A tip published in December of 2000 pointed out that the System Preference panels are stored in /System/Library/Preferences. At that time, about all that was said about this was that you could double-click an individual pane, or drop the panes into the dock for fast access. For some reason, I failed to mention that you could also drop the entire folder into the dock for easy pop-up access to any individual preference panel, as seen here. I use this and the Volumes in Dock pop-up to make navigating to prefs and hard drives quite easy.
There are three ways to get the pop-up in your dock...
EASIEST: In the Finder, click on your OS X hard drive, then the System folder, then the Library folder, then the Preferences folder. Drag this to the dock. You now have a prefs pop-up, but it doesn't have a custom icon, and everything is named with ".Preference" at the end of it.
HARDER: As before, highlight the Preferences panel, but now cmd-opt-drag it to your home folder. Then highlight the System Prefs application in the Applications folder and copy the icon. Select your new shortcut and paste the icon. Drag the new shortcut to the dock. Now you have a custom icon, but you still have ".Preference" after each item.
HARDEST (but still easy): Create a new folder in your home directory (or wherever you have write access), and name it with the words you'd like to see when you roll over it in the dock. I used "SysPrefs". Open a new Finder window and navigate to the /System/Library/Preferences folder again. This time, select all the prefs files inside of the folder, and cmd-opt-drag them to your new SysPrefs folder. Edit each new shortcut name in SysPrefs to remove the ".Preference" ending, and copy/paste the System Prefs application icon as in the "Harder" method. Drag this folder to the dock, and you'll see the results pictured here.
Note that the custom icon will NOT survive restarts in 10.0.4; you'll have to re-drag the customized folder in each time you restart. Hopefully 10.1 will address this issue.
•
[2,751 views]

