If you have any problems or questions about DragThing, check out the list of frequently asked questions below and, if the answer isn't there, mail me at
and I'll do my best to help.
Feature requests are welcome, especially from people who have paid, but do let me know what you think anyway. I do get a lot of email so it may take me a while to respond, but I do read everything in the end!
If you lose your serial number let me know - I keep a database of all the DragThing users with their serial numbers, so I'll be able to look it up. Of course, it's a good idea to print out the email you get back from FastSpring, just in case.
If you don't hear anything back from FastSpring within a few hours of submitting your order, it's best to check with them to make sure they got it in the first place. The most likely explanation if you never hear anything is that they have got an incorrect email address for you, so make sure you have entered it correctly.
Note that I have no connection to FastSpring other than using them to process payments and distribute serial numbers, and they don't know anything about DragThing either, so you shouldn't ask them any technical questions about it.
As promised, I'm going to add the answers to some frequently asked questions here. If you have a question that isn't answered, please let me know at the address above.
Questions:
Q: Can you add more spaces to the default dock? Eight just isn't enough!
Q: How do you rearrange the tabs in a dock?
Q: Can I get rid of the Apple Dock completely?
Q: What do the little anchors mean when I drag windows around?
Q: I can't get the "Windows" menu for applications to appear. How do I switch it on?
Q: DragThing is crashing. What's wrong?
Answers:
Q: Can you add more spaces to the default dock? Eight isn't enough!
A: No problem. Just click and drag at the edges of the dock to resize it. The cursor will change to be a line between two arrows to show you the right place to click. Make sure the dock is unlocked (check the small padlock in the Dock Options window) if you don't see the cursor change.
Q: How do you rearrange the tabs in a dock?
A: Option-click and drag the tab into the position you want - even into another dock. If the dock is set to be a drawer, you'll need to option-shift-click the tab instead, since option-clicking will drag the whole drawer in that case.
Q: Can I get rid of the Apple Dock completely?
A: It is possible, but I wouldn't recommend it. Since people often ask how to do it anyway, here's a good tutorial I found on how to kill the Dock by Kevin Schmitt. This may have unforseen side effects however, which is why I've not documented the procedure myself, or added an option for this in DragThing. I keep the Dock hidden off the bottom of the screen on my own Mac.
Q: I've added an extra row to my dock, and I can't seem to remove it by dragging at the edges again. How do I get rid of it?
A: To remove a row or column, it needs to be completely empty of items in all the different layers of a dock. If you can't see any items that might be blocking things, try switching on the tabs in the Dock Options window for the dock and look in the other layers.
Q: What do the little anchors mean when I drag windows around?
A: When you drag a dock window around, it is silently searching out the nearest corner or midpoint on the screen and attaching itself to it for purposes of resolution switching, resizing, and, in the case of the process dock, growing away from. So, for example, if you drag a horizontal process dock to the bottom middle of the screen, when you launch an application, it will stay centered and grow in both directions.
It's also possible to override the anchor setting, so you can attach the dock to a distant corner. You do this by dragging it to the corner, and then shift-dragging it back into place.
Anyway, in previous versions, all this happened behind the scenes as if by magic and people didn't often understand why. So I added the anchor indicator which appears while you are dragging the docks to show you exactly what is going on.
Q: I can't get the "Windows" menu for applications to appear. How do I switch it on?
A: To show the "Windows" sub-menu in the contextual menus for running applications, you'll need to be running Mac OS X version 10.2.3 or later, and also have the "Enable access for assistive devices" option turned on in the "Universal Access" section of the System Preferences.
Q: DragThing is crashing. What's wrong?
A: Good question. On Mac OS X, the easiest way to find out what's causing the problem is to switch on the crash logging feature in the Preferences window for the Console application (found in the Utilities folder). Then, whenever an application crashes, you'll get a log file which contains hopefully useful information about what happened. Send me any crash logs for DragThing and I'll see what I can find out.
One thing though - if you see any references in the crash log to "APEBundleMessage" or similar "_apeSomething" lines, it's most likely a "haxie" at work. Try disabling any haxies you have installed, and see if the crash goes away. If it does, it might be worth mailing the crash log to the authors of those utilities too.
If you do have any problems, please let me know at the address above.
A: No, DragThing doesn't patch the system at all - it's just a regular application like the Finder or Safari which should make it more stable and a lot less prone to conflicts with the OS and other applications. Haxies are very much like the old Extensions and Control Panels from Mac OS 9.
Q: I just got some email about a new version of DragStrip that is available from Aladdin Systems. Is this the same thing as DragThing? Did you sell out DragThing? It looks very similar!
A: No, DragThing is definitely not the same thing as DragStrip. DragStrip, while also being a similar application launcher with a similar name, is by Aladdin Systems, and is an entirely separate commercial product. Any similarities between the two are entirely coincidental, and the fact that DragStrip can read DragThing preferences files is just because they reverse-engineered my preferences file format without asking!
I would encourage anybody who is interested in an application launcher, to try the two of them, and make a choice based on the quality of the product, not the quality of the PR!
DragThing is still written and supported by one person, me. I have had a number of offers to buy DragThing, but I decided I didn't want it owned by a big company so I could keep control over what happened to it, and keep it affordable! If you want to support shareware authors, please pay for your copy of DragThing!