Mac Users: Where to Put the Docking Station?
Mac users, hello! Let’s argue which side of the screen is best for the docking station. (PC users, please ignore this article and don’t laugh at us.)
By all accounts, only dirty random people leave the dock at the bottom, where it is eating up too much precious vertical real estate. On a reddit thread about posting a dock, the top commenter, the bottom pinner, is literally asking for forgiveness . Bottom dock users note that auto-hiding real estate is not a problem. Who needs a docking station when you can launch apps with Spotlight?
Apple historian Stephen Hackett prefers the right side , next to the part of the desktop where OS X automatically creates new files. He calls the lower docks “a waste of precious vertical space” and finds automatic hiding disorienting. It nudges its dock to the bottom right corner to make room.
IDownloadBlog author Jeff Benjamin created asix-minute video to advocate for the left side. It boils down to three points, in descending order of meaning:
1. Vertical real estate is precious, yadda yadda.
2. Most people are right-handed, so their hand prefers the right side of the trackpad, so the left dock is out of the way.
3. Native English speakers read from left to right, so placing the dock on the left is like putting it at the “beginning”.
I present Benjamin’s full video below to complement my post and make it visually interesting:
AppAdvice blogger Daniel Celeste defends the bottom dock , pointing out that if you place multiple windows on your desktop, horizontal space may be more valuable. And if you are manipulating multiple screens, only the bottom dock will appear on all of them.
One of these bloggers is right. Two of them are wrong. The choice is yours.