Well… I’ve been a OS X Leopard user for a good few months now, and I remember a while back when Apple released info about Leopard and all the features that it would include. Back then, one thing in particular caught my eye, this was the Stacks feature! I remember reading about it and thinking… hhmmm ‘I would find that really useful!’, a simple addition to the ever so popular Dock that surely would do nothing but increase functionality! Anyways, time dragged and dragged until the day finally arrived and I was sliding my Leopard disc into my MacBook ready to begin – wooohoo! I have to be honest, since my install back in November, I have rarely used the Stacks on my Dock, and in fact, I get slightly frustrated by the appearance of them! Personally, I think Apple could of done slightly better in allowing its users to customize the look and feel more. The most frustrating thing for me is not been able to change the look of how it appears on the dock, for example if you have the stack’s contents organized by name first, then which ever icon is listed first will appear front most and be visible to the user on the dock. Okay this may not sound like a huge problem at all, but I am one of these people who likes his desktop to look just right, and this doesn’t cut it for me.

I decided I would start strawling the net in search for a better solution! Knowing how programs like CandyBar allow its users to pretty much Tweak the majority of the interface I figured chances are that there will be someone out there who has the same opinion of me and has had chance to fix it! Well… Luck me! I’m not sure who first figured this little trick out but the files (which will be mentioned shortly) are for download on a crazy Japanese site, so I guess credit would go to the far east somewere! well done.

The simple trick in a nutshell is to add an Icon image to the Stack’s folder, then following the next few steps ensure this icon image always appears at the front of the stack, therefore making it appear on the doc. Now thankfully some genius has created two sets of Icon’s available for free download here. Once you have downloaded a pack, open the .dmg file up and copy the icon set to a location on your machine. Now find an appropriate icon for your Stack and copy it into the Stack’s folder. Once this is done, you have two options, you can either rename the icon to the number zero, or you can modify the time stamp of the file. To do the later, enter the following command in a Terminal…

cd -/FOLDER-NAME

touch -mt 202001010101.01 “ICON FILE NAME”

Ensuring that the Folder Name/Icon File Name attributes are modified depending on which stack and icon you are using! This will set the icon file’s time stamp to January 2020! Now right click on the Stack in the Dock and select Sort by Date Created. Which ever method you used above, the both work in the same way! Once you have completed that step you will notice the change in appearance on the Dock, see below…

The image above shows my current stacks located on my Dock, from left to right I have my External HDD, My Applications, and my Downloads. As you can clearly appreciate they look much better! Also you may have noticed I have a Stack for my Applications, well this contains the applications that I only use occasionally, ones that I don’t have room for on my actual Dock. To do this yourself, it is fairly simple and effective way of finding your extra applications faster. Follow the steps below…

• Go to your Applications Folder
• Highlight all the applications that you want to show in the Applications Stack
• Right click on these applications and select ‘Make Alias’, this is the equivalent of creating a shortcut in Windows
• Now move these Alias files to a separate folder
• Drag this folder to the Dock, Wallaaaa

You should hopefully have something that looks like this below on your own dock:

I hope this is useful to you, I only figured how to do this myself and I have been using Leopard for a while now! very handy if your like me and have limited space on my MacBook’s Dock that you don’t wish to clutter up with Applications your only using now and again!

My opinion of Stacks upon making these changes has greatly improved, I hope I have done the same for you!