MATE Dock Applet Sees New Release

MATE Dock Applet 0.76 was released today, bringing support for startup notifications when launching application, as well as some new cosmetic options.

MATE Dock Applet is a MATE Panel applet that displays running application windows as icons, which features option to pin applications to the dock, supports multiple workspaces, allows changing the MATE panel icon to the dominant desktop wallpaper color, and more.

The latest 0.76 version includes a new indicator for running applications - a solid bar that uses the highlight color defined by the GTK3 theme (since only Ubuntu MATE 16.10 uses GTK3, this doesn't apply to older Ubuntu MATE versions). You can see this in the screenshot above.

For GTK2, this indicator defaults to grey, but there's a new option in the applet preferences that allows defining the color of this indicator:

The new version also allows choosing between a gradient or solid fill for the active icon background. Furthermore, the MATE Dock Applet Preferences window now includes a live preview which displays how the active icon background and indicator will look like:

And the last noteworthy change in this release is support for startup notification when launching applications. Using the new version, when starting a new application, its icon will pulsate until the application is fully loaded.

Install MATE Dock Applet in Ubuntu or Linux Mint

MATE Dock Applet is available in the official Ubuntu repositories starting with Ubuntu 16.04 (Linux Mint 18.x), however, it's not the latest version.

To install the latest MATE Dock Applet in Ubuntu 14.04 / Linux Mint MATE 17.x, 16.04 / Linux Mint MATE 18.x (for MATE built with GTK2) or Ubuntu 16.10 (for MATE built with GTK3), you can use the WebUpd8 MATE PPA.

Add the PPA and install MATE Dock Applet using the commands below:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/mate
sudo apt update
sudo apt install mate-dock-applet

To download the source, report bugs, etc. see the MATE Dock Applet GitHub page.