Hierarchy

November 14, 2007

As I mentioned yesterday, one of the changes in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard that I didn’t like is that the new “Stacks” functionality in the Dock took away the ability to right-click on a docked folder and see a hierarchical menu with the contents of the folder and its subfolders.

I’ve been working for the past week on a little application that has that functionality. When launched, it displays a little palette that folders (or whatever) can be dragged onto, and then right-clicking will open up the hierarchical menu that I miss from previous versions of Mac OS X. Left-clicking will open the folder in the Finder.

This is a 1.0, and it’s the first Cocoa project of mine that I’ve released, so I’m sure there will be bugs. The drag-and-drop is definitely a little kludgy. But I’m releasing it as freeware, and I’ll keep working on it to make it a little more elegant. In the meantime, I hope Apple restores the original functionality to the Dock in a 10.5.x release so I don’t have to rely on another application.

Hierarchy v1.0 can be downloaded here. I’d be happy to hear about bugs and/or feature requests.