I got tired of travelling to the bottom of my screen, so I built a Dock that comes to my cursor
What I learned building Beckon, a Mac app switcher that opens where your hand already is.
I never noticed the trip until I started paying attention to it.
Switch to the browser: pointer down to the bottom of the screen, find the right icon in a row of twenty, click, back up to where I was working. Switch to the editor: down, aim, click, up. Back to the browser for one more thing. Down again.
Each trip takes a second or two. But I switch apps hundreds of times a day, and on a big screen the Dock is about as far from my work as it can be. The pointer is up near the top, where the content is. The Dock is a long way below it, and every icon there is a small target at the end of a long journey.
The usual answer is ⌘Tab. I use it, when my hands are on the keyboard. But a lot of my day isn’t typing: it’s reviewing designs, reading, dragging things around, clicking through a product I’m building. My hand is on the mouse, and reaching for the keyboard to switch apps, then back to the mouse, is a trip of its own.
So I wanted the opposite of the Dock. My apps should come to where the pointer already is.
A ring, and a flick
That’s Beckon. Hold ⌥Space anywhere on screen, or press the middle mouse button, and your apps appear in a ring around the pointer. Flick toward the one you want and let go.
What makes it fast is that only the direction counts. You don’t have to land on an icon: a short flick toward Safari is enough. Every app is the same short distance away, wherever the pointer happens to be.
And the apps don’t move around. They’re in your Dock’s order, with Finder at twelve o’clock, so after a few days you stop looking. My hand knows that Mail is just right of the top and Terminal is down to the left, the way it knows where the keys are.
If you’d rather click than flick, tap the shortcut instead of holding it, and the ring stays open.
The window you meant
Getting to the right app turned out to be half the problem. The other half was getting to the right window.
I usually have several browser windows open: one for the product, one for the docs, one for whatever I’m reading up on. Switching to “Safari” isn’t what I want; I want that Safari window. So in Beckon, when you reach an app with several windows, they fan out beyond it, with live thumbnails. Carry on to the one you want and let go, and that exact window comes forward.
Thumbnails only help if you can tell them apart, so the one you’re pointing at grows, and you can make it bigger still in Settings. If you’d rather read titles, there’s a column of them instead.
Replacing the Dock
Once the ring was doing my switching, I noticed I only went down to the Dock for the other things it does. So Beckon does those too:
- your pinned apps, running or not, plus folders and the Trash;
- the Dock’s own right-click menu: an app’s windows, New Window, Show All Windows, Hide and Quit;
- dropping a file you’re dragging onto an app, a folder or the Trash.
Then there’s one switch to hide the macOS Dock for good. Turn it off and your Dock comes back exactly as it was. That part mattered to me: an app that changes how your Mac works should be able to put everything back.
The Dock has a lot of small behaviours you only notice when they’re missing, and most of the work went into those. A column of windows that opens on the far side of the screen mustn’t close while you’re on your way to it. The windows should get out of the way when you open an app’s right-click menu. Details like those took longer than the ring itself.
Small, and private
A switcher is something you call all day, so it has to appear instantly, and it shouldn’t cost anything while you aren’t using it. Beckon sits in the menu bar using about 20 MB of memory and does nothing at all until you call the ring. An early version held on to far more than that; drawing the ring as a single image, and letting the memory go when it closes, brought it down.
It also never needs to know anything about you. Window titles and thumbnails stay on your Mac, in memory only. There’s no account and no analytics. The only things Beckon ever sends are a licence key, if you enter one, and a check for updates.
Where it is now
Beckon is out for macOS 14 and later, on Apple silicon and Intel. Every download starts with 14 days of Pro. After that it carries on as a free app switcher, for good. Pro, the part that replaces the Dock, is a one-time purchase. No subscription.
I’m building it on my own. I’d rather charge once for a small app that does one job well than build something that needs to know about you.
My own Dock is hidden now, and I don’t miss the trip.
If your hand lives on the mouse too, I’d love you to try Beckon and tell me what’s missing.