Orbital For Mac

The Dock is a pretty accessible way to open and select apps, but it does require you to move your cursor to the edge of the desktop, and hiding the Dock to get some extra screen space leaves you somewhat powerless.

Orbital is an interesting way to bring your Dock closer to your cursor and potentially free up your desktop. It can generate a copy of your Dock at the cursor’s location, even when it’s hidden, allowing you to avoid unnecessary mouse movements and focus on your work.

The app is incredibly simple to use. All you have to do is press ⌥X (the shortcut can be customized) and the icons you normally find in your Dock will now appear around your mouse cursor. Then, just select one of them or click anywhere else to hide them.

Up to 8 items can be displayed at a time. If there are more than 8 items in your Dock, you can see the rest by scrolling to the next page after using the hotkey.

By default, Orbital shows you both pinned and open applications. You can change the settings so that only open apps are shown, at which point you can also disable the indicator that shows you if an app is open.

Badges can also be displayed, and you have the option of seeing files that are pinned to the Dock as well.

Orbital can work as either an app launcher or switcher, depending on whether you choose to display pinned applications. Either way, it’s very intuitive, and it makes it possible to use your Mac with a permanently hidden Dock.

For future versions, it might help to have an option for more icons to be displayed at the same time, as the current limit of 8 requires most users to scroll through separate pages if pinned applications are shown.