Leopard's Stacks - here's how to make it better

One of Leopard’s new features is Stacks. Stacks let you place any folder into the Dock and clicking on it will spring the contents of the folder in a Grid or a Fan. It’s quite visually pleasing, but it’s gotten some flack because you can’t assign an icon to a Stack. Instead, the icon would be of the latest file in the folder. And that makes it rather difficult to distinguish between different Stacks.

So... how do I tell which Stack is my Downloads folder?

Thanks to Optica Optima, my Stacks now look like this.

Visually distinct Stacks, and the translucency is very attractive.

Here's how we do it. Before we proceed, we should define the Sort behaviour of the Stacks. So right click (or command click) on the Stack, and sort by date modified.

Get the icons from this link. The page is in Japanese, but you shouldn’t have any problem finding the link to download the icons.

Choose the icon we want, and place it into the Downloads directory. In the example below I’ve renamed the icon to download_icon. Since we want the latest item to be displayed first in a Stack, we’re going to use the Unix touch command to set the modification date to somewhere in the future. So fire up Terminal, and enter the following commands.

cd Downloads

touch –mt 202001010101.01 download_icon

This will change the modified date of the download_icon to the year 2020, January 1^st, 1:01:01 am.

You can do this for other Stacks in the same manner.

I found out about this from Daring Fireball.

Update:

There's a second set of icons for Stacks. And this time, the icon's modified dates have already been set to the year 2010. So all you need to do is to sort the Stacks by modified date, and forget about the Terminal.

All the icons can be downloaded from optima-optica.