This dock bling is not ready for prime time. It is limited and slow, and the Mac OS X Accessibility system must be enabled in the Universal Access. I watched a demo of Docktopus at Macworld and it worked flawlessly when the rep demoed it at their booth, but when I tried it at home, it was slow and unstable. First of all, not all the badges demonstrated at Macworld came with the download. Badges add information to the Dock icons. There are too few badges and no others on the website. I was looking for the badge that tells you how many objects are in the trash. Nada. The iTunes badge did not work as described either. Hovering the mouse over the iTunes badge did not open a new window showing information about the current playing track, as it should have. The badges included with the download are:

• CPU Meter
• Drive Space
• Folder Count
• iCal Event Peek
• Item size
• iTunes Control
• Launch Menu
• Mail Peek
• Memory

When Docktopus is on and the badges are applied, you cannot activate an icon's application even with the Launch Menu. This is pretty annoying. The badges lag behind the magnification of the Dock. If you have a lot of apps on the Dock and are on a 15-inch monitor or smaller and have magnification turned off, you will not be able to see the badges, let alone benefit from the information they display.

The developers have a great idea developing badges that add information to your Dock icons but Docktopus needs to be faster, bigger, and offer more of them. I look forward to the updates and plan to continue testing this product as it matures and hopefully gets better. After all, the developers won Best of Show at Macworld SF 2006, therefore are committed to the success of this product.

UPDATE!: The new and improved Docktopus v 1.0.2 has been released since this article was written. What's new? Docktopus is now a Universal Binary; Added Microsoft Entourage 2004 support to Mail badge; Fixed CPU and Memory badges to work correctly on Intel Macs; Added dkProcessTool to help gather process information; Fixed some installer permissions errors. I will test it on my 15" MacBook Pro. Stay tuned for my review of the new version next month.