RocketDock

[Liam]

I installed RocketDock today after reading the lifehacker article on ObjectDock. Seems fairly cool. I'll hold out on making a proper verdict though.

It seems that the "dock" functionality is pretty limited unless you can avoid using the task bar altogether. This would be easy for three things:

1) You need the notification area/system tray.

2) The clock.

3) The start bar.

So my questions are:

- Can you hide the taskbar more so than just auto-hiding it. As in, it wouldn't even appear if you moved your mouse down there. (This would be good, object dock + alt tab replacement power toy would render the task features of the taskbar redundant)

- Can you display the notification area/system tray without displaying the rest of the taskbar?

- If the taskbar was properly hidden, and using the windows key to bring up the start menu still worked, this question doesn't matter. But if not is there a way to have a replacement start menu OR having a right click program menu like in most linux distros?

[Archangel]

- Can you hide the taskbar more so than just auto-hiding it. As in, it wouldn't even appear if you moved your mouse down there. (This would be good, object dock + alt tab replacement power toy would render the task features of the taskbar redundant)
Looks like you can do something along the lines of:
CWnd* pWnd = CWnd::FindWindow("Shell_TrayWnd", "");
pWnd->ShowWindow(SW_HIDE);
So it should be *possible*. Not sure what that means if you don't want to write your own binary to do it though.

- Can you display the notification area/system tray without displaying the rest of the taskbar?
Doesn't that rocket thing do it for you? I was thinking maybe there's some way for an app to register itself as the system tray handler, but I suspect that's much harder than the first one.

- If the taskbar was properly hidden, and using the windows key to bring up the start menu still worked, this question doesn't matter. But if not is there a way to have a replacement start menu OR having a right click program menu like in most linux distros?
Why do you need one if you have that docky thing?

All seems quite difficult to me though. Why not just get a decent operating system and have done with it?

[Liam]

- I have no idea what that is.

- Rocket Dock doesn't.

- I need to be able to launch programs...

- I need windows. (School system is heavily reliant on Internet Explorer.

It's looking like maybe the dock thing isn't for me. Oh well.

[Steve B]

Another alternative to Rocket Dock is rklauncher (http://home.cogeco.ca/~rklauncher/), I have found both of those docks reasonable, but have settled on the fact they don't do what I want. So I don't have any. :)

Just thought I would offer an alternative dock, but to be honest without tabs like object dock, the current "GNU" docks look bloated with all you need.

[Archangel]

I'm overcome at how many of these things they are, and how none of them say that they're a clone of the OSX Dock.
Anyway, you only need about seven programs, one of which is a terminal emulator; you can do everything else from there ;-)