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Dock Trick

Here’s a fun Mac OS X Dock trick to amuse others with.

1. Set your Dock’s minimize effect to “Genie” (or the hidden “Suck” choice, using TinkerTool).
2. Open Applications → Utilities → Terminal.
3. Type killall Dock but don’t hit Return just yet.
4. Open Safari and load a decent sized website, like Digg.
5. Switch back to the Terminal, keeping the Safari window in view.
6. Shift-click the yellow minimize button of the Safari window, and hit Return to execute the command while the window is busy morphing.

The Dock process will be killed, and it will disappear, leaving the Safari window with nowhere to go. The window will freeze mid-transition. The cool part is that the window is still responsive, and you can scroll around and see the content transform in real-time.

The Dock automatically relaunches, so you don’t have to worry about breaking anything. Finish minimizing the window, or do Command-W to close it.

Credit due to Marco for his recent comment on the Cool Things You Can Do on a Mac article, although this is likely the original source.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 8th, 2006 at 7:47 pm and is filed under Mac, Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Trackbacks & Pingbacks

  1. [...] Neat! Have to try that Dock Trick and deform the web a bit. [...]

  2. [...] ..The Dock process will be killed, and it will disappear, leaving the Safari window with nowhere to go. The window will freeze mid-transition. The cool part is that the window is still responsive, and you can scroll around and see the content transform in real-time.read more | digg story [...]

Comments

  1. Hehe… Neat…

  2. Just tried it, that is pretty neat.

  3. lol, that is sooo cool

  4. This just goes to show how much effort Apple puts into their feature design…it’s amazing that this doesn’t crash anything, and actually works.

  5. I’m having way too much fun w/this. Try it in iTunes– it’s amazing that everything still works (except the mouse sometimes can’t find things cause their click-areas must not morph with the image, but that’s understandable)

  6. cool dude but i dont have a mac

    lol

  7. UHH… If this were windows y’all would say its a bug. Which it most definatly is.

  8. WOAH!! this is so cool, as i type here with my safari browser sucked halfway into the dock!

    its also cool how once u finish minimizing it, the little picture in the dock is all sucked in too

  9. you can press shift while minimizing windows to slow animation down :D

  10. Awesome!!

  11. That is so awesome!

  12. The neatest thing of all is that once you minimize the windows, the icon shown on the dock is exactly how the window freezed before! :D

    Brilliant tip mate!

  13. Killing the dock process works, but it’s much nicer to ask it to quit by sending it a quit apple event. This gives the dock a chance to save its preference files, &c. You can do this with the command:
    osascript -e ‘tell app “Dock” to quit’

  14. Haha, that is a cool and funny trick…
    Will you be able to do that under Vista, too? ;)

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