Aero Dock Files

Aero Dock is a glass dock and app launcher for Windows — pin your apps to a floating pane of glass, watch icons swell under the cursor, and hover an app to see live previews of its open windows.

This is the first public release.

It's built in the Frutiger Aero design language — glass, water, light, and life — as if Vista's aesthetic had never stopped evolving. Under the glass it's a native app: the entire Windows integration layer is Rust talking directly to Win32 and COM, so shortcut resolution, icon extraction, window tracking, and the live DWM previews are all real Windows APIs.

What's in it

• A dock on any screen edge, floating or flush, DPI-aware across monitors
• Cursor magnification with spring physics, tooltips, and launch bounce
• Live window previews — real DWM thumbnails, framed in glass
• Running-app indicators; click to focus, cycle, or minimize
• Drag to reorder, drop from Explorer to pin, folder flyouts, and stacks
• Keyboard-first search across installed apps (including Store apps) and recent files
• Clock, battery, network, volume, and Recycle Bin in the system corner
• Six themes, optional wallpaper color sync, and five ambient scenes
• Auto-hide, tray icon, and launch-at-sign-in

Install

Download AeroDock_1.0.0_x64-setup.exe below and run it. It installs for the current user, so no administrator rights are needed. Aero Dock starts in your system tray — left-click the tray icon to show the dock.

The installer isn't code-signed, so Windows will show a "Windows protected your PC" prompt on first run. Click More info → Run anyway, or build it yourself from source if you'd rather not.

Requires: Windows 10 (1809+) or Windows 11, x64, with the WebView2 runtime (already present on Windows 11 and current Windows 10).

Privacy

Aero Dock makes no network requests. No telemetry, no analytics, no update check, no account. Everything it knows is one JSON file in your own app config folder.

Full details in the changelog.