Hi Erik,
I'm late in posting back on this, but I wanted to point you to the
reply I made to Chris earlier this week about options for putting
things in the dock. There's an automator workflow based on
additemtodock that you can get at Tim Kilburns' downloads page for
VoiceOver:
http://homepage.mac.com/kilburns/voiceover/downloads.html
It's basically just an AppleScript wrapper around the command -- and
incidentally, you can put shell scripts into Automator this way as an
alternative to using the command line in terminal in some instances.
The automator of version for putting items in the dock lets you work
from Finder and use the GUI. The option to send things to the dock
now appears as another item in the contextual menu (or, in the case of
Leopard, the "more" submenu). This workflow works for both Tiger and
Leopard, but for Tiger it adds support for hierarchical menus for
folders placed in the dock. This is a very fast way to navigate down
a folder "tree" in complex directories, because all the menu and
submenu items are referenced by their aliases. That means that when
you're browsing for a file several levels deep, you don't actually
have to "move" through the various subfolders to get to it. In Tiger
I use this as an alternative and super fast way to navigate and play
my podcasts (whose folder has been placed in the dock with the
Automator workflow). They "play" in iTunes, but I can also access
them from the docked folder, and menu navigation is really fast. (This
is NOT the same as show the folder in Finder; I can do that, too, but
that won't give me the fast, hierarchical menu navigation). Leopard
doesn't support hierarchical folders in the dock - it's one of the
complaints people had. However, if they bring this back, the
Automator workflow will support it. I had used additemtodock by
itself, and I couldn't get the hierarchical menu structure that people
who do regular drag and drop could get under Tiger. A Google search
brought up the additions that needed to be made to enable aliasing and
to use the POSIX path for files.
HTH
Cheers,
Esther
On Sep 24, 2008, at 9:35 AM, erik burggraaf wrote:
It's called add item to dock, and it's an open source command line
tool for local and network deployment of dock shortcuts. It worked
great. Just run to a terminal and type additemtodock /path/
filename.ext and wam... There it is. I can even get the things to
open if I choose open from their context menu, but nothing so far
has done it with a key press.
Insidentally, I can get them to open from finder by pressing command
O on them.
Best,
erik burggraaf
