Leppard introduced a bunch of new things to the user experience, in particular the Dock and the Finder. I like a lot of them, but some of them piss me off (and friends of mine, such as the Funny Little Man) something fierce. Today’s topic of discussion: Stacks.
Issue 1: If you have a folder filled with Apps, and some of them are subdirectories? You can’t squirrel down into them any further to actually launch the application. Basically, you can use springloaded folders to drag items into a nested folder, but you can’t access the contents of those nested folders just with the mouse. You have to click on the folder, then let it launch in the Finder, at which point you can find the app itself and double click.
Issue 2: Good Lord, who decided that you shouldn’t be able to just have a folder look like a folder in the Dock? The idea that the icons change and reflect what’s inside of them is nifty and all, but a UI that changes like that makes it really hard to know what’s what when you’re actually *using* the OS. I’m betting that this one was all Steve.
A workaround to the Problem:
Stacks sorted by Name (such as Applications, Documents, etc) – For folders that are sorted by name, you just create an empty file in the directory. (Go into Terminal and type “touch
Stacks sorted by other criteria (such as Downloads) – This is a bit trickier, since you’re having to manipulate metadata to force the icon-ized file to the top of the stack. Do the same as you did for the previous example, with a little bit of trickery to accompany it. I wrote a quick little AppleScript droplet to torque the ‘mod date’ metadata for the file:
on open files_
repeat with file_ in files_
tell application “Finder”
set modification date of file_ to date “Sunday, January 1, 2012 12:00:00 AM”
end tell
end repeat
end open
1. Touch an empty file on your desktop, and place it inside your Downloads directory (or inside whatever Stack that’s going to bear it’s icon).
2. Name it whatever you want (I used the spaces at the beginning just to always sort it to the top of the list when looking at it in Finder)
3. Give it whatever pretty icon you want. I’d recommend InterfaceLift as a good start.
4. Drop the dummy icon-creating file on the applescript. Watch the modification date get changed to the year 2012. Keep in mind that if you actually change the name of the file, move it, etc… the mod date will change to now. So you’ll have to drop it on the script again.
Anyway, like I said… cludgy, but it works. And it gives me a good bit of what I really want from my Dock and Stacks in Leppard.
NP: Dethklok, “Thunderhorse”
