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Hide the Dock? No. No. and No.
As any every Human Interface expert has already stated, aiming for a target that you can not see is not efficient. You have to be able to see your target to hit it. The user thinks they know approximately where the icon will appear but it is a constantly moving target as the position changes based on what documents are currently open.

What does need to be altered with regard to the dock is the position of the dock. Every user has a screen that is wider than it is tall. Yet we live in a world where documents are taller than they are wide. Why is it then that the designers of the Dock chose to take away some of the height of the screen when that is most precious? The dock belongs on the right side of the screen. There it will not impinge on the restricted height of the screen and it can be left visible at all times so that the user can see the target icon that they are desiring to use without the delay of the dock to appear.

BUT I'M A RAVING LUNATIC!!! IS THERE A WAY TO KEEP THE CAPS LOCK ON ALL THE TIME! ; )

Display the date & day of week? Perhaps this may be desirable to some. But more importantly, every user should be turning on either the seconds display or the blinking colons between the numbers. Every user will be confronted with system hangs or crashes. And we all so often are sitting there looking at our screen without any real clue as to whether the computer is hung up or not. The best and most telling clue that the computer is hung is that the seconds will not change or the colons will not blink. While this is not absolute, there is no better clue that the system has hung. If they are not changing, things have typically gone south and you can presume a problem exists.

Using the Caps Lock example is there an easy way to turn off the help key? I always seem to hit it on my way to the delete key.

I don't see why you would turn off Applications from Spotlight. I use Spotlight as a launcher probably as often as I use it for searching. Especially for items inside System Prefs. For instance Cmd-space "Print" gets me to the Print & Fax prefs pane quicker than mousing to the dock or Apple menu, then clicking the right pane.

I remapped Caps Lock to Control - when programming in X-Code it's much easier to press Caps Lock-period to use code completion, rather than Ctrl-period

rameeti, on 29 January 2010 - 07:31 AM, said:

I did that in MacOS 9 and earlier, but I found it's not really relevant in MacOS X. If something hangs the entire system, then it's usually a kernel panic. I can't remember any crash where the the flashing time colon would be an indicator.

rameeti, on 29 January 2010 - 07:25 AM, said:

You do realize that one of the options you can set for the dock is to have it appear on either side, right?

flybynight, on 29 January 2010 - 07:43 AM, said:

Because I use LaunchBar to launch applications.

rameeti, on 29 January 2010 - 07:31 AM, said:

If I had firsthand experience of a single OS X-era Mac that was wedged in such a fashion that this would be useful, I'd agree. But I haven't. I've seen apps hang. I've seen the system go so far off the rails that there's no doubt about what happened. But a subtle wedging of the whole system? Not that I've seen.

bastion, on 29 January 2010 - 07:46 AM, said:

As the article already mentioned, yes, this is a user alterable setting. I think that was the entire purpose of the article. Things the user could change from their default.

rameeti, on 29 January 2010 - 07:25 AM, said:

Human interface experts, shmexperts. I've had my Dock hidden since the beginning, and it's no big deal.

I do agree, though, that it makes more sense on the side: I keep mine on the left side, hidden. The right side is actually wrong, because if you have a window that is pegged to the right, then you'll activate the Dock when you go to scroll.