There are plenty of dock-styleapplications launchers for Windows. But most have one thing in common: You anchor them to the top, bottom, or side of the screen and then scroll your mouse over that portion of the screen to bring up a list of applications. Circle Dock is different, because this free application launcher it appears where your mouse already is instead of making you move your mouse.
Like most application launches, Circle Dock comes with a list of icons for frequently used programs, like the Control Panel, your default browser, and the recycling bin. You can add shortcuts by dragging them from your desktop or quick launch bar and customize to your heart's content.
Circle Dock has a ton of visual customization options as well. You can either display your icons in concentric circles, or as a spiral. You can add a rotating animation effect to the spiral to make yourself dizzy. There are a more than 30 skins to choose from. And you can decide whether the dock is always visible or if it disappears when the program loses focus or when you click an application icon. One other feature which I wish every application launcher had (and which many, but not all, do have) is the ability to select from a handful of keyboard shortcuts to show or hide the dock.
What's red and green and only uses 96k of disk space? CPU History. It's a lightweight CPU monitor that sits in the Dock on your Mac, and gives you a quick visual readout on how hard your processor is working. It's customizable, easy to read, and won't put a big drain on your system.
So why not Activity Monitor? Well, if you're just going to use it as a display in the dock, it's using way more system resources than you need. Its Dock readout also isn't as customizable as the one in CPU History, which lets you set the update interval, the width of the bars in the CPU graph, and the size of the icon in the Dock. The latest version also shows separate graphs for multi-core processors. It doesn't really do much, but CPU History gets its very specific job done with minimal hassle.
Addicts of endless customization, rejoice! SuperDocker is a free program designed for Mac OS X Leopard that gives you the ability to customize your Leopard dock and more, all in a very easy to use package.
It seems like everything you'd want to change about the dock can be done in SuperDocker: you can change the dock from 3-D to 2-D, add icon transparency, and add customized separators in the dock.
Also, when you edit the dock background, separator, and active application indicator (the blue glowing thing at the bottom of running applications), the SuperDocker interface gives you a real-time preview, so you can perfect the dock inside SuperDocker before you apply the changes to your system.
SuperDocker also has a few preferences for items outside of the dock. You can modify the menu bar, the default screen capture format, the boot screen, and more. And thankfully, all of these customizations can be undone with a single click.
We've got the hot scoop on Yahoo spicy update to widgets; their newest release of Yahoo! Widgets 4. This version offers users and developers improved features and capabilities including a new Widget Dock, new and improved widgets, improved performance, streamlined installation, improved authoring tools and automatic updates.
I recently had the opportunity to load up this new version and take it for a test drive. The big differences noticed in this release are the Widget Dock, Improved performance, and some intuitive new widgets from the Yahoo team.
Check out some great screen shots after the jump...
A couple days ago Ryan brought us RocketDock, the best Apple dock emulator I've seen so far. While using it, I noticed that it has a setting in the options that allows you to turn on "UberIcon" support. At first I was confused, as I wasn't sure if that was just a mode in RocketDock, but since it didn't appear to do anything, I went looking on Punk Software's site. And lo and behold, I found that UberIcon is its own standalone utility.
UberIcon immediately won me over due to its complete simplicity - all it does is to zoom an icon quickly and smoothly when you double click it from your desktop or anywhere within Windows Explorer. It might not sound like much, but it definitely adds a bit of spice to an otherwise fairly two-dimensional XP desktop. And of course as soon as I had UberIcon installed, RocketDock respected the setting and started to zoom icons when I launched them in the same way they do on my desktop. Sweet!
Apple users love pretty things. And nothing is prettier than getting all arts and crafty and displaying your awesome collection of downloaded apps in a sweet collage. Best of all, no work is involved.
This Mac application called Todos opens all of your application icons in a panel. Choose the application you want to open, and hide the panel. That simple. No more cramming all of your applications on the dock. There is a nice hotkey feature to easily open and hide Todos as well.
37signals' web-based business chat app
Campfire
has taken off pretty quickly, to the point that some folks are creating dedicated apps to work with it, like Pyro. Pyro is an app for Mac OS X whose creators describe as a
"site-specific browser," meaning it's a desktop program that wraps around the web-based app and provides
additional OS integration. Specifically, Pyro gives Campfire its own OS X Dock icon which displays the number of unread
messages in your Campfire chat and bounces when new messages arrive. It also has a tabbed interface so you can remain
connected to many Campfire chat rooms and switch between them easily.
A couple days ago 
