Docking Station of Gnome

Docking Station of Gnome

Docky A full fledged dock application that makes opening common applications and managing windows easier and quicker. Docky is fully integrated into the GNOME Desktop and features, no nonsense approach to configuration and usage. Docky provides an intuitive application launcher, running application management, and various "docklets" including a CPU monitor, weather report and clock. It is similar to other docks such as AWN and cairo-dock. Applications can integrate with Docky to add extra items to their context menus or modify their icons to display more information.

Docky is derived from the GNOME Do "docky" interface. Docky is a theme for GNOME Do that behaves much like the Mac OS X dock. Unlike GNOME Do's traditional interface, Docky can be set to one of three modes for hiding:

None - Docky is always visible.

Autohide - Docky is normally hidden and appears when the mouse pointer reaches Docky's unseen edge at the lower/upper edge of the screen.

Intellihide - Docky hides if it overlaps any window in the active window group, but it can still be brought up with the mouse pointer. Standard Do functionality is still present within Docky and the Do hot-key will still produce the expected behaviour. Docky 2 is a separate application from GNOME Do.

Emmabantus in the earlier versions had an intuitive docking station at the bottom of the desktop and the applications were arranged according to the tasks they performed. However, there was poor standardisation of the menus and items and it started fragmenting over time with poor maintenance. The Cairo Dock seems to be the base and it can be downloaded using Synaptic Package Manager.

With Debian Gnome the panels are bigger and located on the right side, instead on the bottom in Emmabantus and appear to clutter the desktop and one cannot launch an application from these panels.

However, Gnome has its own way of addressing this issue with a few essential items, on the bottom of the desktop. One can add or delete any of the applications that are stationed below on the desktop without any panel restriction.

If the number of the items are few on the desktop each item of  the panel member appears big and as and when the number of applications are added each item becomes smaller and smaller to fit the horizontal breath of the monitor. I have added 30 odd items and that gives a pleasing or eye catching appearance.

All the other items are arranged with big icons, 32 for each page and I have seven pages in total which means over 220 items. Most of them are little games and I can drag and drop essential item to page one or  non essential game items to page seven. The Gnome work on this is much more visually appealing than MacOS and I love it.