BrockLi Soup

Remember when I was complaining yesterday about the dock in 10.5.2? Well don’t I feel silly.

I guess I didn’t really bother looking for an answer, because 30 seconds on Google got me a forum thread about this very subject. To use the folder’s icon in the dock, you just need to remove it and re-add it to the dock, or switch it from folder view to stack view and back again. For some reason though, restarting the machine won’t do it (I tried that first, just in case).

And since I didn’t describe it well, this is what I had to start with:

And this is what I’ve got now:

The Finances icon was made for me by the lovely and talented Sarah Friedlander, and I made the Atheist icon using the same tool she did, Can Combine Icons.

MacTipcs .org has an article about the new Stacks features that came with the latest update to OS X. The big thing everyone has been talking about is the ability to display a folder as a folder when you’ve got it in your dock. Up until now, a lot of people have been using the method explained here: basically, put an icon file in the folder you’re going to put in the dock, and it will appear at the front of the stack.

Now, the folders in the dock will actually look like folders. This is a start, but it would be a lot better if they actually used the folder’s icon. For example, I’ve got two folders in my dock: Atheism and Finances. I want icons for each dock item to make it clear which is which - an X icon (or something else) for Atheism, and a dollar symbol for Finances. I was accomplishing this by dropping icons in those folders so that they would appear at the top of the stack, but it’s not an ideal solution. Now that the dock can display these as folders, I would rather use that for consistency.

The problem is that they just look like folders in the dock. I mean, in a perfect world, the Finances folder would have a dollar symbol on it, just like the Applications, Documents, Music, and other folders in OS X have icons to denote what they’re for. So I put an icon on the Finances folder, but alas, the icon isn’t used in the dock; it’s still just a boring folder. Everything else in the dock has the right icon - why not my stack folders?