In my inaugural Leopard Feature Presentation on the New User Interface & Dock, I may have been a bit harsh on much of the new interface, but the wonderful Mac community have continued to come out with ways to rectify many of Leopard’s shortcomings. This morning, TUAW blogged about an incredible new way to dress up your stacks. Now, I didn’t come down too harshly on Stacks, which does seem like kind of a neat idea, although its implementation seems limited and I miss the ability to right-click on a folder in the Dock and get a browse-through menu. But one of the quirks of Stacks is that the icon for a stack is the icon of the item in the top of the stack, which often can misrepresent the stack or make it appear odd. For example, if you put a stack of your Home folder in the Dock, the top icon would be the folder icon for your Desktop! Seem a little strange?

This morning, TUAW blogged about some designers who have come up with some really cool designs for “Stacks drawers”, which are little folder overlays which you can set to automatically appear at the top of your stack, include the general icon of the stack you want, and appear as a little translucent drawer that still let you see the icons behind it. (You can see a screenshot, along with downloads and further instructions in the linked TUAW post.) The download includes drawers with icons suited for your Home, Library, Downloads, Applications, Desktop, Documents, Public, Utilities, Photos, Movies, and Music folders. You also get some additional “novelty” drawers with the shadow person used for Accounts, the @ for bookmarks, the action button gear, the Command key icon, an envelope for Mail, a check mark for to-dos, the “i” for Information, and even Apple’s sideways version of the Windows logo as seen in Boot Camp. (And, of course, there’s a generic drawer with no icon on it.) And of course, what’s to stop other graphic designers from making their own?

The icons are actually folders that you place inside the folder that you want a stack of. The names, by default, have spaces on either end of them so that they appear at the top of stacks that are sorted by name. For Stacks that are sorted by date, however (like the Downloads stack, for example), the TUAW post links to some Terminal-fu that you can use to set the date modified of a folder to the year 2020 so it always appears at the top of the stack.

One minor quirk that I had with this technique is that the name of the icon can’t be identical to the name of the stack it’s housing–once you change it, it works fine. You’ll also have to get used to the fact that when you open the drawer/stack, the drawer icon also comes along for the ride, but I think that the presence of those icons now to remind me of exactly what stack I’m looking at just looks so cool, and makes Stacks more useful. Now let’s hope that Apple offers something like this built-in, without the need to add folder icons to make it work…

Tags: customization, Dock, hack, icons, Mac OS X Leopard, Stacks, Terminal