There is a new feature in the new Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard operating system called Stacks. Pretty simple idea.

The Mac (for those of you who don’t own one) has something called the “dock”. It’s the same thing as the “task bar” in Windows. The big difference is you can drop your application icons on it and launch your application from there. That’s all great, however, after a while, your Dock becomes very crowded. So in Leopard, there is this new feature called “stacks” which allows you to “group” applications together and have them “pop up” in a kind of “Leaning Tower of Piza” kind of way.

It’s pretty neat (very Mac like). However, there are many ways that Apple can (and in my opinion, should) improve on this functionality since Windows already has most of what I’m about suggest inside their “start” menu.

1. I can’t create a “stack” in the dock and then just drop any application I want in there. For example, I would like to have a “Video Editing” stack and drop Final Cut Pro, Compressor and SoundTrack Pro, but you can’t do that. Yes, you can create a folder (which I have done) calling it “Video Editing” and then drop aliases to the applications in there and then drop the folder into the dock, but that is way too much work. (Windows supports this)
2. You can’t have folders inside the stacks that expand like the stack does. Yes. You can have a folder, but when you click on it, it opens it up in finder. Not good. (Windows supports this)
3. You can’t sort the applications inside the stacks exactly how you want to display them. Yes, you can sort them by date and/or by name, but I want to sort them in the order I want. Yes. You can use the trick of numbering each alias and that will sort appropriately, but that’s not good. (Windows supports this)
4. You can’t select what the image of the stack is going to be to represent that stack. This would be a nice feature to have (Windows does not support this). The stack uses the top most application as it’s image to represent the entire stack. Another annoying feature I hate is the fact that it shows all the “images” below the top most. I don’t think that’s cool. It’s messes up the image at the top. I thought my image was all screwed up until I figured out that the images below that one, was of the other applications.
5. I hate the “Show In Finder” at the top most item. I wish there was an option to remove this.

Apple, I beg you, really think this through. Don’t get me wrong, I love the Mac and prefer it over my Windows machine, however, Windows had this functionality since Windows 2000 (or 98?).

I love the way the stacks open up in Leopard, but it’s not perfect and they need to improve on this functionality to make it really a worthwhile solution. Otherwise, it’s just eye candy that its not that useful.

Just my 2 cents.

I know I will get hate email for ragging on Apple, but what the heck.

I welcome it.