Designing the Liquid Glass edge dock
A floating glass dock that puts every output one click away, then disappears when you do not need it. The thinking behind Soundary's three dock modes.
The menu bar is a great place for audio, right up until you own six devices. Then it becomes a tiny dropdown you open, squint at, and close. We wanted something faster: every output visible at a glance, the active one glowing, one click to switch.
So we built a dock that floats at the edge of the screen. And then we spent most of our time making it not be in the way.
A dock has to earn its space
A panel that sits on your screen all day is a liability. It costs pixels, and it costs attention. The only way an edge dock is worth it is if it shows up exactly when it is useful and disappears the rest of the time, without you ever having to manage it.
That constraint is what gave us three modes:
- Hidden. Nothing on screen at all. Nudge the edge with your cursor and the dock slides out, you switch, and it slides away.
- Handle. A thin sliver of glass clings to the edge as a quiet reminder, and expands when you hover.
- Locked. Always visible, for the days when you are switching constantly.
The menu bar keeps working in every one of these modes. That mattered to us: the dock is a bonus, never a dependency. If you hate it, turn it off and lose nothing.
Glass that actually does something
The dock is built on native Liquid Glass on macOS 26 and up, with a material fallback below that. The glass is not there to look pretty in a screenshot. It is doing a job.
Because it is translucent, the dock can sit over your work without hiding it. And against that glassy surface, the active device's glow reads instantly. You see what is selected before you read a single label. That is the whole interaction in one glance.
The hardest part was the edge
Here is the part that ate the most time, and the part you will hopefully never think about. A reveal that feels intentional instead of twitchy is shockingly fiddly. Our first attempts triggered when you did not want them and hesitated when you did. We ended up tuning a one-pixel trigger zone at the screen edge and the slide motion until the dock arrived and left like it meant to, not like it was nervous.
Most of that effort went into movement you will barely notice. Which is exactly the point.
A good dock is one you forget is there, right up until the moment you reach for it.