I was hoping for a lot more from Stacks. I've had a think about it and this is what I've come up with.

The main problem with stacks is that it gives us nothing more than a proxy to a folder view. This is no different to what was available in Tiger. The only differences between Stacks and placing folders in the dock in Tiger are that:

We now get a shiny proxy of a folder view rather than a real folder view
We lose heirarchic right click folder lists
We get to see the top most icon in the dock

As you can see there's no significant benefits to the Stacks and one significant loss (hierarchic folder listings).

What I was hoping for was the retention in Leopard of the current Tiger feature, that of browsing folders dropped into the dock, as well as Stacks. I was also hoping Stacks would:

Be created from folders or documents dragged to the dock. If you dragged 5 documents to the dock they would form a stack.
Be able to stack files from many places, not just one folder.
Be able to add new documents to a stack.

What would be cool would be to use the Stacks feature to tie a list of otherwise separate documents together for short term use. If I want to work on a handle of documents for a project I would just drop them in my current project stack to have immediate access to them, irrespective of where they are on the hard drive.

Stacks have to augment and work alongside folders, not replace them. Currently Stacks are Leopards Flip 3D feature. Pretty to look at but a waste of space. However at least Apple can improve on them. I just hope they do.

Discuss.

In early dev releases, you used to be able to just stack documents up without needing a folder, when they removed this i was pised!

hierarchical menu view should be able to be enabled or disabled via a setting.

if not, then leopard i'm sorry to say is behine windows 98 in this area .

I won't be upgrading until hacks are found for three things.

1) The Aforementioned 'Piles' issue
2) The Dock looks like a Dock, not a 'Stage'
3) We get an opaque Menu Bar.

Me thinks I won't have long to wait until these are found, as they are the most contentious of the new features in Leopard. I'm happy to wait on Tiger until a fix is found. Then all I have to do is work out how to make the UI less dark...

Point 2 is easily fixed with a single terminal command. Point 3 is ridiculous. Is your productivity going to be so adversely affected because the menu bar is partially transulcent?

One workaround is to set a 20px border on the top of your desktop image.

I've set mine to have a black 20px high bar at the top of my desktop image. Works a treat

Frackin stoopid though that you cant just turn off the transparency. Such is Apple's way I guess.

what works better black bar or white bar?

I'm not picking up leopard until next week so can't try until then.

Depends on whether you want a lighter looking bar or a darker looking bar.

Thank christ for the Dock option, the 2D look is much better.

My Eyesight frankly sucks. I need to have a light background behind dark text, otherwise I can't see a fuckin' thing.

Looks like a white bar @20 px for me it is.

So, does anyone like stacks?

I find them pretty useful, I WANT QUICKLOOK ON STACKS!

Now that would be awesome.

If stacks are just a different way to view what's in a folder, then what's the point?

So what *is* the terminal command for a 2D dock?

I haven't used Stacks yet, but you guys sure know how to paint a bleak and negative picture.

Currently, I don't place folders in the dock. I don't see the point. It doesn't give me anything that I can't get in other ways, with less hassle. Stacks, however, looks like a much better way to access certain files from certain folders. I don't want a list view when I look through a list in the Dock, I want visualisation - and that's what Stacks gives you.

There's all sorts of things that would make Stacks uber-useful, but they may require some crafty use of smart-folders or 3rd party hacks or something. Can you make stacks of smart-folders?

I've read that you can do the "old" folders in the dock thing by adding an alias on there. Is this the case? Can someone check?

I coulda sworn it was optional in previous builds ...