Step-by-step

Create custom app and document menus

1 Add Finder items

Open a Finder window and in the sidebar are items like Recents and Applications. Ctrl+click them both and add each one to the Dock with the menu to create useful menus.

2 Configure the menu

Recents is best displayed as a list of files. Ctrl+click the Dock icon you created and select ‘List’ on the menu. Choose ‘Folder’ or ‘Stack’ to select the Dock icon to display.

3 Show icons

Ctrl+click the Applications icon you added and select ‘Grid’ view on the menu. This is not useful for Recents because there are too many files. It looks great here though.

4 Create app aliases

Create a folder in Documents called ‘Dock Menus’. Create a folder in it called ‘Fav Apps’. Drag favourite apps from Applications to the folder to create aliases for each one.

5 Create document aliases

Create another folder called My Docs. Hold down option+cmd and click and drag your most used docs to it. Documents stay where they are on disk. Aliases are created.

6 Dock docs

Drag the ‘My Docs’ folder to the Dock and drop it at the right. Ctrl+click to choose between icons, fan and list views. One click is all it takes to open a file in its app. 7

Create submenus

Create a folder like Dock Menus, then create subfolders for apps/document aliases. Drop the ‘Doc Menus’ folder in the Dock and set list view. Now we have Dock submenus. 8

Create Smart Folders

Click File>new Smart Folder in Finder. Here we search for PDF documents that were opened in the last 14 days, but you could create any type of smart search using rules. 9

Dock Smart Searches

Save the Smart Search to your Doc Menus folder and drag it to the Dock. Set it to list view. Now you have a self-updating Dock menu created from a Smart Folder search.