Filed under: Software, Freeware
Hierarchical menus in the Leopard dock: 3 ways
Stacks is one of the selling points of Leopard, and many users love it. Many, but not all. If you'd like to use hierarchical menus in Leopard, try one of these three solutions.Quay 1.0 was released last week as shareware (here is our post about Quay). For €7, Quay provides custom-sorted hierarchical menus, re-sizable icons and a customizable dock icon. Undocumented APIs are not used, and Quay isn't a hack. If you only want to use one Quay Dock icon it is free, but you'll have to pay for the program to use two or more.
Also available is freeware HierarchicalDock by Eternal Storms Software. To create a hierarchical menu, simply drag a folder onto the application's icon. You can opt to preview your files with Quick Look instead of icons, and sort items by last used date or creation date.
Finally, check out OldFolder. It's free and open source, so you can fiddle around with it. Simply launch it and browse to the folder you'd like to use (support for multiple folders is possible, too).
There you go. Three ways to go "old school" on your dock. Enjoy.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Joshua Whitver said 5:27PM on 12-05-2007
Of course, the best way is for Apple to just fix the freaking Dock and bring them back.
Stacks and Hierarchical menus aren't mutually exclusive from a UI standpoint, so there's nothing that says they couldn't reappear in some future update.
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Joshua Ochs said 5:34PM on 12-05-2007
Unfortunately, there is something that says they can't appear - Steve.
Agreed that they could just add them to the right-click menu with no loss of functionality, usability, etc - they just clearly don't want to.
What's really interesting (to me at least) is that the developer releases supported drilling dow through stacks and folders, in a fashion somewhat similar to spring loaded folders. Sadly, this disappeared from later builds.
Jeff said 6:07PM on 12-05-2007
Related question...
Is there any way I can move folders to the right side of the divider in the dock?
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Charles said 6:20PM on 12-05-2007
I like hierarchical menus in the Dock, but only for launching apps. I still use the ancient utility Snard 1.5, the last freeware version before they went shareware, and the last version that worked as a Dock item. The current version 2.5.3 has gone a different direction but some users might like it.
http://www.gideonsoftworks.com/snard.html
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Mike said 7:52PM on 12-05-2007
I have another fix: go back to Tiger.
I tried Leopard for a week and saw NO benefit. The senseless eye candy is annoying, the new Finder is nice but I can live without it, and Time Machine... well, I have backup software that works just fine.
Leopard looks ugly and ran slower than Tiger on my 2.16ghz iMac. It's a real disappointment...
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Ed said 9:16PM on 12-05-2007
All I want for Christmas is a Heirarchial version of Stacks...
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brian said 10:17PM on 12-05-2007
Well, it only took Apple 2 or 3 years to quit making the puck mouse. There's hope. :-)
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peter said 4:14AM on 12-06-2007
and there's a fourth way :
http://stuntblog.com/
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Ethan said 8:17AM on 12-06-2007
There's no reason there can't be both.
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Paul said 9:58AM on 12-06-2007
Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! My dock is finally USABLE again!
I can't STAND stacks. Stupidest "innovation" ever. "Gee, let's take functionality away! That'll be great! iMovie was such a great success when we castrated it, so let's do the same to the Dock!"
Note the trend? Apple seems pretty keen on dumbing things down.
I'm pretty down on Leopard. I've already taken my PowerBook back to Tiger because Apple doesn't see fit to allow it to access wireless networks under 10.5, and I've been advising my customers to wait until the 10.5.5 release to go with it. If it wasn't such a hassle, I'd remove it from my G5 as well.
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MikeSerrano said 8:00PM on 12-07-2007
Unlike some of my fellow posters here, I am mostly positive on Leopard. The increased speed of Spotlight, Preview's new features (especially the ability to merge and rearrange PDF pages), and QuickLook alone are almost worth the price of admission. And on my humble 2GHz Dual Core Mac Mini with 2GB of RAM the GUI seems to have a bit more of "teh snappy" than Tiger did.
That is not to say that Leopard does not have its share of niggles, and I've been on a search for decent utility programs to workaround its annoyances.
I tried HierarchicalDock for awhile but didn't like how it would seemingly cause (at least on my system) the entire screen to change brightness every time I clicked on any of its Dock icons. I'm now using Quay and cannot report any problems.
As for some of the other annoyances, here are some of my current solutions:
Get rid of the translucent menu bar: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20071115135215262
Direct access to System Preference Panes:
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/20357&vid=134795
(note that PrefsMenu hasn't been updated since OS X 10.3, but it surprisingly works better in Leopard than it did in Tiger)
QuickLook Folder and Zip plugins:
http://www.tuaw.com/2007/11/27/quick-look-folder-and-zip-plugins/
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braintoniq said 1:05PM on 12-08-2007
Another fix that is rock solid in Leopard:
A-Dock
http://jerome.foucher.free.fr/ADock/ADock.html
I like Leopard a lot, but the remove of the hierarchical views and custom folder icons was a strange move. I use them every few minutes. But no worries, A-Dock brought them back, plus some more nice features.
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Chris M said 11:11PM on 12-12-2007
I really like the way stacks works. Spaces is also excellent.
I don't mind eye candy especially if it doesn't hurt system performance. Leopard is MUCH faster than tiger on my 24" iMac 2.16. If it running slower on your system I would wipe your system completely and reinstall.
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