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Overlay Drawers onto Your Dock's Stacks
Posted by Gina Trapani at 9:00 AM on November 14, 2007
Mac OS X Leopard only: One of the nice things about Stacks—or annoying things, depending on how you look at it—is that the topmost document icon appears on your Dock, instead of an indicator of which folder contains it. To solve this problem, the icon designer at Optica Optima's offering a set of icons for download that add a drawer-like image to your Stacks. The screenshot above displays the Downloads, Applications, and Documents folders as Stacks sporting the drawer icons. Pretty! To add the icons to your Stacks, just download and unzip the package, and move the appropriate icon to the folder. For more fun along the same lines, here's how to add custom icons for your Mac hard drives.
Tags: downloads | icons | leopard | mac | mac osx leopard | osx leopard | top
Comments (AU Comments · US Comments)
There are currently no AU comments for this post.
Van Mardian
Posted 12:30 AM 14/11/07
I haven't figured out a way to make the icon file invisible to the Finder, but at the very least, you can lock the file (Get Info > Lock) such that you can do a Select-All + Delete without having to worry about your icon file. When it gets to your locked file it will give you a dialogue box that says "Item [filename] is locked. Do you want to move it to the Trash anyway?" with options "Skip", "Stop", and "Continue".
Van Mardian
samuraispy
Posted 12:13 AM 14/11/07
Doesn't this display the icon along with your other items when you expand the stack?
samuraispy
thirdopticaltool
Posted 11:49 PM 13/11/07
@BITFACTORY: You absolutely do not need to Killall Dock for this to work.
anyway, i did this a few days ago, and I love it.
Changing the date modified to way out in the future is a little wonky, because their directions are a little off (and changing names will reset the date modified) but this is great for my downloads stack, and looks so much nicer!
(These "overlays" are really well designed icons!)
I hope someday Apple decides to make an overlay an option out of the box.
thirdopticaltool
rknight
Posted 9:57 PM 13/11/07
Honestly I hate that feature of the stacks, I think it makes the dock look so messy, but in an attempt to make it work for me, I made stacks of the software "suites" I use (i.e. iWork, iLife, FinalCut Studio, CS3, Office). Then to "cover up" the Apps' icons, I made an icon based on the boxes for those suites. For the most part it covers up the other icons, giving some consistency to the dock, and the icon graphically represents the apps stored in that stack.
That's just my personal way, works for me anyway.
BTW, nice icons and idea, kudos to the designer.
rknight
da5id_nz
Posted 8:06 PM 13/11/07
Ps, while I was at the above link I discovered another link so that you can have Leopard-style stacks in your Windows Rocketdock or Object Dock.
Check it out here. (you also need to download KK Menu which is FREE).
da5id_nz
da5id_nz
Posted 7:56 PM 13/11/07
The guy over at OSX-E has also made .PNG files out of these so they can be used with RocketDock et al.
I haven't tried on my ObjectDock yet, so not sure how it works.
da5id_nz
dorylomorphs
Posted 7:28 PM 13/11/07
This is definitely an upgrade. Now if we can get it to where the icons didnt show up when you opened the stack!
dorylomorphs
primitiveworker
Posted 7:06 PM 13/11/07
those characters were supposed to say "fix the"
primitiveworker
primitiveworker
Posted 7:05 PM 13/11/07
I used this tip to fix the problem of looking at stacks, but haven't figured out how to fix the problem of using stacks.
primitiveworker
nikoPSK
Posted 6:23 PM 13/11/07
Nice, this'll go great with my hackintosh... :P
nikoPSK
bitfactory
Posted 6:21 PM 13/11/07
Also - you won't see it right away after you drop the folders where they need to go. Just relaunch the dock using this command in the terminal...
killall Dock
... and they'll show up immediately.
Very cool addition.
bitfactory
Gina Trapani, Lifehacker Editor
Posted 6:12 PM 13/11/07
@OriginalGabriel: Oops, thanks for the catch.
Gina Trapani, Lifehacker Editor
OriginalGabriel
Posted 5:54 PM 13/11/07
"One of the nice things", not "once of the nice things"
:P
OriginalGabriel
Unseen Vision
Posted 5:31 PM 13/11/07
Oh! Very nice. I'm going to add them right now.
Unseen Vision
Sang
Posted 1:31 AM 14/11/07
nice.. i heard many complaints about mac Stacks and this is definitely helpful..
I also heard some people complain about how they can't just click the folder on their dock to open it in finder like in Tiger. If you make an alias to that folder and drag the alias to the dock, you can click it to open the corresponding folder in Finder.
Sang
Gonzie
Posted 6:49 AM 14/11/07
looks good, just wish Apple had implemented something similar and made stacks more useful
Gonzie
dorylomorphs
Posted 9:07 AM 14/11/07
@samuraispy: Yes the icon displays when you expand the stack. In fan mode, it displays on the bottom. In grid mode, the icon displays in the top left corner.
dorylomorphs
mkyb14
Posted 7:02 PM 15/11/07
does anyone know how they made the folder icons? I couldn't google a solution.
I'm looking to make personal logo's for other folder's that I have!
Thanks
mkyb14
mahuti
Posted 2:35 AM 14/11/07
I made an automator action to simplify the date changing process. Just drag and drop any file onto the action, and it'll set the date modified to 2020. Click the link below to download it.
[barrettnewton.com]
mahuti
mkyb14
Posted 1:42 AM 14/11/07
I need more specific directions ... like do I need to copy the images to a folder somewhere like where the dock icons are? or does doing the command copy them there automatically...
otherwise the folder of icons is located in my downloads folder and I would just run the command with the new folder always residing in my stack... is there a way to make it so that I don't have to copy the "download" folder to each section I want it?
did that make sense? like when I modifyied the dock I replaced the old image with the new black triangle..
mkyb14