Dock is slowly losing icons

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HI,

I have a problem that I tried solving on my own and didn't. My macbook's dock is slowly losing its icons. First mail dropped out of sight and then safari followed. Yesterday I lost IMovie. I didnt delete them and mail isnt in the application folder. I didnt look for the other two in the apps folder. I am at wits end and wanted to know what I should do.

Thanks for your help in the past and I hope you can help me now.

Carl
 
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I suspect that you did it without realizing it. Fortunately, the remedy is simple.

The Pillaging: Grab an icon with your cursor (except the Finder icon) now drag it off the Dock, but don't blink! When you release the mouse, an image of a puff of smoke appears, and the icon is gone.

The remedy: To get any program back in the Dock, open your ~/Applications folder and grab the icon. Drag it to the left side of the Dock and release the mouse. The icon now appears in the Dock, and remains in the Applications Folder.

For files or folders, do the same thing, except drag them to the right side. Folders residing in the Dock are called Stacks. Right click or control-click on them to reveal options. Play around with those to determine which you like. All Stacks do not have to be set the same way.
 
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Thanks for your reply. I wioll try this when i get home. Im on travel now and dont have my mac with me.

Carl
 
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You can also lock the dock by going inot the dock system prefrences. This stops the doc being able to be edited at all. You can lock and unlock the dock whenever you want. That might help, I dunno :).
 
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Can't lock my Dock in SP using Leopard. OP does not state which OS in use.
 
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Ever since Panther, if you run any App then there has always been the choice to right click the icon to keep it in the dock, so not sure why one would want to lock the Dock.
 
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If you are having the Mac in a public environment like in an apple store or in another business or work place locking the dock so it can't be messed with is useful. So the workers/customers can play with the computer and not worry about screwing anything up. Not everyone is Mac savvy, and this is a nice idea.

But for the plain one user at home I see little need to lock the dock.
 
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What Are Your MobileMe Doc Sync Settings?

I don't know if you've got MobileMe and more than one Mac, but if you do, you might want to check your "Dock Sync" settings in System Preferences to find out if you've got your docks set to sync. I had this problem because I've got four Macs and MobileMe. When I had just one Mac, I synced daily with MobileMe and there was no problem. But when I got my new Macs, once I synced them with MobileMe I started getting the disappearing dock icons.

For work reasons I have different apps on each dock, so having my icons shuffle and disappear was driving me nutz. The idea of having to lock my dock just seemed crazy to me. I shouldn't have to do that. At first I thought it was a Snow Leopard bug. But I finally caught what was going on one day when I forced my MacMini to sync to update MobileMe with some iCal changes I made.

It was when I synced my MacBook Pro to update my calendar that I noticed that some of my dock icons had shuffled around while others were just gone altogether. I put two and two together and figured out that the syncing was what was screwing things up. To solve the problem, I went to System Preferences, selected MobileMe, went to the sync options and turned off Dock Sync on all my computers.

That's what did it for me. No more lost or shuffling dock icons!:$
 
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Well, since the OP didn't report back 9 months ago, I doubt your suggestion will be seen by same.
 

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