Posts Tagged ‘Dock’

Earlier we discussed how to add a shortcut to a website to your Dock, but what if I don’t like the springy @ symbol that it makes for an icon?  What if I have more than one shortcut and want to be able to tell them apart easily?  As usual with your Mac, the answer is a quick and simple solution.  In this case, we’re going to create a web shortcut and then change it’s icon.

Let’s create a new shortcut to a webpage but this time instead of dragging it to the Dock, let’s drag it to the Desktop.  Its going to create a shortcut called a webloc, feel free to change the name of this file by clicking on the text, but know that word webloc is important and will reappear on its own.  Now, right click on that icon (or COMMAND+CLICK) and choose Get Info from the menu that pops up.  Leave that window sitting there and let’s work on getting an icon for a moment.

We’ve talked about Candybar before as a great tool for changing your application or system icons, but you can also change individual icons manually.

There are a lot of places you can find icon sets for use with OSX.  For my purposes, I’m using a set of icons called ‘iPhone-Style Icons’, designed by Josh Ladella, which I downloaded for free from his page on DeviantArt.  A couple of the included icons are for Facebook.  Once you download the set, open it in Finder and find the folder titled ICNS to see all the icons.  Click on the one you want and use COMMAND+C to copy it. 

Now, click back on the Get Info window and click directly on that tiny icon in the top left corner to select it, use COMMAND+V to paste the icon there and the icon will change to match the one we copied earlier.

Now, drag the shortcut on the Desktop down to the Dock on the right side of the dashed line, near the trash can.  As you place it down there, you should notice the other icons move aside to make room.

Now you have a fancy Facebook shortcut on your Dock and the only thing left to do is cleanup the webloc that is still on the desktop.  Since this is the actual thing that’s directing us to the website, we want to make sure it doesn’t get deleted, so we just want to put is somewhere safe.  I recommend opening a Finder window and moving it to the Applications folder for safe keeping.

Websites are becoming more and more like applications everyday.  Whether its Facebook, eBay, Bananas4Apples or I Can Has Cheezburger, there are sites that we all check numerous times throughout the day and it might be convenient to have a short cut for those sites right on the dock with your other frequently used applications.  Fortunately, Leopard makes this possible.

First, find the site you want to make a short cut for.  I check Facebook several (hundred) times a day, so I’m going to work with that.  First go to the site, then look for the site’s favicon.  A favicon is the tiny icon all the way on the left side of the web address for the site we’re visiting; for Apple, it’s a little grey apple, for Facebook it’s a white F in a blue square.  If the website you’re looking at doesn’t have one, you’ll see a little globe there. 

What ever the icon is, click and drag it to the dock on the right side of the dashed line, near the trash can.  As you place it down there, you should notice the other icons move aside to make room, be careful not to drop your new shortcut on top of another as it might get added to one of your stacks and will be difficult to find later.

Once we’ve got it added, you’ll see a little springy @ symbol indicating that there’s a web shortcut there. 

Click on the short cut and your website will launch.