Filed under: Productivity, Leopard
Hierarchical browsing work-arounds
One of the bigger annoyances many folks have complained about with Leopard is the loss of hierarchical file browsing of folders in the Dock. Of course in Leopard you get Stacks, with all their fancy fanning and gridding, but you lose the ability to right-click a folder and dig into the sub-folders. As a solution/work-around many folks have suggested the venerable Dock replacement Drag Thing. But it has a lot more features and at $29 is a bit of overkill just to get that one feature back. So instead, you might have a look at the free Hierarchy from Charles O'Rourke.Hierarchy is a dead simple application. All it does is create a little floating HUD-style vertical palette onto which you can drop your folders. Clicking on those folders opens them in the Finder, but better yet right-click generates the old Tiger-style hierarchical menus. Of course, this adds another (potentially annoying) palette window to your desktop, but it does a good job at its small task.
Hierarchy is a free download from Charles O'Rourke.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
shakdang said 11:17AM on 11-15-2007
oh wow! .. what a gem!
I think I've just found my second favorite freeware app ... after quicksilver ofcourse.
kudos to the developer ... and yeah would appreciate if this software is made more flexible in the future by giving user more control over views (horizontal perhaps?), themes/skins etc.
fuse it with the feature to hold the minimized windows and I'll be very tempted to claim this software as a very very decent dock replacement.
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drew said 11:46AM on 11-15-2007
Butler (http://www.manytricks.com/butler/) allows you to add folders/disks/whathaveyou as menu items or in it's little floating dock. It's a great tool for all sorts of things and is donation-ware at this point at least.
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Greg G said 5:35PM on 11-15-2007
Wait, what? You can't right click a folder and go through it from the dock?
Damn, that sucks.
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Mike said 11:50AM on 11-15-2007
Or, you could use my favorite little utility that I've been using since my OS 9 days -- FinderPop. Long live Turly!
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fab said 11:54AM on 11-15-2007
Another (better) solution is A-Dock X (http://jerome.foucher.free.fr/ADockX/ADockX.html). It's a tiny app which offer another Dock (the basic look is the same as tiger, but you can change it), and among many other things, it provide hierarchical menu. Try it, this app really works well !
F.
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stainboy said 12:05PM on 11-15-2007
free is great...but DragThing gives you so much more for the money. i've been using it for years and love it!
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Paul said 12:31PM on 11-15-2007
@ Mike
FinderPop is broken under Leopard, or at least I've not been able to get it to work at all on my three Macs. I hope it comes back soon, because I pretty much do all my work through it.
Alas
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Chuck said 12:58PM on 11-15-2007
There might be a (cough!) beta (cough!) version of Finderpop that works well under Leopard. Stay tuned.
BTW, Folderglance is very similar to FP and already works under Leopard. These two utils, IMHO, are much better than either hierarchical menus in the dock or the other alternatives. Like Quicksilver, FP and FG are utterly invisible until you need them, they appear on command, do what's needed and then vanish. Perfect.
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Rainer Brockerhoff said 1:42PM on 11-15-2007
I'm working on one of those myself, should be out over the weekend in a public beta. The URL will be http://www.brockerhoff.net/quay in case anyone will want to check it out later ;-)
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Jettyboy said 1:31PM on 11-15-2007
I,ve found that this un-obtrusive little menu bar app works great for what so many folks want to see. I've used it since Panther, and it still works as normal on Leopard,and it's free. Check it out here:http://softbend.free.fr/himmelbar/
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ili said 1:54PM on 11-15-2007
I found Himmelbar to work fine, but it allows u to add only one extra folder to its defaults, and that's plain dumb!!!
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ili said 2:21PM on 11-15-2007
And as for Hierarchy it's sweet as hell but it doesn't open a folder in a tree when you click on it, it only opens files...
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Max Mellman said 3:24PM on 11-15-2007
Nah, dude, you just have to right click on it and it'll give you the tree view. Just like the dock used to.
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Charles O'Rourke said 4:52PM on 11-15-2007
There's a v1.0.2 posted now that opens folders in the tree, along with making the drag and drop a little smoother, and adding click-and-hold to get the menu. Check it out if you have v1.0!
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Nate LaCourse said 5:29PM on 11-15-2007
The strange thing is that Stacks worked differently in seeds of Leopard from this past summer. In Grid view, clicking on a folder within a stack transformed the stack into the folder you just clicked on. In essence, you could drill-down (but not back up) folder hierarchies with stacks. And my menu bar was transparent with these builds, whereas with the retail version it isn't (though I'm not complaining about that).
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colin said 5:09PM on 11-15-2007
I wouldn't ever consider living without Max Menus (http://www.proteron.com/maxmenus/) and although it says that it is ready for Tiger, I've had no problems running it under Leopard.
First off, gives you the ability to hot-key anything, apps, docs or folders.
Second, you can hot-key spring up folders. So, for example, I have made a custom pop-up menu which contains my drive and my home folder. I hotkey this and bind that hotkey to my mouse. So, with one button click I have an instant pop-up menu and I can navigate through my drive or, very quickly, through my home folder.
Check it out - I can't imagine anyone being disappointed with it.
And no, I don't work for them but I've had a license for Max Menus for years.
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Twist said 11:01PM on 11-15-2007
I am another MaxMenu's supporter. Though I suggest iKey for a keyboard based launcher since MaxMenu's is rather basic.
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Wissig said 7:00AM on 11-16-2007
First thing I did was get rid of my Stacks folder. Bleccchhhh!
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NightOne said 4:07PM on 11-16-2007
I want my Tiger Finder Sidebar back. Not digging the Leopard ones with the tiny iTunes interface icons.
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