QOTD: Mac Users, Where do you dock your Dock?

Both with my recent iMac acquisition, and my brief previous usage of a MacBook Pro, I’m still “getting to know” the Mac OS X Dock.

It’s an odd little creature. Being a “switcher” (coming from Windows and Linux) it’s taking some getting used to. Although I was a past Mac user, those days were before OS X, and we didn’t have a dock back then – just the “Control Strip” starting with System 7.5 (if I recall correctly).

So far, I’ve come to my first conclusion – I can’t stand the magnification animation, so that *has* to be turned off regardless, but I’ve toyed with positions a little. Initially, back when I was using the MacBook Pro (which only had 1440×900 resolution), I had it hidden on the bottom, but on my iMac, I have 3360×1050 pixels to work with, so I like having it visible. Although I use the Google Quick Search Box to launch a lot of my applications now, I still like seeing the dock, and I like having a lot of my programs there; it makes it easy to see what’s running, and allows me to drop files (which could be opened with several different applications) onto the icon of the application I specifically want it to open with.

After lots of moving it around from the bottom and side to side, I’ve settled on having it along the right hand side of my screen. Why? First it kind of mimics the old Mac OS in that the Finder is at the top and the trash is in the lower right hand corner (where it’s supposed to be). Also, my iMac’s display is my “primary” display (which has my Menu bar), and it’s my “right hand” display – I have my secondary 22″ display off to the left, and if I put my dock all the way to the left hand side of that screen, it really does seem “out in left field”. I definitely wanted my dock sharing the same screen as my menu bar.

A “geeky” side-perk of having the dock on the right is it reminds me (slightly) of OpenStep/NeXTSTEP a little

The side orientation also pleases me because it gets rid of the silly 3D “Leopard Dock” (which looks like it will be staying w/ Snow Leopard), and it seems to make better use of pixels on a wide-screen display.

So, there you have it, I’m one of those werido’s that puts my dock on the side of the screen. My question to you is: Where do *you* dock your Dock?

P.S. I also turned off the silly “Translucent Menu Bar as well” Major UI design fail, IMHO…