In macOS, however, the Dock is used as a repository for any program or file in the operating system. In macOS, running applications have been variously identified by a small black triangle (Mac OS X 10.0-10.4) a blue-tinted luminous dot (Mac OS X 10.5-10.7), a horizontal light bar (OS X 10.8 and 10.9), and a simple black or white dot (OS X 10.10-present). If the program is running, there isn't an ellipsis on the icon.

The Dock indicates if a program is not running by showing an ellipsis below its icon. The icon for the Workspace Manager and the Recycler are always visible. In NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP, the Dock is an application launcher that holds icons for frequently used programs. Part of the macOS Core Services, Dock.app is located at /System/Library/CoreServices/. Any application can be dragged and dropped onto the Dock to add it to the dock, and any application can be dragged from the dock to remove it, except for Finder and Trash, which are permanent fixtures as the leftmost and rightmost items (or highest and lowest items if the Dock is vertically oriented), respectively. iOS has its own version of the Dock for the iPhone and iPod Touch, as does iPadOS for the iPad.Īpple applied for a US patent for the design of the Dock in 1999 and was granted the patent in October 2008, nearly a decade later. The earliest known implementations of a dock are found in operating systems such as RISC OS and NeXTSTEP. The Dock is also a prominent feature of macOS's predecessor NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP operating systems.

It is used to launch applications and to switch between running applications.

The Dock is a prominent feature of the graphical user interface of macOS. Graphical user interface feature by Apple

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