Tim Bray has a post today titled How I Use OS X. Here are some of my responses.

Dock Control · It’s on the side because vertical space is at a premium on a laptop. I prefer the right side but can’t think of a good reason.

Almost everything in the Dock is a running application. Most of them I start once and run forever. No shortcuts, no URLs, no folders.

Mine’s on the left side. I think I put it there because it’s kind of like the menu bar, and top and left are the “beginning” sides in our writing system. I have the dock set to small size icons with maximum magnification because there’s a lot in there. I also have it set to hidden by default. I keep several folders I want to be able to access quickly in the dock.

The Dashboard · I don’t use it. Silly thing.

Amen.

Exposé · I have mouse-to-bottom-right set to show the desktop, otherwise I don’t use it. This may be eccentric.

I’ve never found Exposé to be very useful, although one Snow Leopard review I read today said it’s a lot better in Snow Leopard.

Spaces · Don’t use it. Maybe I should try again; in the early days there were just too many important programs (Lightroom, NetBeans) that didn’t play nice with it.

I’ve found Spaces extremely useful. (I’ve never used Lightroom or NetBeans, though.) I keep Firefox and Vienna in space 1 (my “web space”), Mail and iCal in space 2 (my “personal management space”), Terminal and Aquamacs Emacs in space 3 (my “open systems development space”), and tn3270 in space 4 (my “mainframe development space”). Other things go in whichever space they happen to be in at launch.