Adding Items To The Dock

post from Mac Geekery - Get your geek on. on 29 January 2007 09:27:12 PM. © Mac Geekery - Get your geek on.

As an admin, sometimes you want to tweak the dock a bit when you can't sit at the Mac or VNC in to it. Luckily, the Dock is governed by a plist that's a bit cryptic, but is otherwise fairly easy to tweak. I used this quite a bit, back in the day, but when a friend asked me for it recently, I had to dig around quite a bit to find the darn thing.

The Basics

The com.apple.dock.plist file is binary, but responds to defaults as you would expect. At first, the _CFURLAliasData field looks a bit intimidating, but luckily we don't really have to worry about it. In persistent-apps, a typical Docked item looks about like this:

{
GUID = 1883183727;
"tile-data" = {
"file-data" = {
"_CFURLAliasData" = <00000000 00b40003 00010000 c107bb6f 0000482b 00000000 0000013d 00000a22 0000bfee 53de0000 00000920 fffe0000 00000000 0000ffff ffff0001 00080000 013d0000 013c000e 001a000c 00540065 0072006d 0069006e 0061006c 002e0061 00700070 000f001a 000c004d 00610063 0069006e 0074006f 00730068 00200048 00440012 00234170 706c6963 6174696f 6e732f55 74696c69 74696573 2f546572 6d696e61 6c2e6170 70000013 00012f00 ffff0000 >;

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