AppMenuBoy Restores Tiger's Folder Behavior in the Dock

AppMenuBoy by David Phillip Oster of the Google Mac Team restores the Tiger behavior of folders in the Dock, showing only applications, following aliases and so on. More than that, if a folder contains only an application, AppMenuBoy silently "hoists" that application in the menu so you don't have hierarchical menus that contain only a single icon. AppMenuBoy is free to download.

Put in the simplest words possible, AppMenuBoy allows you to quickly get at all your applications directly from the Dock. "Back in the days of Mac OS X Tiger (10.4), you could drag your Applications folder to the Dock and get a nice menu of your applications there," says David Phillip Oster of the Google Mac Team. "If you had any folders in the applications folder, you'd get hierarchical submenus in the Dock's Applications menu. Apple turned this feature off in Leopard (10.5), replacing it with a simpler, less capable version. It came back partially in 10.5.2, when Apple added a list view for the Applications menu and other folders you add to the Dock."

To correct this, or better yet, to put an older, but useful feature back into place, "AppMenuBoy restores the Tiger behavior plus a little more: it shows only applications, follows aliases, and if a folder contains only an application, it silently 'hoists' that application in the menu so you don't have hierarchical menus that contain only a single icon," David Phillip Oster assures.

Of course, as our testers noted, you can achieve the same effect in OS X 10.5.2 by dragging the Applications folder on the Dock and selecting the "List" option in the right-click menu. AppMenuBoy allows users to have a quick list of all the installed apps on their Mac, easily accessible from the Dock.

So basically, AppMenuBoy ultimately does what it's supposed to do, but it's not exactly a must-have for users of OS X 10.5.2 or later, since Apple has already added this feature in the Dock's preferences.