According to Macenstein, Apple’s upcoming 10.5.2 release of Leopard will restore hierarchical menus to the Dock. My holiday wishes have come true! Users will no longer need to run a third-party application like Hierarchy to get back the functionality that shouldn’t have been removed from the Dock in the first place.

I’ll probably be putting out one more release of Hierarchy to fix a couple of issues until 10.5.2 comes out sometime in January, but at that point I’ll shut it down and get going on some other Mac freeware projects that I’m working on. Thanks to everybody who tried and enjoyed Hierarchy.

It’s amazing how cheap RAM is now. I just bought two 2 GB memory modules from Other World Computing for $120, and, mixing and matching the new modules with the two 1 GB modules that were already in the iMac, boosted both the iMac and the new MacBook up to 3 GB. (Between what came out of the iMac and the MacBook, I now have four 512 MB unused modules hanging around the house.)

I noticed that some of the Leopard animations are less-than-snappy on the MacBook (for example, when I open up the Applications stack in grid view, it stutters a couple times during the animation). I was hopeful that maybe the extra memory would make a difference, but no such luck, so apparently that’s just a result of the MacBook’s on-board video. Too bad. (Kind of strange that Apple would include animations that don’t look perfect on its state-of-the-art shipping machines, though. This MacBook came with Leopard pre-installed.) Exposé and some of the other cool animations work great; so far, it’s only the stacks grid view that seems to hesitate.

I’d upgraded the RAM on the iMac before, but this was my first time opening the RAM access door on a MacBook (come to think of it, it was the first time I’d even opened the battery compartment). It was easy. The video provided by OWC also was helpful (and I didn’t realize that it’d be that easy to replace the hard drive in the MacBook, if I someday desire).

Thanks OWC! This is the second time I’ve bought memory from them, and they’re two for two. The prices are great. I highly recommend them to anybody looking for Mac memory.

I’ve just released Hierarchy v1.0.4. The major change, taking care of the most common feature request in user feedback, is that you now have the choice between a horizontal or a vertical orientation for the Hierarchy palette. There are a couple of other minor bug fixes, including:

• Single-clicking an icon (to launch it) is less sensitive to accidental drag motions.
• It takes less time for the hierarchical menu to appear when clicking-and-holding.
• Minor polish on the overall look-and-feel.

Considering that Hierarchy began as a personal project to make myself more proficient at Objective C and the Cocoa APIs, it’s really gratifying that there have been already 1,300 downloads since I put up the first version four days ago, and there has been lots of positive feedback and interest in new features. (I realize that this is more indicative of the level of frustration with Leopard’s crippling of the Dock than of my elite programming skills, but happily I’ll take it anyway.)

Thanks again, and as always, please feel free to send me bug reports, feature requests, and other feedback.

Thanks again to everybody who has already downloaded Hierarchy, and especially thanks to those who have sent me feedback and feature requests. It’s fun to know that the app is so useful for so many.

I’ve just released a new version, v1.0.3, which includes three of the most requested new features:

• Support for Spaces — the Hierarchy palette now shows up on all Spaces.
• Icons — the hierarchical menus now have small icons representing the files and folders.
• Aliases of folders are now recognized as folders within the menus, complete with their own submenus.

Another highly requested feature is the choice to make the palette horizontal — that is not in this update yet, because it’s going to take some rewriting, but it’s coming as soon as I can get it in there.

In addition to those added features above, I’ve also added automatic updates (so you’ll be notified when a new version of Hierarchy is released, if you choose).

Again, please get in touch with me at software at charlesorourke dot com if you have any questions, feedback, feature requests, or bug reports.

Thank you to everybody who already downloaded and tried out Hierarchy — I’ve already received some great feedback, and released an update (v1.0.2) that implemented some of the suggestions:

• Fixed some of the rough edges around drag-and-drop and palette resizing.
• Clicking on folders in the menus now opens those folders in the Finder.
• Lift-click-and-hold now also opens the menu, along with right-clicking and control-clicking.
• Removed unnecessary “Quit” button; closing the palette closes the application.

I had a v1.0.1 up for a few minutes, but unfortunately it introduces a new bug (left clicking on the icons wouldn’t open the folder anymore) so if you have that, you want 1.0.2.

I’m working on the next version now and trying to include as many of your suggestions as I can. Please keep them coming!

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.