"Animate opening applications" bounces applications in the Dock as they're opening. Set the Minimize option to Genie Effect, and then minimize a window while holding down the shift key …very cool, eh? I'll talk about that in the next section. There is also a third effect, the Suck In Effect, that's only available using a third-party utility like TinkerTool.
The Genie Effect is very cool, but if you're like me, after the first few times you just want to get the window out of the way so you can get to work.
The Genie Effect is a slower, genie-in-the-bottle action, whereas the Scale Effect is more of an immediate action that simply shrinks the window. To see the chosen effect, click the yellow minimize button in any window's title bar. (Unfortunately, if you have multiple monitors, there's no way to move the Dock to a different screen.) The "Minimize using" setting changes the effect you see when a window is minimized to the Dock. The "Position on screen" setting simply places the Dock on the left, right, or bottom edge of the main display. And don't worry-you can use the magnification slider to change it back to a normal size. Change the value to something much bigger, like 384, save your changes, and then quit the Dock (it will relaunch). The next line is the maximum magnification size (enclosed by and ). Open the Dock preference file ( ~/Library/Preferences/) in a text editor and find the line that says largesize. Want to make Dock magnification really big? Turn magnification on in Dock preferences.
Figure 6.2: A QuickTime movie playing in the Dock