#macdock

Overcast.  That says a lot but it is a good day for creative ideas and perhaps even a good a day for building designs. Needing to design and build is a challenge to me at the moment. I have to have a continual state of learning because of where I am coming from (no need to explain here). I must reach my designed schedule and try to focus on the time frames allocated for each task. My trouble is that I must learn how to operate the apps before I can use them as I need. I just finished building the temporary front for my Collection site; however, the old material is still there, thus rendering what I published no good. I am sure that my web host, Macdock, will help me solve the problem. None the less, I must learn more just to correct the problem. The apps in my Creative Cloud need updating! Ah ha, a learning experience and I really need to get back on lynda.com to continue learning so that I can catch up with where I am suppose to be. The truth is that my learning curve is a monster but I must continue to fight it and overcome this horrid monkey on my back. I have my schedule all made and it is workable and flexible. It allows time to study and try to fill in the holes in my learning curve. Part of my learning involves creating rapid washes in watercolor. These designs are part of that focus.

This is a design done in gouache in about 8 to 10 min.s.  The pencil  is an addition which was added after the completion.

This was also done quickly but more like 5 min.s

The first of these three and the open space needs to be thought about  a lot more than I gave it at the time.

My recent obsession to automate all things lead me to figure out a way to automatically move my Dock based on available screen space.

Reasoning

When I am disconnected from my external monitors I want to have my Dock on the right. The goal is to optimize vertical space since it is severely reduced on the MacBook’s own screen.

Things change once I plug in one or two external monitors. And having the Dock be on the Right of the rightmost monitor no longer makes any sense. It can go back on the bottom of the screen. Usually I would do this manually after plugging in my monitors. But we don’t like anything manual so lets fix this with an applescript!

activate application "Finder" tell application "System Events" tell process "Finder" click menu item "Position on Bottom" of menu 1 of menu item "Dock" of menu 1 of menu bar item "Apple" of menu bar 1 end tell end tell

Running this script will move the Dock to the bottom. To move to the Right simply change the String “Position on Bottom” to “Position on Right” and vice versa to the Left.

So this script solves the problem of how to move the Dock programmatically so how do we do this automatically when we connect a new monitor?

After some intense Googling I found something called ControlPlane that sounded like it would do what I wanted. Unfortunately, I was not able to get it to work correctly. It’s a very powerful app that allows it to guess the context based on state of your system but for our needs we need something simpler.

Fortunately, after more searching I found DisplayWatcher to solve my problem.

To completely automate this follow the below steps:

Go to DisplayWatcher’s site to download the app. Then install it with these directions here

Export your Applescript to two different apps (example: Move Bottom.app and Move Right.app)

Run both apps. Your Mac should prompt to add the apps to your assistive permission list. Add it.

Go to the DisplayWatcher configuration panel and add the exported app to run when it’s on it’s native monitor

Plugin your external monitors and open the configuration panel again to add the move bottom app to run