We’re bound to see some innovative new Apple Watch charging docks at this week’s Consumer Electronics Show, and kicking things off is accessory maker Actionproof’s cute “Bozon” Apple Watch charging dock.
Am I the only one who thinks this looks like a little Pixar cartoon alien?
Let’s face it: the dock gets crowded. Even on the iPad, the short row of icons Apple gives us at the bottom of our iOS homepage is always too little.
You can fill your dock with folders if you want to cram more apps there… or you can download this neat little jailbreak tweak, which doubles the amount of icons you can put in your dock.
Is Apple preparing to deliver a refreshed iPhone 5c? A product image on its own online store shows what could be a new iPhone 6c sitting atop the new Lightning iPhone dock. The device carries the same plastic back we’re already familiar with, as well as a Touch ID sensor.
For a certain subset of Apple fans, the only thing more exciting than Cupertino unleashing a new device upon the world is the box they choose to unleash it in. Apple is famous for its sexy, minimalist packaging design, and when the Apple Watch hits the market in 2015, we are expecting it to come in a box worthy of its luxury watch status.
Of course, what that box will actually look like is anyone’s guess. But Evelio Mattos of Design Packaging has released a stunning Apple Watch concept that isn’t just sexy, but has a killer hidden feature: the box doubles as an iPhone dock!
The more I use my MacBook Pro for work and play, the more I need to plug stuff into it. It’s got only two USB 3 ports along with its two Thunderbolt ports and HDMI out. Other docks, like the Kanex dock we reviewed a while back, use up one of the two USB ports, and they don’t provide video out capabilities.
With Apple’s Thunderbolt protocol, though, you can get stuff like video and audio out that requires a lot of bandwidth. The Elgato Thunderbolt Dock is just what you need if you aren’t using either of your MacBook Pro’s Thunderbolt ports, as it gives you three more USB 3 ports, an HDMI out to connect your favorite high-def monitor, a microphone and headphone port, and a gigabit Ethernet port as well.
It’s kind of everything you need in one sleek package.
Here’s what I use on a fairly daily basis: external hard drive, iPhone, iPad(s), gaming mouse, flash drive full of media and DSLR camera.
Man or woman, I’m willing to bet you’ve got a similar load of peripherals that you use with your MacBook Pro or Air. With the MacBook’s two USB 3.0 ports, there’s never enough to go around when I want to plug in more than, say, two devices at once. Sure there’s two Thunderbolt ports, too, but I’m just not that fancy.
So, here’s a weird one–have you ever wanted to watch a window animate itself really slowly as you minimize it to the Dock? No?
Well, let’s assume you did for some reason. How would you go about it?
In Mavericks, anyway, it’s a trivial thing, and it produces a fun effect: your window will minimize to the Dock super slowly, even slower than in the animated image above.
A new Kickstarter project is aiming to build minimal charging docks designed to hold Apple’s 8-pin Lightning Cable. The underside of each “MikroDok” features a Mikro-suction adhesive backing, which allows the doc to be securely positioned and also moved multiple times.
I love everything about my iPad Mini’s Smart Case but for one thing: I can’t use it with the BlueLounge MiniDock, a super handy little charging dock.
The iPort Charge Case and Stand won’t help there, but it will at least let me charge the iPad while it’s inside a case. It’ll even work in landscape orientation.
While no one puts baby in the corner, you can ignore that time-honored advice and actually put the Dock in the corner on the screen of your Mac.
While the traditional tools for moving the Dock around will let you move it to the right, left, or bottom of the screen, this little bit of Terminal magic will have the dock pinned to the far corners of your Mac’s screen, either the right bottom, the top left, or any other corner you can imagine.
As you guys probably know, I’m a sucker for wood on my iGadgets. My MacBook keyboard is covered in wood. My iPhone has wood paneling. Even my iPad is swatched from power button to Lightning port in a wooden smart cover and case.
Given the borderline hysteria I feel for love, it should come as no surprise that I want some wood in my iPhone dock… and Grove is about to make it happen for me.
Apple hasn’t sold its own dock for the iPhone since introducing the Lightning connector on the iPhone 5, but it looks like the company has had a change of heart, and will start selling an iPhone 5s dock for $29 starting on September 20th at Apple retail stores.
Along with being able to charge your iPhone 5 or iPhone 5s, the new dock also has some “special audio porting” to make speakerphone calls clear while placed in the dock. An iPhone 5c dock will also be available for the same price.
Landing Zone byLanding Zone Category: MacBook Docks Works With:MacBook Air 13-inch Price: $200
My 13-inch MacBook Air is a fantastic portable computer – fast, light, crazy battery life and with a “bigger” screen than my old 13-inch aluminum MacBook[1]. But as a desktop computer it sucks: only two USB ports, no Ethernet, and a tiny amount of storage.
Which is exactly why the Landing Zone exists. It’s a dock that stays on your desk, hooked up to all your peripherals, and which grabs onto your MacBook like a facehugger grabs onto, uh, a face.
I’ve been using one for a while now, and it’s almost entirely excellent.
An iPhone dock is a pleasant thing to have on one’s desk. It keeps things nice and tidy, while making it easy to holster your iPhone and juice it up without mucking around with wires.
Saidoka by BlueLounge Category: iPhone Dock Works With: iPhone 4, 4S, 5 Price: $29.99-$49.99
There is one way in which tethering your iPhone via cable directly to your computer is superior, though. It’s easier to actually use your iPhone that way instead of gorilla-arming it.
That’s the brilliance of the Saidoka: it’s an iPhone dock that lets you easily tap our text messages, answer calls, and even play games, all while your iPhone is charging and syncing.
I routinely hide the Dock on my Macbook Air, since it takes up a significant portion of my screen. While I use Alfred most of the time to launch apps and such, I still like to use the Dock; call it a hold over from the last ten years or so.
Sometimes, though, when I move the mouse cursor over to the side of the screen I keep the Dock on (the left, if you’re curious), it pops up even when I don’t want it to.
Then I found this Terminal command which lets me set the time delay between when my cursor hits the edge of my screen and when the Dock actually appears. Now I have the delay period set to a larger number, making it much slower to respond and unhide.
Imagine cramming an entire iPhone stand, not just into your pocket, but into a credit card slot in your wallet.
That’s what the Pocket Tripod 360º does. It’s an ingenious little design: a small plastic card that unfolds into a sturdy dock that can keep your iPhone 5 propped up at literally 360 degree angles.
It used to be so easy to remove items from the sidebar of OS X Finder windows. You’d simply click, drag, and poof! The offending item would disappear like a well-heeled Dock icon in search of greater opportunity in the world.
Today, however (and for quite some time, really) you can’t just click and drag the sidebar items away without giving it a little more thought. That’s where this handy keyboard shortcut comes in.
Sure, you could use the right-click (Control-click or two-finger click on a trackpad) to bring up a contextual menu, but where’s the fun in that?
The Dock is one of those things that we all use on our Macs, but may not really do much more than swap out applications and use whatever Stacks were put there when we got the darn Mac.
However, if you really want to get the most out of your Mac, you might as well learn how to do a bit more with the Dock, and master your use of this oft-overlooked bit of user software. Here are four great ways to do just that.
After I wrote a tip on removing icons from the new Mountain Lion Dock a while back, I got a few questions from readers who weren’t quite able to make it work.
Cult of Mac reader, Diane, emailed and said, “well, it sounds good…..But none of your suggestions work on my computer. when I let go, it still zooms back. when I trash it, it still zooms back. when I right click there is no option to remove it from the dock.”
Without knowing the specifics,of course, I cant diagnose the problem perfectly. I do think, however, that I might have an answer to this.
If you’re using Stacks in the Dock, either the built-in ones for Documents and such, or your own, like the Recent Items Stack, you might want to customize the way the Stack looks and behaves.
In Mac OS X Mountain Lion, at least, and very likely earlier versions of OS X, you can have your Stacks appear as a grid, a list, or a fan. You can also have OS X choose the best view for you, depending on how many items are in the Stack.
Here’s the quick way to change the view of any Stack in your OS X Dock.
The old rainbow Apple menu had a function that let you find recent documents, along with the ability to place folders in it for quick and easy access. This was replaced in Mac OS X with stacks, a visual way to do a similar thing, but from the Dock. You can drag a folder into the right hand side of the Dock and have it open as a Stack, of course, but did you know you could get a list of Recent Apps, Documents, or Servers, as well as Favorite Volumes or Items as a Stack, as well?
You can, with a little Terminal magic. Here’s how.
One word cropped up over and over at the Consumer Electronics Show this year, and it wasn’t “speakerdock” (yes, that may be two words; but I’m merging them here because that’s what I’m doing). In fact, the word was “Bluetooth” — a word discordant with the very idea of a dock-equipped speaker.
And yet, amid the tsunami of Bluetooth-equipped speakers at CES, there were holdouts — adherers to the Old Way of doing things, of physically connecting a device to its speaker.
One such holdout is the Aud 5, iLuv’s first speaker dock to harbor a Lightning connector.
For the past six year that I’ve owned an iPhone, not once have I thought about buying a dock. What’s the point? You’ve got your cable right there anyway, and unless it adds some great functionality to the iPhone, I’ve never seen much point in them. But the Projectone from Karas Kustoms has changed my opinion on the usefulness of iPhone docks.
Projectone by Karas Kustoms Category: iPhone Dock Works With: iPhone 5 Price: $45
The Projectone is a machined aluminum dock for your iPhone 5 that passively amplifies sound like a megaphone. Its simplistic style and industrial stylings make it one of the best-looking iPhone docks we’ve seen in a while, but is it actually worth its $45 price tag?