DragThing for Mac lies within System Tools, more precisely System Optimization. The following version: 5.9 is the most frequently downloaded one by the program users. The actual developer of this software for Mac is James Thomson. You can launch DragThing on Mac OS X 10.7.4 or later.

Chances are you launch apps and open files dozens of times a day. And if you’re using the Dock, the Finder, or Spotlight to do so, chances are you could do so more efficiently.That’s why we think that every Mac user should have some kind of launcher—a utility that makes launching programs, opening files, and other everyday chores a lot easier. A launcher is one of the most useful utilities you can install on your Mac; for many of us, that’s one of the first things we do whenever we get a new machine.But choosing a launcher isn’t as simple as it sounds. Here’s how we’d walk you through that decision. Hands on the mouseIf your hand spends more time on the mouse than on the keyboard, you should look at a mouse-driven launcher, such as Mabasoft’s $19 ( ), Stunt Software’s $15 ( ), or TLA Systems’ $29 ( ).All three let you create customized docks, in which you can place applications, folders, files, and more. You can do the same with OS X’s own Dock.

But OS X’s Dock can only hold so much before it gets unwieldy. These third-party utilities can accommodate way more items.Application Wizard does so by placing four colored buttons in a small panel on the side of the screen.

Clicking on those buttons opens up four completely customizable menus that can hold as many items as you want. Overflow has a single dock, but you can create multiple categories within it; the number of categories and items within them is limited only by the size of your screen.

DragThing lets you create multiple docks and multiple sections (layers) within them; you could, for example, create separate docks (or layers) for remote servers you regularly access, and another one for local folders.Anything you can select in the Finder—applications, files, folders, and volumes—can reside in an Application Wizard menu or an Overflow dock. DragThing accommodates those items plus URLs and clippings (little bits of reusable text).

If you put a container—such as a folder or volume—into a DragThing or Overflow dock, you can then drag items onto it to copy or move them there. DragThing folders are also spring-loaded (drag an item onto one and its contents will appear).DragThing lets you create customized docks, with multiple layers and themes.DragThing is by far the most powerful of the mouse-based launchers, followed by Application Wizard and Overflow; they follow that same order when it comes to the time it takes to set them up. Configuring DragThing can be a chore: For any given dock, you’ve got nearly 50 different options. Application Wizard isn’t quite that bad, and Overflow is much, much simpler. Hands on the keyboardIf you prefer the keyboard to the mouse, you could use Spotlight to find and launch apps, files, folders, and more. But Spotlight is focused more on searching than launching.

More often than not, you’ll have to scan through its results to find the thing you want to open. It can be slow, and it’s not particularly configurable.So if you want a keyboard-based launcher, look beyond Spotlight. When you do, you’ll find two kinds of choices: lightweight and heavyweight.There are a bunch of lightweight options out there, including Google, and a relatively new one called.Unlike Spotlight, these utilities are designed from the ground up as launchers: They specifically focus on finding and opening files and applications.

(Some can also launch Web searches.) They’re easy to set up and use. And because they maintain their own indexes, they’re quick.

But they really are pretty lightweight. For example, if one of them finds a file, it might let you open it in the Finder but not launch it in an associated app.If you want more flexibility in what you find and what you can do with it, you need one of the heavyweight launchers: Many Tricks’ $20 ( ), Objective Development’s $35 ( ), or the free, open-source ( ).Those three ably handle the simple stuff—finding and opening files and applications—but they often do a better job of it than their lighter competitors. For example, they can learn what you want. If you type xl and then select Excel from the resulting list often enough, Excel will eventually start appearing at the top of your results list.These heavyweights can also do more with what they find. When Quicksilver finds a file, for instance, it can perform 21 separate actions on it, from opening it in a chosen app to copying or moving it; Butler and LaunchBar give you similar flexibility.

You can also use all three to initiate Web searches, perform quick calculations, insert text snippets, manage your clipboard history, and more.LaunchBar can index (and therefore launch) files, applications, and much, much more.All three are also almost infinitely configurable—too much so, for some users. (Butler’s configuration screen is particularly daunting; the vendor says that it will be revamped later this year.) You can assign hotkeys to almost anything, customize the look and feel, and much more. Fortunately, each of them works pretty well as is, so you don’t need to spend too much time wading through those configuration screens if you don’t want to. Macworld’s buying adviceIf your hands are on the mouse more than on the keyboard, Overflow is a good basic choice. If you need something more powerful and are willing to spend the time configuring it, DragThing is the best bet.If you're more keyboard-centric and want a simple way to open files and launch apps (and not much else), almost any of the lightweight options is worth a trial run; though it’s still in beta, Alfred looks particularly promising.If you want a keyboard launcher that will do more, I think the best choice right now is LaunchBar.

It’s well supported, with good documentation. It’s extremely flexible, yet its configuration screen won’t make you scream. Quicksilver’s interface and documentation aren’t great; for an app as powerful but quirky as this, they should both be better. Also, Quicksilver and some of its plugins have become unstable, particularly with Snow Leopard. Butler is incredibly powerful, perhaps the most customizable of the bunch; if its coming revamp solves the interface problem, it should be every bit as good as, if not better than, LaunchBar.One final note: The distinction between keyboard-based launchers and those that use the mouse isn’t really that binary: There’s no reason you can’t use both kinds. For example, I know some people who keep Launchbar around for launching apps and Web searches and DragThing for managing files. It’s entirely up to you and your workflow.Dan Miller is an executive editor at Macworld.

For many people—particularly those who’ve come to the Mac after first using an iOS device—there was and always has been Mac OS X. Before that darkness. In truth, Apple has left a long trail of OS revisions in its wake—from System 1.x to Mac OS 9.x. (Apple changed its OS naming scheme from System This to Mac OS That when it moved from System 7.5 to Mac OS 7.6.) In these earlier days of the Mac’s operating system you couldn’t fling a brick in any compass direction without hitting some utility that attempted to make that operating system better (or more attractive or, in far too many cases, goofier).For those who weren’t there, the pre-OS X Mac OS was quite a different beast. Oh sure, you still double-clicked this and dragged that, but things we take for granted just didn’t exist in those days.

What, you want your Mac to operate for an entire day without crashing? You say you’d like to share a printer with the other computers in your home? Take a class. Agk easy grabber 10195 drivers test.

Is 2400 baud broad enough for you, buddy? In short, powerful and cool though my Power Mac 6100 and, later, Power Computing Power Tower 180e, seemed at the time, the Mac OS was still on the clumsy side.Third-party developers made some interesting efforts to deal with that clumsiness. Under Mac OS 9 and earlier, those developers had greater opportunities to muck with the Finder and low-level functions on the Mac.

You could slap themes on your Mac sixteen ways to Sunday, use to place the ugliest fonts imaginable in the menu bar, and, oh, those. One of the areas that developers found particularly interesting was application launching. In those dockless days, launching an application was pretty tedious: Dig down into one folder or another, double-click the item you sought, and you were on your way.Like many people I used and its component, which placed hierarchical menus within the Apple menu. (Yes, this was a really big deal at the time). And while that was a better solution than rooting around in one folder or another seeking a favorite application, it still required a fair bit of mousing around and dealing with menus that could be quite clumsy.What's Up, Dock?It was around this time that dock utilities became popular. (makers of ) had one as did (I believe).

And there were plenty more. Similar to the dock you find in today’s Mac OS X, these tools allowed you to place your favorite applications in an always-present window and launch them with a single click. (With OS 9, Apple instituted its own single-button launching utility aptly called Launcher.) I tried every dock utility I could lay my hands on. I believe it was our own Jason Snell (he was about 8 years old at the time) who one day suggested, “If you’d like a dock launcher, you should take a look at.”In those days, it was available as shareware and could be downloaded from site, so I gave it a go. I liked what I saw, and for a variety of reasons. First, it was quite flexible. Beyond being a way to launch applications with a single click, the docks you created could be used to access or launch a variety of items—folders, devices on a local network, servers, URLs, and so on.

And you could create multiple docks. In my case, I created one dock for my currently running applications and another for applications I used routinely.

The Macs I use today employ that same configuration.And developer James Thomson kept up with it. Unlike with lot of these utilities, Thomson didn’t sell it to a large company or give up on it. Instead he supported and added more features to the utility. Among those features was the ability to launch items via keyboard shortcuts, store and retrieve text clippings, save docks as drawers that pop-out when you move your cursor to the edge of the screen, and allow you to preview certain kinds of files from within a hierarchical menu.I expected DragThing to disappear with the birth of OS X and its accompanying Dock. And, for a time, I lived without it in an attempt to make do with OS X’s Dock.

But I was spoiled. I liked having multiple docks, and OS X gave me just one.

I enjoyed being able to throw a dock anywhere I wanted on screen—perhaps even on a second monitor (something I still do today). OS X’s Dock restricted me to one of the primary monitor’s four edges.Given how unimpressed I was with the Dock, I was more than pleased when DragThing eventually shipped in an OS X-compatible version. My DragThing docks were back, along with the workflow I was so comfortable with. Better yet, Thomson catered to the whims of this long-time Mac user by allowing me to place the Trash back on the desktop where it rightly belonged. And his support for OS X didn’t stop there. He additionally added support for OS X’s Aqua graphics, which allowed me to make my docks transparent, thus displaying rows of small icons seemingly suspended in air.Not a DragSo, where do DragThing and I stand today? Like a lot of other DragThing users, it remains one of those utilities that I install almost immediately after setting up a new Mac.

When initially configuring it I use three main docks: The Process dock shows all currently running applications. I use it to quickly eyeball what’s currently running as well as a tool for rapidly switching to other running applications.My Favorites dock is where I place applications, volumes, servers, Automator workflow applications, and folders I routinely use. (Those folders include Applications, Utilities, my Home folder, the Documents folder, and the DropBox folder that lives inside my user’s Public folder.)The Process dock's configuration screen.I also have an Important Stuff dock which contains folders where I toss files after I’ve finished with them. For instance, I have folders for Macworld Stuff, Podcasts, Pictures, Macworld Videos, Music, Presentations, and Outside Projects. The originals of these folders are scattered across multiple drives and storage devices attached to my Mac.When configuring DragThing, I shrink the dock’s icons so that they’re large enough to be recognized but small enough that I can fit a lot of them in a row—currently they’re set at 25 by 25 pixels. I hide the window title bar, names, and tabs. Again, the idea is to show only the icons.

Within the Visibility tab I enable the Use Translucency option and set the slider to 100 percent transparent so that nothing other than the icons are seen. In the Advanced tab I enable the Use Single-Click to Open Items option, which does just that—let’s me click just once to engage a dock object.The ability to preview items from within DragThing’s hierarchical menus is more than a little handy.I also configure a couple of universal options. I do this by opening the General preference and in the Switching area I enable the Hide Other Applications When Switching option (as well as the Only Hide When Switching Using DragThing). With these options enabled, whenever I click on an application in the Process dock, any other open applications are hidden. But if I want those applications to remain visible, I instead use OS X’s Command-Tab shortcut to move between applications.

In the Sounds tab I’ve enabled Use DragThing Sounds. This ensures that I know that something’s really happened when I click on a dock item.

Finally, I click the Trash tab and ensure that the Show Trash on Finder Desktop item is enabled.I’m so accustomed to having DragThing on my Macs that I forget that it’s not part of the OS. It’s only when I’m speaking to a group (in person or virtually), show my Mac’s screen, and someone pipes up, “What are all those docks on your desktop?” that I’m reminded how much DragThing is ingrained in my computing life.Although DragThing and I have traveled a long and nearly constant road together, it's not an exclusive relationship. I use LaunchBar to launch applications and open documents that I don’t touch often enough to add to a DragThing dock.

And unless I really want to clear the decks by hiding other applications, I’ll often switch between apps using the Command-Tab keyboard shortcut. But old—and helpful—habits are tough to break. And I am thoroughly accustomed to having DragThing around.