How to Easily Keep a Constant Dock Icon in Leopard’s Stacks
Sure, I’ve gotten annoyed by the eyesore of Leopard’s new Stacks feature. Looks like a jumbled mess and since the icons change based on the contents, it’s hard to tell the Stacks apart if you have multiple Stacks without constant icons. I briefly read over the modified date hack to keep a constant icon and it seems like a hassle. I wanted something quick and easy to implement so I figured out a better way. Here’s an easy tip for creating a static icon (or custom icon) at the front of the Stack.
Myself, I have four Stacks in the Dock:
When clicking on the Stack, I think the trick becomes pretty clear, as seen here
(pic 2).
This trick is simply achieved by creating a folder within the folder you intend to use as a Stack and change its name to a space character. After that, just do a Cmd+I (Get Info) on the icon you’d like to use, select the icon, copy it (cmd+c) then Get Info again on the new folder and paste the icon onto the existing folder icon. Voila! new constant icon (pic 3).
The only drawback here is you can’t sort the Stack by anything except “Name” because it will obviously sort to whatever matches that criteria. I prefer sorting by name anyway so this works out great for me and I hope it works for you too.