Improve your Stacks with some drawers
As noted in our recent (bad) little things about Leopard post, the dynamic Stacks icons are a bit of a pain. Basically the Dock icon for a Stack automatically changes to reflect whatever is first in that Stack (based on how it is sorted, by name, date, etc.). A clever Japanese user came up with a beautiful work-around for this annoyance with these lovely drawer icons, which is nicely explained for us Japanese-challenged folks here.
The idea is pretty simple. The icon pack features 18 custom drawer folders, and you just place whichever one you like in the Stack you want prettified. Then using a simple terminal command you change the date modified for that folder to well into the future (2020). Now when you sort the folder by date modified, the custom icon folder will always come up first and so give your Dock this great effect.
You can download the drawer icons here (download link) and the terminal jockeying is explained here.
Update: The original Japanese creator of these drawers wrote in to tell us that he's put up a "blank" drawer PNG (or right-click and download here). that you can use as the foundation of your own custom drawers.
Thanks to everyone who sent this in!
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 4)
Modano said 9:05AM on 11-13-2007
I downloaded these last night and they look great! FYI, they come with a modified date of 2010 so you don't really need to run the terminal commands at all. Finally, my dock is sensible again!
Reply
Matt said 9:16AM on 11-13-2007
I love it. I don't know why, but it always annoyed me that my address book appeared first for my apps.
Reply
Ozbone said 9:18AM on 11-13-2007
That is brilliant! And so simple. Thanks !!
Reply
craig said 9:30AM on 11-13-2007
This is not working for me... Sorting by Date Modified is not changing the front item in the stack.
geigh...
any ideas?
Reply
Paul said 9:31AM on 11-13-2007
I do something considerably more low-tech.
I just created a new folder in, say, Applications that was named with a couple of spaces, then copied the icon from the actual Applications folder, and pasted it as the icon of my blank folder. Then I sort by name, it shows up first, and all the other icons behind it.
You might need to do a killall dock to get the new icon to show correctly, but at least everything looks like it's in some kind of representative folder.
These look cooler though.
Reply
Rattboi said 12:58AM on 11-15-2007
It works really well for Grids, but in Fan mode, you just permanently lost your first icon. Not a huge deal, but it might be annoying if you're already used to downloading stuff and clicking the first link in the list.
Reply
Leonard Nimrod said 9:50AM on 11-13-2007
Very nice. I'm certain that Apple has already seen these and is already working on a way of adding this feature to Leopard that doesn't require an image to sit in the stacked folder.
Reply
Andrew said 9:49AM on 11-13-2007
In the words of James May, "It's an ingenious solution to a problem that should never have existed!"
Reply
Shreedhan said 9:53AM on 11-13-2007
If only there was someway to hide the icon so it doesn't show when you open the stack, i don't think it's possible cos the stack is designed to show what's in that particular folder lol
Reply
Joseph Crawford said 9:56AM on 11-13-2007
I agree this problem should not have existed. THis is a good work around and I have it implemented using a folder with the name 0. However the one thing that I do not like is the fact that the icon folder shows in the stacks. I tried making it hidden by naming it .0/ but it didn't show as the stack icon then.
Guess we just have to deal with it like this. Many props to the guy who figured this out it really is a good work around. I would just like to see an icon in the set for Volumes ;)
Reply
BMW328i said 10:00AM on 11-13-2007
Actually, all you really need to do is drop the icon in the folder of choice and then just rename it to "00", without the quotes of course :)
Reply
akatsuki said 10:18AM on 11-13-2007
Better yet, paste the icon onto an alias of the folder it is in and touch the alias to be modified later. This lets you click on the box icon to get to the folder and puts it first in the list rather than last.
Reply
pedro said 10:19AM on 11-13-2007
I just wish we had the option to go back to the original way of the springing docks, or at LEAST have the option of navigable stacks! I always used to put my applications folder in the menu for quick access to that and the utilities folder, but now I have to put BOTH folders in the dock so that I don't have to open a finder window to get to utilities.
Reply
Wysiwyg said 10:23AM on 11-13-2007
You could use zeros to name the folder, but i prefer to use spaces (the big flat key in the keyboard, not the virtual desktops). It gets the file to the top of the list without the need of awkward names that start with @ or 0.
Reply
Panathas17 said 10:23AM on 11-13-2007
Cool, looks way better now!
Reply
Rboyett said 10:35AM on 11-13-2007
So now are stacks have trays.
I'm looking at a stack of papers in a tray on my desk and I'm wonder, WTF didn't I think of that :)
Brilliant!
Reply
Pete Zich said 10:26AM on 11-13-2007
It would be awesome if we could get another folder to stay the 5th (or something like that) to last modified so there could be a back and make the sides work better, but that would need some rather annoying scripting and the dock would probably have to be killed regularly.
Reply
Brychanus said 10:27AM on 11-13-2007
For those unsatisfied with the selection available in the first ZIP file, go to the original (Japanese) site and feel your way to the download links. There is a second set of icons (DRAWERS_icon_#2) but for some reason every English re-post I've seen has ignored them.
Reply
Todd Dominey said 10:44AM on 11-13-2007
The whole concept of swapping out the stack icon with the latest file is just stupid. I get the general idea of what Apple was trying to accomplish, for if you had a bunch of stacks and each were a generic folder icon, you wouldn't be able to tell which folder was which (unless of course you moused-over the stack to see the tool tip). But the issue is that the content preview is so large it completely masks the folder underneath (especially at small sizes) so it looks like a document -- not a stack.
Reply
Fernando said 10:44AM on 11-13-2007
I had my own personal fix for the applications stack, renamed a icon-less app with a name starting with zero, and now the stack shows a generic app icon...
btw, can someone mirror the .zip, for some reason, .mac sites time out when I try to load them, since I installed leopard
Reply