ObjectDock

ObjectDock is an animated launcher bar that sits on any edge of your screen, magnifies icons as the mouse passes over them, and lets you hide the taskbar entirely if you prefer that look. It comes in two shapes. The QuickLaunch dock is the translucent, bouncing row of large icons borrowed from a certain other desktop, and the tabbed dock is a quieter drawer with named tabs that holds files and links out of the way until you need them.

If you would rather type than click, a keyboard-driven launcher answers the same problem differently, but among docks proper this one sits alongside RocketDock and Nexus as the names still in the conversation. ObjectDock is the most polished of the three to look at, and also the one that has shed the most features on its way to running properly on a modern desktop. That trade is the whole story of the application.

Zoom, bubble, swing and the rest of the animations

Hover over the QuickLaunch dock and the icons under the cursor swell to as much as 192 pixels, with a choice of zoom, bubble, swing or glow behaviour and a slider for how far the effect spreads to neighbours. Icon size and transparency, the font and colours, and the background skin are all adjustable per dock, and dragging a shortcut from the desktop onto the bar adds it with a high-resolution icon pulled automatically, which is a small pleasure when most launchers give you a blurry 32-pixel thumbnail.

Tabbed docks as a desk drawer

The tabbed dock is the more useful of the two and the less flashy. Each tab holds its own set of shortcuts, documents, folders or web links, the tabs can be renamed, resized or colour coded with no text at all, and the whole thing collapses to a thin strip on the screen edge.

Put the current project’s files in one tab and the launchers you use daily in another and File Explorer stops being the first thing you open. RocketDock never had anything like this, which is the clearest reason to pick ObjectDock over it.

Ghost mode and staying out of the way

Several docks can run at once, each pinned to its own monitor, and every dock can be always on top, always underneath everything else, or set to auto-hide until the mouse touches the edge. Ghost mode makes a dock fade to near invisibility until you approach it, which is the setting to use when you want a distraction-free desktop but still want the launcher one flick away. There is one hole here that annoys owners of two or more screens.

Auto-hide does not work on a QuickLaunch dock in a multi-monitor setup, only on tabbed docks. The workaround regulars pass around is to open the settings folder from Troubleshooting Options and change Autohide to 1 in CurrentTheme.ini by hand.

What the current version left behind

This is where long-time users get upset, and fairly. Docklets, the little weather, CPU and clock widgets that used to live on the dock, are gone, and the nearest substitute is a pack that restores desktop widgets rather than anything on the bar. The Stacks add-on that fanned out folder contents is gone too. The system tray dock is gone too, so tray icons stay on the taskbar you were trying to hide. Running programs show as a single icon each, with no count and no thumbnail preview, so switching between three open copies of the browser means clicking the icon three times.

Some shortcuts also refuse to behave. Programs installed as packaged apps, and games launched through certain publisher launchers, either fail to add or lose their custom icons on restart, and dragging straight from the start menu creates a broken link.

Drag the shortcut to the desktop first and then onto the dock and it works.

Conclusion

ObjectDock is for the person who wants a large-icon launcher and a tidy drawer for the current project, and who cares more about how the desktop looks than about widgets on the bar. Someone who has tuned a dock for years with weather docklets and fanned-out Stacks will find the current release a step backwards and should test it before committing.

Taken on its own terms, as a good-looking launcher with the tabbed drawer as its real strength, it does the job and does it smoothly. Just do not expect it to be the information display it once was.