Docktopus: Little Widgets in Your Dock

The Dock is one of the most known parts of OS X. Every non-Mac user I know that sees OS X for the first time has always pointed the mouse right at the dock and played with the magnification. For us, the dock is nothing spectacular anymore. But it is still a great UI element as it ever was, and some applications make more use of it than others. The applications that make clever use of the dock icon to enable all sorts of functionality or display various information are using the dock the way it was meant to be used.

Unfortunately, not all applications have an interactive dock icon, being content with just an icon that opens up a contextual menu that more often than not only has the default entries in it.

Docktopus is a program that wants to change all that.

What does it do?
Docktopus will let you place 'badges' to dock icons. A badge is the equivalent of a widget, in that it can do pretty much anything that you want it to do if you have the necessary knowledge. Unlike widgets which can be moved about in the Dashboard, badges are especially designed to be placed on the dock icons.

Each icon is split into four areas, for each corner, and in each one a different badge can be placed. The idea is great, and fits right in, adding more control or features within the same space.

So what can these badges do?

Docktopus comes with a number of badges, but anyone can make their own with the SDK that is provided on the site for free. Though it is incredibly small, weighing in at only 96K, it has all the documentation you need, including examples. That having been said, let's see what these badges are all about...

CPU Meter
This badge will add a CPU meter to an application. It looks like a thermometer that changes color from blue to red, depending on how much processing power the application is using. You have the choice of only displaying values that are above a certain percentage.

Drive Space
Simple enough, this badge will show a pie-chart representing the proportion of used and free space on a drive. Each of the two colors used for free and used space respectively are up to your choosing.

Folder Count
This badge will show the number of items inside the folder it is placed on. I said "folder" in the general sense, because it can also be placed on drives and the Trash.

iCal Event Peek
When the mouse is hovered over for a customizable period, this badge will display the event of the day, from any iCal calendar of your choosing.

Item Size
Yes, you guessed it, this badge will show how much disk space the item it is on occupies, and can be placed on anything. Because constantly calculating sizes is resource intensive, the badge can be edited and you can tell it how often, and how many resources it should hoard when updating.

iTunes Control
This little badge places a small play/pause button on any icon you like. By holding different keys down when pressing this button you can issue next track and previous track commands. Also by hovering over it you can see a floater displaying the track name, artist and album. Optionally you may choose to display album art, if present, in the floater.

Launch Menu
This is one of the better badges in the lot. If you click on this badge you can see a contextual menu with items of your choosing. You can use it to browse the contents of your computer or launch files. The nice touch is that if you place this on an application and use the contextual menu to choose a file, it will be opened, if possible, in that application, overriding the normal way of opening the file in the application that created it. This and the fact that holding down the Command key while selecting anything will cause it to be revealed in the Finder makes this badge actually useful.

Mail Peek
This badge will display the number of unread mails in the account of your choosing, and hovering over it will bring up a floater that will let you see some brief information about your most recent five received mails, along with the option to quickly mark them as junk.

Memory
Predictably enough, this badge will display the memory usage of the application it is placed upon.

Not lightning speed
For the record, I work from a dual G5 with plenty of RAM, and I only have slowdown issues with badly written programs. Now that we got that out of the way, I have to say... This thing is SLOW. I don't mean that it bogs down the computer or anything, or that it hoards resources, but rather that it is slow and unresponsive like playing online on a 14.4K modem. The developers are clearly aware of this judging by the FAQ section of the documentation. They point a finger at the refresh rate of the monitor but I played around with that and saw no change in speed whatsoever.

The idea of the badges is great, and I would welcome them gladly, but they really are horrible in the way they constantly lag behind the magnification of the dock, even jumping about the screen and resizing sometimes. The developer suggests turning off the magnification in the dock and obviously that solves the problem.

The Good
This little program has the potential to bring about the revolution of the dock by force. Already many programs display all sorts of useful information in the dock icon; this could be just the thing to get those that don't to do.

The Bad
Unfortunately, the promise of great things is snuffed out in its early infancy by the huge latency the badges have if you have magnification turned on. Also, while the default badges are OK to get an idea of what the application can do, they are not that many, and there are no others on the site.

The Truth
If you don't use dock magnification and like those applications that give feedback in the dock icon, then this will be right up your alley. If you like the magnification and can put up with the latency, then be sure to give this a try.

Here are some screenshots, click to enlarge: