Junecloud

I often drag files to folders in my dock. If you’ve done this you probably already know why it’s frustrating: if you don’t drag the file to just the right spot, the folder will slide out of the way. If you’re actually trying to add the file directly to the dock, that’s pretty useful, but otherwise it can be pretty frustrating.

The Dock has a little-known secret though: you can lock it. Here’s the secret command you can enter in Terminal:
defaults write com.apple.dock contents-immutable -bool true; killall Dock;

This is easy enough to do, and you can change true back to false if you want to unlock it. If you’re like me, you’re probably not going to remember this next time you need though. So I made a quick script to handle the whole process for me. You can just drop it in your Applications folder or the script menu. (To enable the script menu in Snow Leopard, open AppleScript Editor, open the Preferences, and check “Show script menu in the menu bar”. In earlier versions of OS X, you can do this in AppleScript Utility.)

Download this AppleScript Application

Update: The first version posted wouldn’t work the first time you used the lock feature, which is clearly a problem. It’s fixed now.