A friend of mine recently made the jump from windows and bought a new 20″ iMac with a copy of Leopard. He has been impressed with his choice so far but a few things have been puzzling him.
Being a PC and Windows user for a good 20 years, the switch to the Mac has been a new experience for him, but he started with his old habits of creating Aliases (shortcuts as he likes to call them) on his Desktop, he had quite a few. He said when he put them in his Dock it got too small to tell what they were. He also had Word Documents, PowerPoint presentations etc. It was a mess, something which you would not expect to see on a Mac.
I told him to create a Folder in Documents called Stacks, and organize his apps into Folders named what they were related to. I started by showing him an example.
I created a Folder in Stacks called ‘iLife’ and copied all the Aliases from the Application relating to iLife into this Folder.
Once I had placed the Aliases into the ‘iLife’ Folder, I dragged the Folder onto the Dock to right of the dotted divider line. This placed the Folder ‘iLife’ as a Stack and allowed him to remove the Apps from the Dock making room for more Stacks.
When he moused over each Stack in the Dock, the name of that Stack appeared above it allowing him to know which was which. The only problem he found was the order in which some stacks would fan out were in an order he didn’t like.
After pondering over this for a few moments, I went into the ‘iLife’ Folder we had created and began to edit the names of the Aliases. I placed a number in front of each Alias, corresponding to the order in which he would like them to fan out from the Stack. I moused over the Stack and pressed Ctrl+Mouse Click (Right Click if enabled) and selected ‘Sort By’ and selected the ‘Name’ option. This organized the Stack into number order and looked the part.
After this he used the method I showed him to create more Stacks in the Dock and only has three Apps in the Dock which are not stacked, they are Finder, Dashboard and System Preferences. Now he has an organized Desktop and a Dock full of Stacks.
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