TMO Quick Tip - Leopard: Regaining the Dock's Hierarchical Menus

by , 7:30 AM EST, December 28th, 2007

Mac OS X 10.5 added some great features, but it took away a few, too. One feature I sorely miss from Tiger is the ability to display hierarchical menus in the Dock. That amazingly handy feature was replaced in Leopard with Stacks -- useful in its own way, but not a tool that fits my style. Thanks to the efforts of third party developers, however, my beloved hierarchical menus live on in Leopard.

One application that returns hierarchical menus to Leopard's Dock is the free HierarchicalDock from Eternal Storms Software. This app creates special folder icons for your Dock that act like the hierarchical menus from pre-Leopard days. Just drag a folder into the HierarchicalDock window, and then drag it to your Dock.

Leopard's Stacks...

HierarchicalDock lets you display folder contents alphabetically, by creation date, or last date used. It also supports displaying folder contents with Quick Look icons.

...and HierarchicalDock's menus.

Leopard's Stacks features is nice, but if you rely on pop-up folder menus in the Dock for navigating regularly used directories, HierarchicalDock adds back a feature that many users -- including me -- just can't seem to live without.

Jeff Gamet is TMO's Morning Editor and Reviews Editor. He lectures, teaches and speaks on Mac OS X and design-related topics, and is the author of The Designer's Guide to Mac OS X from Peachpit Press.

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