In this video, we will look at a new feature that Apple added to the dock in Mac OS Mojave, Recent apps. Let’s go to My Mac. Now let’s first take a look at the dock before Mac OS Mojave. Down at the bottom, when we’re looking at our dock, you’re going to see that we have this vertical line. If you recall, anything that’s on the left of this vertical line is a favorited app or an open app. Anything on the right is either a file or a folder. What I can do is I can store my favorite apps on the left side, so I have easy access to them, or I can view all of my open apps, and on the right side, I can store all of my favorite documents and folders.

When I open up an app that is not in the dock that I haven’t favorited- let’s go and open up an app here. I’m going to go to my Finder. Now I’m going to go to Applications. What I’m going to do is I’m going to open up the Calculator. I double click on it, now this is not in my dock, so watch what happens. It opens up down in my dock. Now, this is the normal behavior that we’re used to with the dock. When I quit out of it, it’s going to disappear. I quit out of the Calculator app, and it disappears. That’s how we are used to using the dock. Well, with Mac OS Mojave, they added a new feature, Recent apps. This is enabled by default; I turned it off so I could demonstrate the old behavior. Now what I need to do is I need to go and turn it back on. Where do we turn on and off Recent apps? Well, we need to go to our system preferences. Now what we do is we go over to our dock. You’re going to see a new option here, show recent applications in the dock. I click on it. When I open up an application that is not in my dock, it’ll show up in this new section.

Before I show how this works, I also want to show you that I have indicators for open applications turned on. When we look at my apps here, my app icons in the dock here, you’re going to see that I have a black dot below Mail, which means that Mail is open. I do not have a black dot below Contacts, so Contacts is not open. This is how I can easily see which apps are open in my dock and which ones are not. This is nothing new in Mac OS Mojave, but I just wanted to point out if you’re wondering what those black dots are. Now I’m going to go and close this window here, my System Preferences window. Now let’s go and open up Chess. It’s going to show up in the dock, double click on it.

If we look here, you’re going to see we now have two vertical lines, one on the left side and one on the right side. This is the new Recent Apps section. Now watch what happens when I quit out of the chess app. Right now, we have the black dot below, which means that the chess app is open. I’m going to quit Command+Q. The chess app does not disappear from the dock, but the black dot did, which means that the app is no longer open. Now, this is a recent application. Let’s go and open up another application. I’m going to scroll up here, and I’m going to open up the Dictionary, double click on it. Now we can see we have the Dictionary along with the chess app. The dictionary app is open, that’s why we have the black dot. I quit out of the dictionary, and it still stays in the dock. If you have an iPad, you may be familiar with this behavior. This is how the dock works on the iPad. With the iPad, we can have up to three recent applications in there.

Let’s go and open up another one. I’m going to go with Keynote, double click on it. We can see it is opening up in my recent applications area in the dock. I quit out of it, and it’s still in the dock. How many apps can we have here? Well, let’s go and open up Pages. I scroll up until I find Pages, I double click on it. You’re going to see; it removed the chess app. We can have up to three Recent apps just like in the iPad. I’m going to quit. If I were to open up another app that is not in my dock, the Dictionary app would disappear. We can have up to three recent apps in here. Now, we can also remove these apps manually. To remove an app from our dock, all we have to do is drag it up. I’m going to drag this up, and you’re going to see it says Remove. We do have to drag it up a little bit above the dock. If I bring this backdown, you’re going to see Remove disappears. I get it back up, and now I can remove it.

We can also move a recent app into a favorite app. Let’s say I use Keynote quite a bit. I want to favorite this. Well, all I have to do is drag this over to the left side of this vertical line. Now the Keynote app will always be on my dock.

That’s how we can view our Recent apps in the dock in Mac OS Mojave.