It’s a good idea to keep your eyes peeled for the various ways your devices call out for your attention. Macs do this in several ways, including Dock icons bouncing.

On various devices, certain glyphs appear in an application and invite you to click for more information or to take a particular action. Sometimes they are linked to a notification, but not always.

Having good peripheral vision is one way to attune to these behaviors. Another is simply to have awareness of activity not occurring as expected and knowing where to look for a resolution.

The Dock Icon Bounce

When a Mac application in the background needs your attention, its Dock icon will jump away from the edge of the screen and then gently bounce as it lands again. It’s an adorable way to hope you will notice the icon and switch to the application to see what it wants.

Robin Williams described this beautifully in The Little Mac Book: Tiger Edition, published in 2005.

For example, Microsoft Word doesn’t like to quit when a document contains unsaved changes. Unlike Pages, it doesn’t have a place to store such files. So, when I tried to quit Word using the Application Switcher, it leapt out of the Dock.

Colored ⓘ Button

Some applications will post a ⓘ in their interface to let you know that there’s more information or something you need to do. For example, if you’ve migrated to a new Mac, Time Machine will not automatically continue backing up where it left off with your old Mac.

You may need to click the ⓘ in Time Machine preferences and Claim Existing Backups, thereby indicating that Time Machine should use them as a foundation before going forward.

Similarly, on iPhone/iPad, where actionable items are commonly colored blue, tapping a ⓘ may show useful information to lead you to resolve a problem.

Connection Bolt

Some applications will use a  to indicate a connection error. For example, in Mail, if an account is offline, you may see this glyph with Account Offline on the right side of the Favorites Bar and/or the glyphs next to account mailboxes on the sidebar.

These are all buttons you can click to potentially get the account(s) back online. If doing so requires any further action like entering a password, Mail will prompt you.

I encourage you to feel the freedom to click/tap items on the screen to discover what they do. Explore your applications thoroughly and you might discover new functionality to increase your efficiency and flexibility.