10.5: Create a System Preferences Stack

Nov 05, '07 07:30:04AM

Contributed by: kostia

Now that I have to live without Fruit Menu (nothing Unsanity writes is yet Leopard-compatible) I found myself missing a cascading System Preferences menu.

To replicate it, I made a folder and dragged in aliases to all my frequently used preference panes. The panes are located in each of these locations (for some reason, some panes appear multiple places):

I created a folder (I keep it in my home directory, but it can be anywhere) called System Preferences to hold these aliases, and I dragged that folder to the right side of the Dock. Lo and behold, a cascading System Preferences menu. Right-clicking on the Stack lets you decide if it should be a fan or a grid (though a fan is limited in how many icons it shows).

The icon of a Stack is literally a stack of the icons of the first few items in the folder; in my case, it was the layered icons for the preference panes for Accounts, Appearance, and Bluetooth. I found that ugly so I made an alias to the System Preferences application itself in the folder, too. I put a space at the start of this new alias's name so it would alphabetize first. Now the icon for the Stack is still a stack, but the top icon on the stack is System Preferences itself.

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