Leopard Dock annoyances and workarounds

There have already been numerous complaints about the Dock in Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), most of them surfacing before the OS upgrade was released in final form. Now that Leopard Dock behavior is concrete, two primary functional (not aesthetic) annoyances -- all related to the way the Dock handles folders -- remain:

1. Hierarchy gone You can no longer access the hierarchy of a folder stored in the Dock. Instead of a pop-up listing of folder contents that can be navigated in hierarchical fashion, the only options are "Fan" or "Grid." "Fan" shows up to 11 items contained in the folder, with an option to go to the Finder to see the rest of the items. "Grid" shows a more complete picture of what's inside a folder, but still doesn't allow for navigation to sub-folders contained therein.

Solution: Use DragThing This third-party Dock replacement retains the hierarchical navigation functionality now missing from Leopard's Dock. It's $29 shareware, and includes a bunch of other nifty functions like the ability to create multiple docks, store clippings and images, and can put the Trash icon on your desktop.

2. Custom icons ignored As noted by MacFixIt reader Scott Rose, when you drag a folder into the Leopard dock that already has a custom icon associated with it, the dock now ignores that folder's custom icon. Instead, it gives you the custom icon of the first custom icon (alphabetically) of the item inside that folder.

Solution: Trick the folder Scott also offers a clever, if tedious, workaround: "The only way to fix this is to create a special folder called "_1" inside that folder and paste in the very same custom icon that the parent folder has for its icon."

Feedback? Late-breakers@macfixit.com.

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