Leopard Stacks and the Applications folder
29 October 2007 9:29 am UTC
Important update: There are now two proper solutions to the Stacks fiasco. Either install the 10.5.2 update or install Quay. You do not need to use my application.
Leopard arrived with one major irritation: you can no longer drag a folder to the Dock and have its contents appear in a popup menu. This bugged me so much I couldn’t enjoy any of the great new features. So I whipped up a workaround to use until somebody comes up with a better idea.
The problem is Stacks. In the good old days myself and, oh, I guess, ten million other users would drag the Applications folder to the right side of the Dock. A simple right-click would produce a menu that traversed the folder and its subfolders, giving us a super quick and simple way of launching any application. Whenever I set up OS X, the very first thing I would do was to drag the Apps folder to the Dock.
You can still do that, except that now they are presented as Stacks. I won’t rant about Stacks in general here except to say that they don’t work very well for launching applications. The fan display isn’t big enough to show all the apps, and the grid display uses giant-size icons that make it difficult to locate quickly the app you want. The Dock icon is overlaid with the first app’s icon, so you see the Address Book icon instead the Applications folder icon. And for apps in the Utilities folder, forget it; you might as well just go through the Finder in the first place.
Yuk.
Yuk yuk.
I wrote a little application that does nothing except sit in the Dock and provide a menu of the contents of the Applications folder. When it is running, its icon changes from the generic application icon to the Leopard Applications folder icon. Once you’ve configured it, its Dock menu will provide a hierarchical menu of applications you can launch, similar to what we enjoyed pre-Leopard.
Yippee!
This is a quick-and-dirty alpha amateur hobbyist kludge no-promises-made use-as-your-own-risk application. I’m sure somebody will soon come up with a better solution.
Download the application here. Or, if you prefer, download the source project.
If you try this, please let me know how it works for you. If there’s anything wrong with it I want to fix it.
Important update: There are now two proper solutions to the Stacks fiasco. Either install the 10.5.2 update or install Quay. You do not need to use my application.
Leave a Comment
29 October 2007 1:50 pm
wow – can’t wait to try this -I’ve been searching for a simple solution like this all weekend! thanks! can’t believe Apple didn’t put more work into Stacks – hierarchical functionality should have been included in the first place
Kevin
30 October 2007 4:40 am
Hi, you might also be interested in HimmelBar, which works similar to this, except it places a button in the menu bar, instead of the dock.
Link
Ross, your app does look good though. Any chance of adding icons to that menu? =D
Warwick Brown
30 October 2007 10:16 am
Adding icons to a Dock menu has not been possible in OS X, but I have not yet checked whether this has changed in Leopard. I intend to.
I hope to have an update available later today that will at least fix the issue many people are having with the app not responding. I’ll add features as quickly as I can, or until somebody comes up with a better solution.
Ross
3 November 2007 2:53 pm
Is there any chance that you’ll create something that will allow users to choose other folders to view using a list? This is how I access essentially all the files on my computers, and from what I’ve seen, Stacks is going to be a major PITA.
Joel
3 November 2007 7:16 pm
Joel, I’ve just about got a revised application ready to upload. It’s designed to work as an application launcher only. It’s unlikely that I will figure out something that can be used for other folders. The only practical way to make that work is to build the menu as the user mouses over each subfolder. But the only application that is capable of doing that is the Dock, because the Dock receives all the menu events, and is selective about what it sends to the underlying application; it tells the app only when the user has selected a menu item, not when the user has moused over an item.
Ross
5 November 2007 12:02 pm
Amazing! I’ve been searching everywhere for a solution like this ever since I first installed 10.5. For a ‘quick-fix’ solution this is as good as I could have hoped. Thanks so much.
Matt
5 November 2007 5:22 pm
I love you!!!
Thank you.
barone rosso
6 November 2007 10:09 am
Great application. I’m looking for a similar one but for a specific folder other than applications (favorites, for example). Any suggestion ?
Xabier
6 November 2007 3:15 pm
Xabier, I don’t know of anything yet, nor have I figured out how to make one. I hope somebody does, however.
Ross
6 November 2007 4:43 pm
Oh man, I can’t believe I found this- the answer to all my gripes of Spaces! Thank you so much for programming this. A side note, I tried duplicating the program to give me additional instances of the program for other folders but that did not work. I’d love to get this to be able to do multiple folders as i have about 5 on my dock that I need hierarchal menus for.
Ted
7 November 2007 5:02 am
Great idea, although a little late for me. I was so astounded at the imbecility of removing hierarchical menus from the dock that I spent a lot of time researching answers to this, rather than exploring Leopard, or doing any work. In the end, I shelled out $29 on an application called DragThing. I thoroughly recommend it. It’s amazingly flexible. You can have as many docks as want, all over the place. Little ones for specific projects, docks of apps, docks of favourite URLs, all sorts of things. And yes, you can have a dock with you applications folder in it, and you can navigate through the hierarchical menus. And the hierarcical menus work for your document folders as well.
Creating this app is still worthwhile, as sometimes the simple little solution is best. But if you want to really explore what’s possible with docks, check out DragThing. (I’m not in any way associated with DragThing, btw.)
Simon T
7 November 2007 11:47 am
Thanks! This will be a very handy tool. Appreciate the effort.
Marc Orchant
10 November 2007 8:19 am
Thanks for this! Like you Stacks does not work well with viewing ALL your apps.
Blake Brannon
18 November 2007 9:48 pm
This is cool, I’m running Leopard on a Mac G4 and so it’s not powerful enough to do stacks…This is actually better because it’s like the Windows start menu, like what I’m used to!
Pudnik
25 November 2007 8:01 am
Hi, i really love this app, its seem to works just fine it almost works like dockExtender.
In future version, if you plan on making, it would be nice to the app icon and the possibility of have more than 1 folder in the dock. Thanks
ferna
26 November 2007 9:42 am
Try launching apps with Spotlight and forget about using the Dock for launching apps. With Leopard, Spotlight is SO MUCH FASTER that I’m using it all the time for launching apps. It’s actually designed for it! Just hit Cmd-Space and type “te” to lauch the Terminal or “wo” to lauch Word. Works great!
Marc van Maastricht
2 December 2007 11:37 pm
Thank you so much. Works great.
David Zelman
5 December 2007 2:28 am
I think this is a great little tool. I would *love* it if it supported icons as well.
Nice work
oubiwann
14 December 2007 12:05 am
Hi Ross, you fill perfectly that leack within Leopard’s dock! Just one suggestion (maybe 2). Couldn’t the displayed window for entering the root folder be move in your application preference in the menu bar (I see that we can hide it). Icon display would be also nice. But it’s not a big deal. By the way than many thanks for your great job. Merci beaucoup!!!
Fanfan
14 December 2007 10:59 am
I’m gratified that people are still finding DockAppsMenu useful. But I suppose I should reiterate that I stopped working on it, and in fact do not use it myself, because I consider Quay a far superior solution.
Ross
12 February 2008 1:06 pm
Thanks for saving me from several months of frustration. Mental note to self – “I owe Ross Carter a beer or job or something.” I like to think someone at Apple looked at this page and decided enough people were annoyed that this fix needed to be in 10.5.2.
Joseph
20 February 2008 6:23 am
Im a new mac user so forgive me if this is dumb but if you drag the applications folder to the dock then right click it and select “list” it produces the applications in a list like your screenshot.
Geoff
20 February 2008 9:13 am
Geoff, you’ve installed the 10.5.2 update, which restores the functionality we lost in 10.5.0. Solutions like DockAppsMenu were intended to provide some relief until Apple fixed the situation, as they have now done.
Ross