Recent Things Dock Stack Revisited

I use the recent applications Dock stack more than I expected when I mentioned it a few weeks ago. So, for those wary of the command line, here’s a tiny application that adds a new “recent things” stack to your Dock.

Download “Add Recent Things Dock Stack.app” (208 KB)

Your Dock will be restarted, so any minimized windows will be revealed. It shows recent applications by default, but you can right-click its icon to choose to show recent documents or servers as well as favorite volumes or items. Mac OS X 10.5 is probably required.

Posted on Tuesday, November 18th, 2008.

Recent Things Dock Stacks

Hot on the heels of an alternative to opening things with the Dock comes this tip (via Mac OS X Hints) about a different way to open things with the Dock. Fire up Terminal and enter these lines to restart the Dock with a new “recent things” stack:

defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-others -array-add '{ "tile-data" = { "list-type" = 1; }; "tile-type" = "recents-tile"; }' killall Dock 

Right-click the stack to choose what sort of items to display:

Visit the Appearance system preferences to choose how many items are displayed for each of the “Recent” options. The “Favorite Volumes” option displays connected drives, and the “Favorite Items” option shows the “Places” listed in the Finder sidebar (which can include files and applications as well as folders, by the way).

Here’s an example of what you might see in a Recent Applications stack:

You can run the command more than once to create a couple instances of the stack – useful if you’d like to use more than one of the display options.

Posted on Saturday, September 13th, 2008.