After having gotten fed up with Gnome I decided to try XFCE as suggested by most of my Linux-using Twitter friends and I must say, it's a huge improvement.  One thing I missed though was Gome-do's dock launcher.  While I could install Gnome-do in XFCE it would install a ton of required packages and also requires compiz to look normal.  Instead I decided to create a simple and fast dock launcher that needed no extra packages.

My dock launcher is actually just a tweaked panel with a few launchers but with the right tweaks it works much like Gnome-do for my purposes.  Here's how to set up the poor man's dock.

1 - Create a new panel

• Right click any existing panel and choose customize panel. 
• Click the green + button to add a new panel. 
• Adjust the size to your taste.  I find 55px to be comfortable.  If you have compositor enabled you can also adjust the transparency. 
• Use fixed position and select the position of your choice.  I chose the bottom center position since I don't have any other bottom panel. 
• Select normal width and enable autohide to give the panel the "docky" feel.

2 - Add launchers

• Right click your new panel and select add new items.
• Choose launcher as the item type. The rest should be self-explanatory.

That's it.  Simple, fast dock style launcher with no pre-requisites.