This morning I was sitting, enjoying my feeds with some music when I decided do something as simple switching to a different playlist in iTunes. Down goes the mouse to the bottom of my screen (where my dock is hidden) … Up a bit … Down again … Uhh … Dock? To my dismay, the minimized iTunes window was locked up in a completely non-functional dock. Not only was my iTunes locked down there, but so were several other programs I was working in. I began my quest and tried several things to get to my apps (and the dock):

• I tried the Alt-Tab method first – the selector came up nice, but nothing happened when I selected an app. It seemed that my apps were lost forever in the black hole of the dead dock.
• Then I thought I would try and edit the system prefs for the dock. Although it brought the dock into view for editing, it was not functional at all and disappeared as soon as the prefs pane was closed.
• Then I threw my laptop at the wall, stormed out into my front yard and yelled at a little girl riding her scooter by on her way to school (ok… so I didn’t do that, but I really wanted to).

Just then, my “tech-supporting-troubleshoot-it-till-you-die” geek genetics kicked in and I just had to fight this till I won or died trying. I knew that if I rebooted, I would lose all my unsaved work and all would return to normality, but that just wasn’t a good enough solution for me. I spent a few minutes digging and here’s what I figured out. It may not be the perfect solution, but I’m up and running again without a reboot. Take that Windows! (and you too, little scooter girl!)

My re-discovery of the day: Activity Monitor

What a nifty little app. It gives you a birds eye view on the processes or apps your Mac is running. This is similar to the Task Manager in Windows. Sure enough, one of the apps running is the dock and all I had to do is quit the process and dock relaunched in just a few seconds. Everything was back on track. My apps all popped back to my desktop, I finally switched my playlist in iTunes, minimized the ones I didn’t need right away and got back to work. All was right again in the world and that little scooter girl was none the wiser. Thanks Activity Monitor!