November 12, 2007
Badge your Stacks with translucent icons
Posted Nov. 12, ’07, 10:13 AM PT by Dan Moren
Category | Tips
Do you dislike homogeneity with a passion? Sick of the fact that Leopard’s new Stacks features can turn all the folders in your Dock into mindless, faceless, indistinguishable little icons? There are, of course, easy if kludgy ways to fix this: you can drop the icon of your choice into the folder and rename it so that it appears at the top (put a space at the beginning of the name, for example).
But come on, we’re Mac users—what about style? Fortunately, the clever mind behind the optica optima blog has created a set of slick translucent icons that make it easy to tell your folders apart. To me, this seems like one of those things that Apple should have thought of when creating Stacks in the first place.
I only use two Stacks in my Dock currently: Applications and Downloads. While this trick works a treat for Applications, my Downloads folder is organized by Date Added, meaning that the most recent added file shows up on top, which kind of makes this hack impractical. To the rescue comes the XD blog, which points out that by entering one simple command in Terminal, you can fudge the icon’s date added to some point far, far in the future (by which point Apple will have hopefully rethought Stacks entirely). Nice.
You know, between the Dock, the translucent menubar, and now Stacks, it seems like more time is being spent undoing Apple’s interface changes in Leopard. Has OS X jumped the shark?
Update: As reader Kevin points out below, in order for the Downloads trick to work, you’ll need to have the Stack sorted by Date Modified, not Date Added.
[via Daring Fireball]
6 Comments
Leave a comment
Recent Entries
About MacUser
MacUser is your source for news, info, and opinion about Apple, the Mac, and the iPod. Our dedicated team of bloggers covers everything that is relevant to Mac users — and, okay, some stuff that’s not quite relevant, but is still a lot of fun.
Subscribe/RSS
- Blog Posts
- Blog Comments
- Podcast (RSS) (iTunes)
Tip us off!
- Email: macuser [at] macuser [dot] com
Recent Comments 
- the truth on iPod touch users get second classed again with the omission of new Maps features
- James Katt on Apple levels DMCA on iPodhash project
- AdamC on Apple levels DMCA on iPodhash project
- sf addict on Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes afoot at MacUser
- Paul Norton on iPod touch users get second classed again with the omission of new Maps features
- me on iPod touch users get second classed again with the omission of new Maps features
Categories
- Apple (234)
- Advertising (162)
- Events (235)
- Huh? (182)
- Humor (259)
- News (148)
- People (258)
- Rivals (405)
- Speculation (167)
- Steve Jobs (172)
- Stores (206)
- Apple TV (58)
- Business (451)
- Games (143)
- Geekery (460)
- Hardware (935)
- Accessories (79)
- Intel Macs (162)
- Ihnatko (18)
- Internet (463)
- Legal (244)
- MacUser (95)
- Macalope (8)
- Money (177)
- Music (344)
- Podcasting (100)
- Photography (74)
- Security (246)
- Software (1544)
- Updates (538)
- Tips (352)
- Troubleshooting (189)
- Video (403)
- Windows (219)
- iPhone (199)
- iPod (602)
- iPod Accessories (96)
- iPod Software (61)
- iTunes (128)
- iTunes Store (443)
Archives
- November 2008 (92)
- October 2008 (138)
- September 2008 (151)
- August 2008 (177)
- July 2008 (175)
- June 2008 (171)
- May 2008 (185)
- April 2008 (234)
- March 2008 (217)
- February 2008 (215)
- January 2008 (239)
- December 2007 (169)
- November 2007 (164)
- October 2007 (187)
- September 2007 (167)
- August 2007 (195)
- July 2007 (152)
- June 2007 (223)
- May 2007 (243)
- April 2007 (286)
- March 2007 (288)
- February 2007 (250)
- January 2007 (266)
- December 2006 (244)
- November 2006 (293)
- October 2006 (307)
- September 2006 (250)
- August 2006 (268)
- July 2006 (288)
- June 2006 (293)
- May 2006 (297)
- April 2006 (351)
- March 2006 (366)
- February 2006 (110)
- January 2006 (107)
- December 2005 (23)
Mac Publishing Sites
Links
What an awesome suggestion! This worked perfectly.
I agree, this is the way Apple should've made those icons.
Thanks!
These icons are the perfect solution until Apple updates Stack's customization.
Unless I missed something the "one simple command" changes the modification time of the icon which means that your Downloads folder needs to be changed to sort by Date Modified as opposed to Date Added. I think its a limitation of the 'touch' command: you can't change the actual creation time of the icon. Its annoying, but IMO the pretty icons are worth it. I'm keeping my eye pealed for Date Added fix/hack.
Awesome, thanks. Did it and love it.
The files are already saved as though they were modified 1/1/2010, so you don't have to do anything.
i really dont see what all the fuss is about over the dock and menubar. i think they're friggin nice!!! makin this comment just to balance out all the bad stuff thats being said..