Doctopus enhances your dock icons

Earlier today I came across Doctopus, an interesting little utility that allows you to put informative "badges" over your dock icons. These badges look much like the message indicator that pops up in Apple's Mail. For instance, you can monitor the amount of free size available on a hard drive by glancing at a pie chart on that drive's dock icon, or quicky peek at iCal events just by mousing over the iCal badge.

There's a universal "launcher" badge that you can assign to an Applescript, QuicKeys shortcut or Automator workflow. I've been playing with it for about half an hour, and it is pretty useful. The badges move in kind of an odd manner (it's hard to explain). They seem to "hover" above the dock icons, and they don't feel like they're actually attached. A minor complaint for sure, but if you've got magnification activated for your dock, it's a bit odd to see the tiny badges move just an instant after the icons move.

Still, it's worth checking out. There's a free 30 day demo available, and a full license will run you $19.95US. Doctopus requires Mac
OS X 10.4 or newer and a 500 MHz CPU (1.0 GHz if Dock magnification is enabled).

[Via Spymac]