On 1 May 1995, young James Thomson released the first version of DragThing, “the original dock designed to tidy up your Macintosh desktop.” On 1 May 2010, a still young James Thomson celebrated his product’s 15th birthday the way any good indie software developer would: with a free update.
It’s been over six years since we last charged for an update, and we’ve released over twenty free updates since then, so this should really be a paid one. But since it’s a relatively minor release, this is still free for people who bought any earlier version of DragThing 5.
My favorite DragThing feature
… is the ability to assign keystrokes to my favorite apps. I launch TextEdit with F1, Mail with F2, Fetch with F3, TextMate with F6, Photoshop with F7, Safari with F8, Illustrator with F10. The best part is that even when I’m working in a half-dozen or more apps at once, I can easily switch between them with a keypress—for instance, after copying a selection in Illustrator, I can hit F7 and paste it into Photoshop.
There are certainly other ways of doing these things (including other ways of assigning keystrokes to applications), but DragThing makes it easy.
Trash Can love
DragThing also lets you stick documents, folders, and applications in single or multiple, highly configurable docks, and can store frequently used text and photo clippings for pasting into other applications with a click. Plus you can assign sounds to actions (now you can hear when you empty the Trash can), stick the Trash can back on the desktop where it belongs, and play with all manner of dock styles and color schemes (caution! a little goes a long way).
You can take my copy of DragThing when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands.
Congratulations, James Thomson. The rest of you, download DragThing 5.9.6.
