I've used Dragthing since the days of System 7. (For you youngsters, that's before OS X was Mac OS.) But lately, thanks to Alfred and Keyboard Maestro, I hadn't been using it much at all. When I recently switched to a newer Mac, I decided to try living without it.

The thing I miss most, it turns out, is its "disk dock;" a feature that makes it easy access all drives. As an alternative, I put the Volumes folder in my OS X dock. I set the folder to display as a fan; an option that's available via the contextual menu. Here's how it looks:

It turns out this is a pretty good substitute, although you have to get used to seeing the occasional odd volume that gets mounted by various maintenance tasks, which you'd normally never notice. If you're not familiar with the Volumes folder, it's one of those Unix-y things. To access it, so you can drag it into your dock, in the Finder choose Go > Go to Folder, then enter "/Volumes" and click Go. Then drag the Volumes folder proxy icon, from the top of the Finder window, to a spot in the dock.

There's a good chance I'll end up installing Dragthing for some of its other nifty features, but I'm pleased to have remembered a solution that doesn't require any additional software to make it work.