The issue of Leopards confusing, or untidy stacks has been a questions thats ranged for some time, as I pointed out over on Andy Pipers blog; The stack itself is just a mishmash of all the icons in that folder pile don top of each other, meaning that sometimes they got a bit confusing by either looking all the same (you’d have an application icon in the download and say the application stack, or it just wasn’t clear from a first look what was what.
I mentioned on Andy’s blog about trying to trick finder into showing the last icon at the front, and I’d played a bit with using touch from terminal to fix a date in the future to bring the icon to the front. However I found a great post on XD’s Blog that discusses a japanese post about tidying them up.
The basics are, you place semi-transparent icons into the folder that you’re putting onto the dock as a stack, in my case I have Documents, Applications, and Downloads
The resulting new and improved stacks on my system now look like this;
The actual physicals of how to do this are fairly simple and for the smart amongst you.. involved terminal, touch, and a bit of cut and paste..
Get the zip archive of the icons from optica optima here unzip them to someplace (thanks martin, I’ve linked to the other site that seems now to have a number of different styles), you’ll find it contains about 20 odd icons for folders like applications, accounts, downloads etc, each icon attached to a directory. Copy the correct directory into the other directory that you want to use in your dock stack.For instance if I was going to update my downloads stack, I’d copy the Downloads folder from the zipfile into my download folder in my user account.We now need to fire up Terminal and do a bit of touching here and there.. You’ll need to replace the ” Downloads “ name in the below for each of the folders you want correctly stackable in your dock, keeping in mind that the directories in the zipfile have a leading and trailing space on their name.
cd ~/Downloads
touch -mt 202001010101.01 ” Downloads “
This will change the date modified of the icon to 1st January, 2020. Now just make sure your stack is sorting by date modified (ctrl-click or right-click the stack and Sort by..) Repeat for other stacks you have and there you go, a nice and elegant solution to the stack icon issue.
Entries (RSS)
Entries (RSS)
November 11th, 2007 at 4:01 pm
I really don’t care how the Dock looks, although I admit I do like your screenshot better than the stock Dock.
But how about just disabling Stacks? I used my own Stacks-like feature — folders in the Dock — in Tiger and it worked great for me. Hierarchical navigation and a quick click to open the folder. I don’t like Stacks and want to disable it completely so the Dock works like Tiger’s dock. And ideas how to do this?
November 11th, 2007 at 4:11 pm
if you really dont want the stacks anymore.. just drag them off the dock and they should vanish.. if you drop an alias of a folder onto the dock it will, or should act like a folder on the dock did in tiger. I tend to have quite a busy dock, so stacks works well for me, its got drawbacks.. but I’m sure improvements will come…
November 11th, 2007 at 4:18 pm
No, it doesn’t act like pre-Leopard stacks at all. ANY folder you put on the dock acts like a Stacks folder. This is something I discovered while writing my Leopard book.
November 11th, 2007 at 4:24 pm
correct any FOLDER does, but a folder alias doesnt.. right click the folder, create alias, drag the alias to the right of the dock, and if i click the alias on the dock, it opens the finder window.. now i’m not 100% sure if thats how it worked pre-leopard, but it certainly doesnt then use stacks on the alias..
November 12th, 2007 at 9:15 pm
That still doesn’t solve the problem. In Tiger, you could control-click a folder in the Dock and get a hierarchical listing of the folder ocntenets, including the ability to drill down. I used this feature for a quick-access to my most-used apps aside from those I keep in the Dock, arranged in sub-folders by some rough categories. I can’t do that any more. Clicking on a sub-folder in a stack just opens the folder in a Finder window, which is what I was trying to avoid in the first place. So far, stacks suck.
November 12th, 2007 at 11:17 pm
kevin, nope your right.. now maria has explained it to me as well.. leopard doesnt support folders on the dock like tiger used to.. and now its been explained.. it actually sounds quite useful!!
November 12th, 2007 at 11:19 pm
How does it look on the side?
November 12th, 2007 at 11:26 pm
it looks like you’d expect it to on the side I guess
November 13th, 2007 at 5:41 am
Small nitpick here… is there a command to change the “Date Added” to 2020 instead of “Date Modified” so we can keep the folder sorted by date added? If I download a file that was modified a month ago after one that was modified yesterday, for instance, it will be hidden behind the previous download.
November 14th, 2007 at 4:14 pm
Note you can CTRL-Click on the folder, and select “View As - Grid” instead of Fan, and get rid of the worst of the behaviour.
November 20th, 2007 at 5:09 pm
Great icon hack, at least now i know what the hell i’m looking at before i click blindly for my files. it’s completely inexcusable that they got rid of the one dock function i actually used that was helpful. i guess apple expected us all these years to either only use 10-12 apps (that would fit in the doc) or open up the Apps folder from the finder every time. I’m just hoping they bring the folder view into stacks with their next release.
December 5th, 2007 at 3:32 pm
The optica icons are no longer available on the .mac site. They’re available at http://optica-optima.blogspot.com/2007/11/drawers-icon-1.html
December 5th, 2007 at 3:49 pm
Thanks martin, I’ve updated the link to point to the new site in the post..
December 12th, 2007 at 3:56 pm
There is a very easy fix to make the pile appear with a folder icon in the dock. Just create a new folder named AAA that you add into the pile. Sort the pile by name and the folder will autoatically appear in the dock. You can even change the image of the folder before by replacing it by anything you want.
December 12th, 2007 at 3:59 pm
mark, which is exactly what you’re doing in the above example… you just touch the folder to a future date to keep it at the front of the stack
December 12th, 2007 at 4:01 pm
Sorry, Wrong. If you replace the icon by another one, it will automatically revert to the basic folder icon.
December 12th, 2007 at 4:10 pm
To Andrew: Something like that. Create a folder on your finder that you name 1a. And don’t call it AAA, as numbered files will get first, call it 1a and it will remain up front whatever you name the others.
Put it in the folder or pile that you want in the dock. Then sort the pile by name, and it will always appear with the folder first. Cheers, mark
December 12th, 2007 at 4:15 pm
mark.. not sure if i’m missing the point on your comment… you take a folder which has a icon attached to it, drop it into the folder the stack is assigned to, and then touch that folder to a date in the future, the folder with the new icon appears at the front of the stack with all other items behind it.. the items are still sorted in date order.
if you create a folder called ‘AAA’ change it’s icon and then sort by name, the stack will also show folder AAA at the front. I am talking about putting the changed folder INSIDE the folder that you stack; so my downloads folder has a folder in it.. touched to the future, with a download icon attached it it… my application folder has a folder inside it, touched to the future with a icon attached to it, I’ve not found any folder icons reverting back to default ones, regardless of the method used.. I did however find that leopard didnt seem to observe keeping the folder at the front without touching to the future and just relying on name…
unless i’m misunderstood both of your comments???
January 13th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
Hi, I managed to get this to work for Downloads and Documents but i cant get it to work for Applications or Volumes… I cant seem to get to the applications folder in terminal, the same goes for volumes. it tells me that there is “no such file or directory.” Any suggestions
January 13th, 2008 at 1:45 pm
Mat, you probably just forgot the ‘/’ int he change directory location. Terminal will log into your user account (say /Users/mat/) typing cd documents or cd downloads will work as it will take you directly into that folder (since they are under your user folder), Applications and Volumes however reside at the root directory level.. so you’ll need to type cd /Applications or cd /Volumes.. As you can see I’ve changed my Applications stack to have the icon…
hope that helps and I’m not teaching you to suck eggs !!!
January 13th, 2008 at 2:04 pm
that worked… i left out the “~” after cd and its perfect… thanks andrew… not teaching me to suck eggs at all…
March 6th, 2008 at 12:03 pm
This is a great idea! Apple should know about this… and adopt this.. With this trick the Dock is well organised. The original concept is just confusing…. Thanks!