home directory). Label it More Applications or something. In the folder, put aliases to all of the programs and applications you have one your computer. Then drag the folder onto the Dock. Now, when you need to launch an application that is not located on your dock, you only need to right-click your new folder in the dock and select the App you need from the list.

I also gave my folder a new icon, just to keep my Dock looking spiffy.

[OverclockedHomoSapien]

This basically creates an "Apple Menu" for the dock, with the advantage over the Apple menu of being more customizable, and of course you can make as many as you like for the dock. It helps to paste custom icons on the folder before dragging to the dock so you can tell it apart from other folders.

MOST newbies to OS X have no clue that this can be done and so it negatively affects their OS X experience. Windows users probably have no clue and yet they miss the start menu (i.e., the Apple menu).

Thus, I think Apple needs to have a utility of some sort in the system preferences that aids in creating such "apple menus" for the dock. This utility would be painfully simple, all it would need to do is create folders into which items could be dragged to create aliases. The folders could get custom icons using this utility, and they would automatically appear in the dock.

I believe such a utility would vastly improve the OS X experience for countless users new to Macs, or simply Mac users too dumb to figure this out. It's very important that Apple demonstrate to people that the dock is a powerful alternative to the start menu, and that it can match and exceed the functionality of the start menu. Without holding new user's hands Apple is missing an opportunity to show off how great the dock is.

This is the sort of thing that shows why I love the dock so much: It's simple, minimalist, and yet extremely powerful in the right hands. I've two folders in my dock filled with aliases, one for utilities, one for apps, and between these two every single app and utility on my HD is a mouse click away. I also put my Home folder in the dock, so that I can access every document on my HD with one mouse click.

What I fear for the sake of Apple is that many reviewers don't realize the full potential of the dock and so OS X gets glowing reviews instead of ultramegaglowing reviews.

[chabig]

I keep my folder in my Favorites.

It's kind of funny how many people don't think to do this. It also works very well for people who feel they have to "organize" their applications. Then when the next OS update comes out they find out that it can't find their stuff because they've moved it. All they need to do is leave /Applications alone and "organize" their aliases.

Chris

[cpt kangarooski]

Sadly, this is a crappy idea. It's reasonable enough as long as OS X is broken, but the need for it should never have arisen.

The REAL solution is for applications to universally not care where they are located in order to run, unless a user with authority to do so has specifically intervened and set up some sort of requirement. (e.g. not wanting people to run applications from different computer or removable media)

This would let people set up any kind of hierarchy they liked. (for example, I only call things like Word or Photoshop applications -- not all programs generally; this works for me)

Then the hierarchy could be directly plugged into the dock. Changes in one would of course be instantly reflected elsewhere.

There are considerable disadvantages to your proposal that don't exist with such a method as described above.

1. It involves more overhead. Aliases have to be created. If programs are removed, then the user has to manually remove aliases to it.

2. It adds unecessary complexity. There is an elegance to not having any extraneous files evident on the computer -- this is one of the key advantages to application bundles, is it not? If the user won't ordinarily interact with them, why did we bother in the first place?

3. It requires the user to have more of an understanding of aliases than he can be relied upon to have, or that it is reasonable to expect.

While this might not be the case for most MacNN posters, in the real world I've seen lots of people who had _everything_ in their MacOS Apple Menu Items folder. (assuming that they could figure out that that was how they added stuff to there -- the ones that couldn't just had everything on their desktop or the top of their boot drive)

The Mac as a whole is predicated upon the ideal that the user should not HAVE to learn anything extraneous to the actual work that they want to perform in order to be able to do that. File organization is a useful, but ultimately non-critical skill. If we bring it to the forefront, we are putting hurdles into the users' path via that clumsy method of 'helping' him, and we threaten to destroy the Mac ideal and return to the days of fiddling with every damn thing under the sun.

4. It imposes a judgement on the users. Specifically that the contents of /Applications shouldn't be organized, even if the user has a superior organizational method. (and since he's the only one using it, it only has to be superior in his subjective view)

I chafe under OS X's asinine organization because I like mine better. I've actually got much of Windows reorganized the way I like it on my IBM, though it pisses the hell out of me that I have to go to such lengths to set up the Start Menu to mirror this. And I used to have to do the same thing with MacOS because it was similarly broken, though at least more flexible about what you could do.

5. It breaks consistancy -- the organization in the dock should ideally mirror the organization in the filesystem. A user who manually traverses the filesystem may be confused to find a lack of any meaningful structure there; structure that could've helped them find what they're looking for, or understand more about what they see. (e.g. is program X an application, or a game, or a utility -- there's no supplementary information to help them know without running it)

[Miniryu]

Originally posted by chabig:
I keep my folder in my Favorites.

It's kind of funny how many people don't think to do this. It also works very well for people who feel they have to "organize" their applications. Then when the next OS update comes out they find out that it can't find their stuff because they've moved it. All they need to do is leave /Applications alone and "organize" their aliases.

Chris

The other problem with using your Favorites menu to access your programs is that you need to launch everything from the finder. Using the Dock, you can get to your aliases from any program.