A Simple Hack To Fix Leopard's Stacks

The stacks icons I've found all have a mod date of 11/12/07--is there perhaps another location that has the icons with the future modification date?

It's easy to change the mod date of an icon on your system, as long as Terminal doesn't give you the willies.

Navigate to the folder in which the icon resides, using the cd command, then use a command of this form:

touch -mt 202001010101.01 Documents

In the default configuration as shipped, opening Terminal will stick you in the home folder for your account; using

ls

to show the contents of that folder will give you what you need to use cd to move to other folders, that and the lovely

cd ..

command, which'll move you up one level in the folder hierarchy.

The one thing I've found about this hack is that you need to remember to always keep your folders sorted by date. If you often resort, like I apparently do, by name or kind, your icon disappears until you resort by date.

+ Michael -- _________________________________________________ Michael J. Tardiff mjttaoproductions.com Seattle, Washington USA

Don't know about magic but what I don't see in your screenshot is the drawer icon on the folder "Download itself, either in the stack or the Finder list. Basically all this hack does is force a folder/file with the appropriate icon to be the first displayed item in the stack and therefore be the one displayed most prominently in the Dock. Either re-copy the Download folder from the collection or do a get info on it, copy the icon, do a get info on your Download folder and paste it.

--
Michael
----------------------------------------------------------------
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

cuz I find it funny

On Nov 16, 2007, at 9:26 AM, Dan Butcher wrote:

The stacks icons I've found all have a mod date of 11/12/07--is there perhaps another location that has the icons with the future modification date?

Easy to fix. Honest, don't let the fact you must use Terminal get you worried.

1). Open "Terminal" and type the following followed by a space, but DO NOT PRESS THE RETURN KEY:

$ touch 1231235920

The number after the touch command is the date. It is in the MMDDhhmmYY format. This represents December 31, 2020 at 11:59pm.

2). Now drag the file you need to change the date from the Finder window to the Terminal window. The name of the file will be automatically displayed in the terminal window. The command line will look something like this:

$ touch 1231235920 /Users/david/Documents/\ Documents\

Now, press <RETURN>. That's all there is to it.

David Weintraub

On Nov 17, 2007, at 7:14 AM, mjt wrote:

> The stacks icons I've found all have a mod date of 11/12/07--is
> there
> perhaps another location that has the icons with the future
> modification
> date?
>
> It's easy to change the mod date of an icon on your system, as long
> as Terminal doesn't give you the willies.
>
> Navigate to the folder in which the icon resides, using the cd
> command, then use a command of this form:
>
> touch -mt 202001010101.01 Documents

Be very careful with this! The Documents folder you want to change
contains a space before and after the name of the folder. The correct
command would be:

touch -mt 2020010101001.01 ' Documents '

Doing it without the quotes will create an empty file called
"Documents" with the date.

I've already replied showing a slightly easier way of doing this
(dropping the name of the folder into the Terminal will give it the
full path name and prefixes all spaces with a backslash. The backslash
tells the terminal the next character is part of the file name.)

David Weintraub

I love those little drawers and know how to put them in front of a stack by changing the modification date. But this doesn't work with the downloads stack – which is the only stack I use at the moment. The download stack is sorted by date added and I wonder where this information is stored (it is not an extended file attribute) and how I could change this.

An idea anyone?

Stefan

On 4-Dec-2007, at 07:19, Stefan Neumärker wrote:
> I love those little drawers and know how to put them in front of a
> stack by changing the modification date. But this doesn't work with
> the downloads stack – which is the only stack I use at the moment.
> The download stack is sorted by date added and I wonder where this
> information is stored (it is not an extended file attribute) and how
> I could change this.

rclick on stack -> Sort By => "Date Modified" || "Date Created"

On 2007-12-05, at 03:19, Stefan Neumärker wrote:

> But this doesn't work with the downloads stack – which is the only
> stack I use at the moment. The download stack is sorted by date
> added and I wonder where this information is stored (it is not an
> extended file attribute) and how I could change this.

I'm guessing it's not really 'date added' but 'order added', which is
in the SQLite database ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.db.

I added add1 and add2 to my download folder then copied the db:

$ sqlite3 /Users/tom/Desktop/com.apple.dock.db

sqlite> .tables
directories files

sqlite> .dump files
BEGIN TRANSACTION;
CREATE TABLE files (name VARCHAR NOT NULL, filesystemid INTEGER,
directory_id INTEGER, ordering INTEGER);
INSERT INTO "files" VALUES('add1',8318035,1,1);
INSERT INTO "files" VALUES('add2',8318046,1,2);
CREATE INDEX files_index on files (name, filesystemid, directory_id,
ordering);
COMMIT;

I wouldn't recommend editing this file (I took a copy) as you may
conflict with the Dock.

David Weintraub
qazwartgmail.com

Actually, the 'Date added' sort-by option is not just the unix mtime. I have experimented myself: I have the cool translucent icons, which work fine for my Applications and Document drawers, which are sorted by name and date modified (respectively). However my Downloads stack--containing a ' Downloads ' file having a modified date far in the future--looks fine at first, but as soon as you add a new file, the new file's icon moves in front. The only way to fix this problem is to change the sort by to Date Modified. Unfortunately, this does not work for downloads, which may have varying modified dates depending on when they were created by the application developer, *not* when you downloaded them.

On Dec 14, 2007 9:24 AM, Solomon Ford <solomonfordgmail.com> wrote:
> Actually, the 'Date added' sort-by option is not just the unix mtime. I have experimented myself:
> I have the cool translucent icons, which work fine for my Applications and Document drawers,
> which are sorted by name and date modified (respectively). However my Downloads stack--containing a '
> Downloads ' file having a modified date far in the future--looks fine at first, but as soon as you add a new file, the
> new file's icon moves in front. The only way to fix this problem is to change the sort by to Date Modified.
> Unfortunately, this does not work for downloads, which may have varying modified dates depending on when
> they were created by the application developer, *not* when you downloaded them.

Could be "ctime" or "atime" instead of "mtime"? Both of those can be
set with the Unix "touch" command.

I have the translucent draw icons on my Downloads stack, and it works
great with the modification time set. Hmm... maybe it's not modtime,
but name I have it sorted? Better check).

Wish I could do something with the Recent Application Stack I added.


--
David Weintraub
qazwartgmail.com

On Dec 15, 2007, at 3:46 AM, David Weintraub wrote:

> On Dec 14, 2007 9:24 AM, Solomon Ford <solomonfordgmail.com> wrote:
>> Actually, the 'Date added' sort-by option is not just the unix
>> mtime. I have experimented myself:
>> I have the cool translucent icons, which work fine for my
>> Applications and Document drawers,
>> which are sorted by name and date modified (respectively). However
>> my Downloads stack--containing a '
>> Downloads ' file having a modified date far in the future--looks
>> fine at first, but as soon as you add a new file, the
>> new file's icon moves in front. The only way to fix this problem is
>> to change the sort by to Date Modified.
>> Unfortunately, this does not work for downloads, which may have
>> varying modified dates depending on when
>> they were created by the application developer, *not* when you
>> downloaded them.
>
> Could be "ctime" or "atime" instead of "mtime"? Both of those can be
> set with the Unix "touch" command.
>
> I have the translucent draw icons on my Downloads stack, and it works
> great with the modification time set. Hmm... maybe it's not modtime,
> but name I have it sorted? Better check).
>
> Wish I could do something with the Recent Application Stack I added.

Keep in mind that (something in) Leopard knows the date/time of the
download and the source URL. That's how it warns that you're about to
open a downloaded app. The Downloads stack seems to be special-cased
in terms of ordering. (I continue to use Leopard as-shipped with
respect to stacks.)

(Time of start of download? end of download? I really haven't paid
attention.)

The downloaded file knowledge does not stay with the file when it
moves via AFP to another Mac. (Per experimented...I wasn't sure
whether it would or not.) The knowledge also doesn't travel with a
FAT-32 USB drive (not at all surprising).

   --John

I'm having a problem with these icon drawer apps. When I download, they all appear to be Classic apps. I'm running Leopard, of course; no Classic! So, how could this ever work? Or what is my problem?