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Last time I mentioned that you can customize the OS X dock, deciding where you want it to reside on your desktop, how big it should be, whether icons should do clever things like get bigger when moused over and/or bounce up and down when launching. Looking at your newly customized dock, you'll notice that it contains icons which you didn't put there and you probably don't want, while icons you do want aren't there. You can fix this.
Everything you see on the dock can be removed, with a few exceptions: the trash can is in the dock, and there it will stay. There ain't a thing you can do about that, and you can't just add an alias for trash to the desktop in the usual place. The trash can is at the end of the dock, period. The Finder will always be running, so it too will always be in the dock. Also, neither a running application nor a minimized window can be removed. But anything else can be deleted, simply click-hold-drag an icon and release it on the desktop. Poof! and it is gone. Yes, there really are little poofy clouds that appear in the spot where you release the icon, signifying that it is gone from the dock. It is not, of course, gone from your computer. The things in the dock are actually aliases, and you can add anything you like, rather like the old Apple Menu. This is very simple. If you want to add a folder or document simply drag it to the space next to the trash can and release. The dock automatically makes an alias of the item and puts it there. It does exactly the same thing when you click the minimize button on an open window, with the added excitement of making the collapsing window swoop gracefully into place next to the trash. If you click the trash can, a window opens showing the contents of the trash. A control-click brings up the "Empty Trash" option, and selecting it immediately empties the trash. No warning about the amount of stuff in the trash and whether you really want to get rid of all it. If you never put anything in the trash that you might change your mind about, never accidently put several folders in the trash instead of just one, well, just go with the new flow. But if you do have little accidents you will probably want to see the contents of the trash before you empty it. You've been warned!
To open a window, document, or folder that is in the dock you need but click once on its icon. To view the contents of a folder WITHOUT opening its window control-click on it. You can then select an item in the folder, and the list collapses again. If you control click on a document you can choose to view it in a Finder window. I used to keep a folder, containing the aliases of all the programs I have, in my Apple Menu. That way I could easily launch any program, even rarely used ones, without conducting a search. You can do something similar with the dock: just drag such a folder from wherever you choose to keep it (in your home directory is probably best) and drop it in the dock. You can now scroll through your list of programs with a control click and launch at will. If you don't mess about with the location of things, so that all of your OS X applications are in the default X Applications folder, and all of your Classic applications are actually in the Applications (Mac OS 9) folder, you can can drag both folders into the dock and have quick access to all your applications without the bother of creating aliases for each application. You can tell which folder is which because when you mouse over items in the dock their name automatically appears. Or you can create custom icons... But that is a topic for another time.
The other end of the dock, the side anchored by the Finder, contains applications. Any application that is running places an icon in this area of the dock. You can tell it is running because it is there, and it has a little triangle next to it. If you wish you can drag an application icon to this area of the dock and there it will remain. Click on the icon to launch the program. If a program is running and you decide you would like to always have its icon available in the dock, control click on the icon and you can choose "Keep in Dock" to place its alias there permanently (or at least until you change your mind and drag it off). You can rearrange icons in either end of the dock by a simple click-hold-drag to new position. As you may have guessed by now, the dock has not only taken over the functions of the Apple Menu, but those of the Application Switcher as well. If you were in the habit of keeping the Application Switcher on your desktop, so that you could open a file in a running application by dragging it to the application's icon, you can do this with the dock. I have had weird failures with this, where dropping the file on the running application's icon did nothing at all, even though navigating to the file through the application's Open dialog box worked just fine. I haven't figured out why it doesn't always work, but it doesn't. It may be some combo of multiple drives and old applications running in Classic in X, but I don't know.
Now all this adding of things to the dock, both automatic and deliberate, means that the trash can moves around. It is not nailed in one place. I find this annoying. If you habitually delete items by dragging them to the trash, and unmount disks by doing the same, then the moving target aspect of the dock is decidedly undesirable. You can develop new habits: select the drive and use the keyboard shortcut of command-E, or control-click on a drive and select "Eject" from the contextual menu that appears. If you don't want to use both keyboard and mouse, you can customize the window toolbar so that it contains an eject command, then you can eject a disk from its Finder window (we'll talk about the toolbar some other time). Or you can gaze carefully at the screen to locate the trash and drag the disk to it. If you miss the eject icon a disk alias will appear next to the trash can. Ditto for deleting files and folders. You can put a delete command in the toolbar, control click to get a contextual menu to move to trash, or use the keyboard shortcut of command-delete. Or accidently put aliases in the dock when you drag to the trash can and miss your target.
One thing that helps slightly is to download Tinkertools. This gives you a new Preference Pane in System Preferences that allows you to pin the dock end to one place, so that the trash can stays put. Of course, you still can miss your aim and accidently create a dock alias instead of ejecting or trashing something. But with the trash can staying put it is a little easier to hit it. Tinkertools is free and does quite a number of other things as well, including, if you want, displaying all the hidden system files. You can get it from its creator Marcel Bresink's web site, or wherever fine Mac programs are available for download. There is also a script which I used that makes your dock transparent, but that one requires a bit more bravery, as it does things not intended by Apple, while Tinkertools simply implements options that Apple made, but didn't turn on. You can get the Transparent Dock script from its creator at Free Range Mac. You must also have installed some scripting additions for it to work, but he explains all that. The Transparent Dock is a matter of aesthetics rather than functionality, but as an artist I think that's important.
plorations: Sitting in the Dock of the X