Dock

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What Does Dock Mean?

Dock is an iconic graphical user interface (GUI) feature of the Mac OS X operating system. Dock provides a quick method for the user to launch and alternate software applications.

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Dock is similar to ObjectDock and RocketDock on Windows operating systems.

Techopedia Explains Dock

Dock is a feature of NEXTSTEP and OpenStep, which were Mac OS X predecessors. A separate iPhone operating system version is used with the iPhone and iPad.

Dock features include:

  • Capable of holding multiple items
  • Located at the bottom of a display screen
  • May be manually relocated to other screen areas, such as left, right or top
  • Dynamically resizes programs to fit display screens

Dock was patented in October 2008.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert

Margaret is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.