Rocketdock review

Did you ever want a shortcut bar for programs you tend to use allot to improve your favorite program's accessibility? There are several different programs that do this, and Rocketdock is one of them. First thing you need to do after installation is customize the application to add programs that you use often to its bar. Adding and removing icons to the dock is also very easy. To add an shortcut you only have to drag the shortcut from your desktop or another location to the dock.

Removing a shortcut works the same, just drag it off the dock and it's gone. Clicking with the right mouse button on the dock brings up a menu which displays additional options to create shortcuts or separators. You can also activate some other options for the dock like its auto hide function.

Personally i find that Rocketdock is too big the way it ships, taking up to much screen space. You can however change that with a click on the program' settings button. Here you can change the size of the icons so that they better match your needs. In the position field you can enter where the dock is positioned at on the screen, and on which screen if you use a dual-monitor setup. And in the settings' style field you can select the style of the dock and control the text under the text of the icons.

Creating you own style isn't very hard either. You can open the styles map and take a look at the .ini files that are listed there. You can also follow tutorials that you find online which provide a good start if you want to know more.

Another interesting feature of Rocketdock is its add-on system which basically allows you to install new features, icons, images and stuff like that easily. You find icon packages on the official site for instance that change the look and feel of the dock significantly.

Tips

1. Rocketdock is a portable program. You can however configure it to run at start of the system so that it is available right away.
2. If you want a larger or smaller dock size, open the icons page of the settings. You can also change or disable the hover effect if you do not the default one or any effect.
3. The position tab allows you to change the the location on the screen where it is displayed, and the monitor that you want to display it.
4. You can also change the theme of the dock. The program ships with dozens of themes that you can activate right away under the style tab.

Update: I stopped using Rocketdock once I started to use Windows 7 as it allowed me to pin all the programs I want to the operating system's taskbar instead.