My copy of the newly-released Mac OS X Leopard arrived on my desk on launch day before I even got to work. I resisted installing it until I could update my system back-up that night, but at this point I’ve been using the new operating system for a full 48 hours. Aside from a couple of apps needing updates, the upgrade has been a blissfully uneventful experience.
Thanks to the pervasive tweaks to the user experience in Leopard, using my Mac is a more uniformly pleasant experience … with one major exception: the display of docked folders (now called “Stacks”). Thankfully, I’ve found a work-around.
As explained in detail in Ars Technica‘s excellent review of Leopard, folders placed on Leopard’s Dock will only display their icon when they are empty. For folders with files in them, the icons of the folders’ contents are stacked one on top of the other to produce, in the vast majority of cases, a completely useless result.
In the above screenshot from the Ars Technica review, the folder on the far left is the user’s Home directory. What is displayed is a stack of folder icons, with the front-most icon that of the Desktop folder. At a glance, then, the Home folder looks like the Desktop folder when placed on the dock. The other folders that you would typically expect to find on the dock are similarly difficult to identify.
The most convincing example from the article is the following screenshot, which shows the Downloads folder (containing a disk image) sitting next to an actual disk image on the Dock. Can you tell which is which?
And of course, there is no preference (hidden or otherwise) to control this icon insanity.
Thankfully, after dealing with this horrendous situation for 48 hours, I’ve found a work-around that restores (mostly) the pre-Leopard behaviour of docked folders. Instead of placing the folder itself in the Dock, create an alias to the folder, and place that on the Dock.
Here’s the procedure in detail:
- In your Home folder, create a new folder named Dock Aliases.
- One at a time, Cmd-Option-Drag each of your “special” folders (Applications, Documents, etc.) into the Dock Aliases folder, to create aliases there.
- Open the Dock Aliases folder. You should see the aliases you created. You can tell them apart from the originals by the little black arrow in the bottom-left-hand corner of each icon.
- One at a time, drag each of the folders you want to your Dock.
Here’s what you’ll end up with:
Clicking on any of these docked aliases will open the corresponding folder in a Finder window. The only thing missing from the pre-Leopard behaviour is the ability to browse through the folders by right-clicking them.
Ideally, one could choose to benefit from the Fan and Grid views provided by stacks without having to live with the horrendous Dock icons, but at least this work-around gives you one more choice than Apple saw fit to provide!
and then, go get some REAL folder icons from iconfactory or something.
I worked around it by setting each Docked folder to sort by Name, and then adding an icon file to each folder named “ • Stack Icon”. The extra space at the beginning appears to be necessary, as Stacks seem to sort differently from Finder windows.
The icon gets placed on a white background, which is not necessarily the most attractive thing in the world for the Dock, but it retains the fan or grid behavior and differentiates it well from minimized windows.
I would have thought even rudimentary user testing would have brought this up as a problem.
you can drag the alias file into the corresponding folders, name it with some space/underscores/AAAAA’s, sort by name and then you get the stack behavior with the proper icon.
I have 4 HD’s in my Mac Pro. They show up a dumb folders in my Dock.
Unfortunately, there seems to be no way round this with ‘aliases’.
I cannot believe how many of Apple’s own UIG’s the new Dock violates.
Really, as someone who used folder the Dock for quick directory access, Leopard’s Dock has really slowed me down. If only there were a way of reverting to 10.4′s Dock.
All I ever wanted was 10.4′s Dock plus spring-loaded folders, and rather like the devil in Bedazzled (not the dismal remake) Apple have made me regret what I wished for.
Plus the indistinguishable new folders are an incongruity.
You may like to give overlays a try, nice looking draws that the icons poke out of
http://t.ecksdee.org/post/19001860
I seem to be the odd-man out. I like the way the folders work in the dock (except for the well named “Icon Madness”). With one exception, all the folders I put in the dock contained aliases for applications — the folders just grouped them in a useful way (and I only put frequently used applications’ aliases in these folders). I then trashed every application icon I could from the dock (leaving the Finder and the Trash).
Every now and again I accidently “Opened” one of these folders — now I don’t have to worry about that. The one exception is a “shared folder” — shared with Windows XP using Parallels Desktop. Now it takes an extra click to open it. Hardly a problem.
I like the way the stacks “open” — I guess because I’m getting older, I find the big icons make it easy to select an application.
I’m going to try the Icon work-around (putting a carefully-named icon in the folder).
dude, THANK YOU.
i’m very visual. the new nondescript or piled-up icons were making my head hurt. your fix has saved me.
[it DOES seem supremely un-Apple of Apple to make such a mess of the UI, doesn't it? i just don't get it. shall we start the countdown until they fix this?]
Very pretty solution using semi-translucent folder icons (from a Japanese guy) go check
http://t.ecksdee.org/post/19001860
for the English language version.
It is awesome! and much more Apple-ish than Apple’s! really really pretty!
OMG THANK YOU! the clicking on a folder in the dock to open the folder problem has been annoying me since i upgraded. now if only i could get back the spacebar jumps to the first item in a list function. . . .
Hello,
I don’t mean to ruin all your glory but here is a no nuff and apple way to do this.
And it open’s as a stack and all sorts, doesn’t change anything except the icon…
Right click your stack / folder and click
“Display As > Folder”
This makes the icon the folder icon, not the “stack” contents.
Hope this helps anyone
Hello,
I am having a similar problem to what was discussed above. As Tom suggested, going to “Display As> Folder” fixes the problem. However! When I return to OS X after a shutdown, the dock folder displays the icon for the first item in that folder! I can go back in, do the display as folder trick again.. but it doesn’t remain permanent.
One thought though.. anyone else out there with this problem using TinkerTools? I’m not saying there is a link.. I’m just wondering if maybe there is.
Good luck, never despair!
Hello,
I got the same problem as Steven March. I changed the Icon of a folder I placed in the dock. The icon shows up properly but as soon as I shut down or restart the mac, the normal blue folder icon shows up. In Finder though the changed icon is still there. So I have to click on the dock folder to uncheck “show as folder” and check it again.
Does anyone know how to fix this?
Thanks.
All you have to do is put an image with transparency in the folder. Set the modified date to 2100 and it will always be on top if you have ‘order by date’. If you have ‘order by name’ then call the image file ‘ animagefile’.
I’m not sure if I understand you correctly jim, but I think you’re referring to the show as staple function. But I’m using the show as folder function. The replaced icon just doesn’t show after a restart. As if the dock doesn’t remember what icon to show.
The specs:
macbook 2,4 with 10.5.7
Well, just to let anyone who was interested in my prob, know. I solved it by removing folder with the changed icon from the dock and put it back in. Seems like Leopard can’t remember a changed icon of a folder in the dock when its already in the dock while changing it. If you remove the folder from the dock before changing it and you put it back in after you replaced the icon then Leopard will remember the replaced icon even after a restart. At least so it was with my macbook. (It only appeared with the “show as folder” option, not with “show as staple”.
Have a beautiful time…
After all this I”m still not happy with it. I have 3 folders on an external drive, connected via FireWire 800. No matter what I do I cannot get these folders to load the folder icon at startup. Evertime I reboot I have to right click on them and click “Stack” and then “Folder”. Anyone seen a fix for this?
After writing that last message I had an epiphany.
Try a linux solution…
So I started terminal, and typed this.
mkdir dock_icons
cd dock_icons
ln -s /Volumes/ExternalHD/MIS MIS
ln -s /Volumes/ExternalHD/Forms Forms
This makes a folder to keep you organized, and then a you use good old command link program to create an alias that isn’t a GUI alias. You type first what you want it to point to, and then what you want it named.
So in my case I had an external volume named ExternalHD, so /Volumes/ExternalHD/MIS, and MIS is the folder that I wanted to link to , and MIS is the link name that I wanted to give it.
It copies whatever Icon you have set for the folder to this new link, and whenever you drag it to the Dock it shows that icon sans “shorcut arrow”.
Be the Mac!
God Bless!
P.S. you still have to right click on them once you’ve dragged them to you dock and click “Folder”
The only simple thing that works was Tom Arnfeld’s suggestion above.
You change your folder icon’s:
Cmd-i on each folder,
cmd-c to copy any graphic
cmd-v paste the graphic in the upper left icon visible in your cmd-i window
Then, in you dock, do exactly as Tom Arnfeld has said.
Great site! Thanks so much for posting it! Keep up the awesome work!
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