Now that I’ve got a massive 27″ Apple Thunderbolt Display as part of my dev stack, I decided that it would be a good time to experiment with adding ALL THE ICONS to my Dock.

I’ve always been sort of a minimalist when it comes to Dock items, relying on other tools like Alfred to get at what I wanted on the fly. Really, the core reason for my minimalist approach was due to just simply having a small screen to work with. If you saw my last post, you’d have seen a screenshot of my 11″ Mac Book Air’s display – not a ton of room for fluff, especially since I like it bottom-right aligned to take advantage of that bottom-left real estate.

Spaces used to be a part of the default Dock icon set, and getting rid of them was always one of my first three OS X modifications. But I’ve recently seen developers, like Chris Coyier, use Dock icons and spaces in an interesting way. Here’s a screenie of Chris’ setup:

Chris Coyier's Desktop

And here’s mine, so far:

My Desktop

What I like about having all my important icons is that they serve as a reminder that I have specific tools for specific reasons and that I should use them for such. Note: I’m not yet fully set up, so don’t judge me on the icons I’m missing (in fact, leave a comment with your app suggestions). Once you’ve got all your icons on the Dock though, it’s a bit of a barfy jumbly icon mess. This is where spaces come in:

defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-apps -array-add '{"tile-type"="spacer-tile";}'
killall Dock

Run the defaults line once for every space you want to add.

Oh, and don’t worry about that killall line, it just relaunches the Dock with your new shiny (and by shiny, I mean invisible) spaces.

Now, see how lovely that makes things? Man, I’m on a roll with this tech blogging thing…