*** Hierarchical dock folders are back!!!!!

Question

Just posted and it works!!!
http://www.eternalstorms.at/utilities/hierdock/
Sweeeet!!!!!!!

Answer 1

It seems to do the job, has icons in the hierarchical lists (which is nice), and does it all through a novel approach. Here's how it works:
You launch the app and drag a folder ("X") onto the open app window. The app creates a document ("X.essdocker") in the Application Support folder, and presents an icon for this document in the app window. When you drag the icon to the Dock (to the right of the divider, where it belongs) it stays there and acts more or less like a pre-Leopard folder.
I say "more or less" because there is an important difference. Before Leopard you would right-click to display a hierarchical listing of folder contents, or left-click to open the folder. With this app you left-click to display the hierarchical listing, and you can't open the folder by clicking on it (you have to use the open command displayed at the bottom of the hierarchical list). This difference could be a bit of a pain if you've got (for example) Tiger and Leopard systems running side-by-side on your desk and would prefer to have some consistency between them.
(Speaking of consistency, the idea of double-clicking on the folders to open them is not a preferable solution to the problem. Double-clicking is something we do with folders in the Finder; there should be no need to double-click anything in the dock.)
There are a couple of other small things that bothered me about the app. Even if there is no chance of getting the app to respond properly to right- and left-clicks, it may be possible to polish these other points:
First, I was wondering why the icon in the dock needs to have the ".essdocker" extension in its name. It seems to me that the application should be able to remove this extension from the item name even if it is needed for the document in the Application Support folder.
Second, I noticed that when I click on the dock to display the hierarchical list, the entire screen of my iMac suddenly gets a bit brighter. It stays that way while the list is displayed, and goes back to normal when I select something. I'm not sure why this happens, and it can be considered a minor cosmetic flaw, but it's one of those things (like unnecessarily loud Finder sounds) that can get to be quite irritating over the long term.
Third, I'm wondering if the ".esshelper" document is a pointer to the folder it's based on, or if it's a snapshot of that folder at a particular point in time. If it's the latter, then this program won't be very useful for folders whose contents change frequently. This is a question I can easily test for myself; I brought it up because it leads into the last thing I'd like to mention:
Finally, the app came with no documentation to speak of. I understand why Eternal Storms is in a rush to get this released: it's something a lot of people really need. But I'd really like to see just a little documentation explaining what the program does and how it works, so I'll know where to look in the event that problems should start happening.
I've taken the time to describe the application and mention a few points that merit further work because I think Eternal Storms has got a good idea here that could be made even better. It's better than OldFolder in two ways: (1) you don't have to run multiple copies of the app to have more than one hierarchical folder in your dock, and (2) the folders appear in the right-hand side of the dock, where they belong.
(See http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1233191 for OldFolder links.)
Still, this doesn't let Apple off the hook. Hierarchical folders should never have been removed!