Reviews @ Applelust.com

DragThing for OS X: Stocking Stuffer Deluxe

Reviewer: Pierre Igot

Date: May 19, 2001

Price: $25 for single user (unlimited user site and world licenses also available)

Requirements:
Mac OS 8.6 or Mac OS 9 with CarbonLib 1.1.1 (Classic)
Mac OS X (Carbon)

Product Web Site: http://www.dragthing.com

Rating: Five out of Five bites of the Apple

It’s not quite Christmas season yet, but those who have decided to take the jump and start using Mac OS X right away won’t be able to wait until the gift-giving time of the year to complement their brand new OS. The forthcoming Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Office for Mac OS X will represent big-league Mac OS X-mas purchases — and, unfortunately, will be priced accordingly. And they won’t be available for a while. But there’s nothing that says that you cannot indulge in a little bit of shopping right away — especially when it could very well provide you with a significant increase in productivity for a very reasonable fee.

In this “stocking stuffer” league of smaller Mac OS X programs, DragThing 4.0 currently stands out. The utility bears a “4.0” label, because it first was — and still is as well — a “classic” Mac OS application. In this review, we are going to focus on the OS X aspect of things, because it’s the direction we want to give to our web site, but many of the features mentioned here also apply to the utility running on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS 8.6. (In order to run on a Mac running a pre-Mac OS X system, version 4.0 of DragThing requires Mac OS 9 or Mac OS 8.6 with CarbonLib version 1.1.1 or higher.)

First Out of the Gate

One of the first things that I want to say about this program is that, like BBEdit and other traditional Mac applications which were ported to Mac OS X soon after the initial release of the new system, this early availability is testimony, not only to the commitment and enthusiasm of its developer, James Thompson, but also to how well-designed and compliant with Mac OS standards the application is. Indeed, while I’m no expert in application development, I cannot help but think that those applications that are first out of the gate are probably those that were the most compliant with Apple’s traditional guidelines and required the least amount of work in order to be able to run natively in the OS X environment.

On top of that, the fact that DragThing is actually an interface utility — i.e. the type of program most often suspected of interfering with the operating system’s normal operations by altering its basic functionality — makes James Thompson’s achievement all the more remarkable.

Yes, DragThing 4.0 runs natively under Mac OS X. Yes, it can provide an “Application switcher” type of palette that is available system-wide. Yes, it can handle DragThing-specific keyboard shortcuts available from within any application. And yet — do I need to say this again? — it runs natively under Mac OS X, it’s fully compatible with the new interface, it never crashes, it never causes any other application to crash, it doesn’t slow down your working environment one bit. In other words, it has all the underlying strengths of a well-designed native OS X application — and all the interface coolness we, demanding Mac users, have come to expect from cool Mac applications.

I must say that it’s a combination that’s hard to beat. Add to that that it is almost infinitely customizable, that the very few things that don’t quite work as expected yet will only make it even cooler once Apple gets its developing act fully together and provides its developers with all the necessary OS X APIs — and you have an obvious winner that can only get even better.

But that’s enough introductory words. For those who have never used DragThing before, what is all this fuss about? Let’s review the utility’s main features.

A Bonanza of Docks

Default Dock Platinum Style The basic metaphor in DragThing is the “dock.” In DragThing, a dock is essentially a palette-type of window (with a small title bar that can be hidden). Within each dock, you can have one or several “layers.” When you have only one layer, the dock can act as a simple button palette. When you have several layers, you can switch from layer to layer using tabs similar to those found in traditional Platinum-style windows such as the “Appearance” control panel in Mac OS 9 — which enables you to pack a lot of functionality into a limited space.

On each layer, you can have all kinds of “items” which basically act as buttons or icons, depending on whether you elect to have them respond to one or two clicks (a dock-wide setting). When you create a new dock, DragThing gets you started with a reasonably simple 1-layer, vertical dock of 6 items of approximately 80 by 60 pixels each. But you can immediately add more layers, adjust the size of the items, the orientation of the palette, the visibility of the title bar, the color scheme, and a great variety other settings or behaviours.

By doing that, you can build a dock that more or less behaves like a Launcher-on-steroids, providing you with instant access to your most often used applications, folders, documents, scripts, accessories, URLs, etc.

You can also create a dock that actually behaves like a Microsoft Office type of “toolbar” with a series of buttons triggering a series of AppleScript scripts.

And, for each of those docks, you can have a wide variety of visual designs, thanks to a simple, yet very powerful interface that lets you choose between various color schemes (or create your own) and various “styles” or types of 3D effects (traditional button, bevel, emboss, etc.) for each layer of your dock. With so much flexibility, designing an Aqua inspired type of palette or a more traditional Platinum type of toolbar is really just a few mouse clicks away.

Start Dragging

Once you have the type of design you want (you can always continue to adjust it later on), you can start dragging items to it which will turn into buttons with icons, text or both. You can ask DragThing to sort the items by name, creator, type or label (a clear indication that the Labels functionality of Mac OS 9 is still there, but waiting to be properly reactivated by Apple in a forthcoming upgrade of Mac OS X).

Variety of Styles If you create an item based on a folder, control-clicking on the item or clicking down and holding the mouse button for a short while will make a hierarchical pop-up menu appear much in the same way as it does when you click on a folder in Apple’s Dock. If it’s anything else than a folder, the contextual menu gives you access to a number of item-specific options, including Finder commands such as “Move to Trash,” “Get Info,” etc.

You can also define a keyboard shortcut for any item in any dock. You can thus have a system-wide keyboard shortcut that switches to a given application, executes a given AppleScript script or opens a given folder in the Finder. When you think about it, this gives you instant access to a wide variety of possibilities. For a “thing” that has to do with “dragging,” DragThing sure has lots of keyboard potential as well! (DragThing also has its own series of shortcuts for various commands, of course, but you can customize those as well.)

You can decide to make the dock visible at all times or only for certain applications. You can ask DragThing to « minimize » the dock automatically after use, which turns it into a simple button (in the same style as the dock) that expands back into the full-blown dock whenever you click on it or drag something onto it. You can ask DragThing to “float” the dock, which makes it visible at all times, no matter which application you are in.

And these are just some of the features and options provided by DragThing. In fact, there are too many to be able to list them all here. But the key thing is that they are all useful, and it’s clearly a testimony to the fact that DragThing is a very mature product, and that James Thompson is very responsive to the needs of DragThing users.

The Process Dock

Where DragThing goes from extremely useful and absolutely cool to definitely indispensable is in the “Process Dock.” Regardless of what you might think of the Dock provided by Apple in Mac OS X, it is clear that it doesn’t meet the needs of all users out there. This might improve with time — but why wait? Right now, with DragThing, you can have a “Process Dock” that gives you back most of the functionality that was available in Mac OS 9 through the Application Switcher or through third-party utilities such as WestCode Software’s OneClick and its “Task Bar.”

This Process Dock looks like any other DragThing dock, but its behaves differently. Instead of being a user-created dock to which the user can add items, it actually lists all currently open applications or “processes.” Those who know a little bit about Mac OS X’s UNIX underpinnings know that there are actually several fairly arcane things going on when OS X is running that can be described as “processes.” Well, DragThing doesn’t show those, of course (although it does include an option to show “background-only” process as well). But it does show every running application launched by the user, just like the Application Switcher used to do in OS 9. It is, therefore, a dynamic kind of dock, just like the Mac OS X Dock is — except that it doesn’t attempt to serve as a launcher as well, and is thus a more “focused” tool than the Dock is.

There are a number of useful things that the Dock does and that DragThing’s Process Dock doesn’t do. It doesn’t support “docklings.” It doesn’t show application icons bouncing up and down while the applications are launching, which can be a useful form of visual feedback. And, when you control-click on an application button in the Process Dock, it doesn’t provide you with a menu of all of that application’s currently open windows. Instead, it provides you with a contextual menu similar to the one available in other DragThing docks, with commands such as “Get Info” or “Move to Trash” — but also a Process Dock-specific option to “Quit Process.”

Those things made me want to keep the Mac OS X Dock as well just the same. Anyway, since there’s no way to turn off the Dock in OS X, you are stuck with it. But, if, like me, you are using DragThing but still want to use some of the Dock’s functionality from time to time, the best option is to simply have Mac OS X’s Dock hide automatically and only show when you drag your cursor towards the bottom of the screen. You can then use the Process Dock to switch between applications and drag a document to one of the applications listed, and only use the Dock for more specific features not available in the Process Dock. You thus get the best of both worlds, in a way. And, when you think about it, it is really what the best utility applications do.

Still In Hiding

With so many things that you can do, is there anything that you can’t do in DragThing?

Well, there is one thing that is still missing, but I am told that it should be added soon, depending on Apple’s willingness to provide the necessary tools to implement it. DragThing provides you with the ability to use “hot keys” (keyboard shortcuts) to switch between applications. But the ability to use hot keys to hide applications is still greyed out, as shown in the capture below.

Now, Apple does provide us with the cmd-H keyboard shortcut, which hides the current application. But, for some reason, they are still not providing us with a shortcut for the “Hide Others” command — even though it seems obvious to many people, including yours truly, that this is very much a needed feature pretty much since Mac OS 8 came out.

Well, James Thompson tells me that DragThing will, sooner or later, provide us with this functionality as well, even though it’s still greyed out in the current version. The problem is that Apple still hasn’t provided the API for this. Either they will or James Thompson says he will reverse-engineer the feature.

The other thing is that, sometimes, but sometimes only, when selecting the “Hide Others” command from within an application, the command hides the DragThing docks as well, even though you designed them as “floating” docks, i.e. docks that are supposed to remain visible at all times.

This is actually, once again, a problem with the current version of Mac OS X, that James Thompson hopes Apple will fix some time soon. Right now, Mac OS X sometimes behaves inconsistently in the way it manages windows, and that explains the somewhat unpredictable behaviour.

Conclusion

But those are really very minor quibbles, and, as indicated, they have mostly to do with the “unfinished” nature of Mac OS X in its current incarnation.

I hope that this review has shown, at least partly, how DragThing is exactly the type of product that used to make the Mac OS so cool: the kind of product that opens your eyes to a whole set of features that you didn’t know you needed so badly. Even better: it’s the kind of product which, once your eyes have been opened and you start asking for more, turns out to have anticipated every angle of your new-found lust, thanks to several years of improvements and fine-tuning.

And the fact that this type of product exists for Mac OS X, only a few weeks after the product was officially launched, demonstrates great achievement both on the part of the Mac OS X development team and on the part of the third-party developer who provides us with such a great piece of software.

The only mystery to me is why it’s taken me so long to discover this product myself. Some of it has to do with the fact that there used to be a fair amount of competition for this type of utility under Mac OS 9, and I was just accustomed to using other products, such as OneClick. But some of it might also have to do with the somewhat misleading and self-deprecating quality of the very name of the software. As this review has shown, I hope, DragThing is much, much more than just a “thing” that has to do with “dragging.” It’s a full-fledged program that provides you with very advanced functionality in many areas of the user interface and is an indispensable complement to Mac OS X for the power user.

If “five stars” means a perfect product, then DragThing gets 4 and 7/8, because of the few features mentioned above that are still missing, even though it’s not for lack of willingness on the developer’s part. But if “five stars” means a product that does all it claims to do, as well as it claims to do it, then DragThing deserves ten.