Ditch the Dock and Other Visual Clutter

A lot of people can’t work with a messy desk. Personally I go through cycles. When I’m really struggling and feeling swamped, it’s usually because my desk is swamped too. Cleaning it up can be very therapeutic.

Computer desktops and users can suffer the same problem. And it’s not just the desktop, but everything you see on the screen: icons, windows, toolbars, Dock, pictures and so on. When you have to concentrate, these provide a lot of visual clutter and distraction. I wrote about Scrivener a few weeks ago and as I write I’m using it and have black text on an off-white screen and nothing else. I’m over visual clutter. It’s like loud music you don’t like when you’re trying to think.

The problem with a lot of this visual clutter is it’s designed to be what? Eye catching. And that it is. It happens subconsciously and if you don’t believe it’s going on, get hold of Scrivener or WriteRoom and try them in full screen. It really makes a difference. (Although I don’t like their default color schemes – find them a bit hard to look at.)

Eye catching
People in advertising and graphic design know all the tricks about drawing your eye to a certain spot on the page, and they know how to make your eye travel a path around the page. A poorly designed page that confuses the eye becomes tiring and annoying. Icon and interface designers attempt to design icons that are both pleasing and appealing to the eye. Eye catching.

So what is happening on our cluttered computer screens? They are full of eye catching icons and so on, subconsciously pulling our eyes every which way. No wonder so many people get eye strain from using computers.

And then, all of a sudden, I’d had enough. Time to lose the clutter.

The Dock goes first
One piece of clutter that was really annoying me was the Dock. Yes it’s a thing of beauty, full of gorgeous icons… gorgeous eye catching icons. Icons that often have little “Look at me” prompts, such as new mail or newsfeed counts.

Yes, I’ve tried the “Hide” option but it annoys me when the Dock pops up everytime my mouse brushes the bottom of the screen.

What’s the Dock for anyway? It tells you when you’ve got mail, it tells you what apps are running and gives a quick way to launch your favorite apps. It is designed to distract you.

So I searched the ‘net and found Chaotic Software’s Dock Disabler was just what I wanted. A few minutes later I had no Dock and its visual assault.

Next I ran sterCleanDesk to get rid of the desktop clutter. The sterCleanDesk download link is dead but I’ve put a copy on my site, QwertyRash.

In Finder’s preferences I disabled display of anything on the desktop. And in applications I started hiding toolbars – except Safari. Safari’s toolbars aren’t visually assaulting. There’s a silver button in the top right of many application’s windows for easily hiding toolbars.

Everything was looking quite promising until I started discovered the impact of disabling the Dock. Here’s the list of what doesn’t work when you disable the Dock:
- Minimize applications
- Dashboard
- Set desktop picture
– Command-tab application switching
- Exposé

Unfortunately, I did need Dashboard and application switching. The command-tab application switcher has the advantage that it shows you message counts for Mail and other apps, and of course, is very effective at application switching.

Further hunting turned up Sideburn’s DockBlock which is a menubar app that includes a list of running applications, reconnects the Exposé keys (albeit, slow response) and has a simplistic command-tab application switcher. But it still didn’t give me the Dashboard back.

Life without the Dock. Plan ‘B’
Okay, I decided I’d have to re-enable the Dock but just hide it out of the way where I wouldn’t bump it into life too often. Therefore, I turned on auto-hide, shrunk it as small as it would go and moved it to the right of screen. Afterwards I moved it to the left as I have dual screens so it’s way out of the way over there.

Next was to find a suitable Dock substitute that would reside in the menubar. Again there are a few options: SwitchBlade; Application Switcher Menu (ASM);DockBlock and more. But I discovered I already had one that did the job just fine, in ClawMenu (formally PiquantMenu)

With command-tab still active and ClawMenu’s active applications menu I am quite happy with my application switching options. Application switching with command-tab is very simple. Press command-tab, wave your mouse over the application to switch to and release. No click required.

One other little application I’ve been playing with which is a clever way of reducing visual distraction of background applications is Doodim. It dims or blacks out the background applications which goes a long way to helping your eyes focus on the foreground app.

Another habit to get into to reduce screen clutter is pressing command-option-H. This hides all the background applications. ASM has the option to do this automatically when switching applications which I like, but sometimes you don’t want it to happen all the time.

Overflow, my favorite application launcher, is also running all the time, so I can simply switch to it to launch apps.

Growl
It didn’t take long to discover in iChat I’d miss responses. (Sorry Hadley and Chris – I wasn’t ignoring you!) I’d relied on the bouncing icon of the Dock to tell me when someone responded. With mail I relied on the new mail count changing.

Growl to the rescue. Growl is a long time favorite app which I’ve now configured to notify me when I get new email, and when someone responds in a chat session. To do this, I installed the GrowlMail extension, and the Chax iChat extension. Chax comes with a raft of other features, such as auto-reconnect on disconnection, and is well worth a look whether you’ve got Growl or not.

Advantages
I’ve found a few advantages of ditching the Dock. Besides the removal of the visual distraction of the Dock, my next favorite benefit is that I’ve gained an extra half-inch of real estate across the bottom of my screen. This is significant on a laptop with its smaller vertical height. Plus I’ve learned a few key strokes to improve producticvity.

Disadvantages
There are disadvantages. A sense of disconnectedness can be disconcerting. The feeling that you might be missing something. You can get over that insecurity. Especially with Growl.

Some people will suggest that Growl is distracting with its notifications. That it is. The difference is they aren’t there all the time and you can control which ones display.

The Application menu
It would be nice if Apple reinstated the old Applications menu which showed active applications.  Make it a fully-featured Dock alternative too. Make it optional though and likewise give the Dock a permanently hidden feature, but without losing Exposé, Dashboard and so on.

Come one Steve, can you just squeeze this into Leopard?

All clean
So there you go. A nice clean distraction-limited desktop. The image with this article shows my lovely distraction free screen. It works for me and you might want to give it a try too because you just might find it works for you too.

And if anyone has any tips of their own for reducing screen clutter, let us know.

Some of the applications mentioned here have been previously reviewed on Apple Matters. Here are links to those reviews:

Scrivener
ClawMenu
Growl
sterCleanDesk
Overflow