Somewhere in the foggy back end of my mind, I seem to remember a demo of stacks where Steve(?) took files from a number of different folders and placed them onto a stack in the Dock, creating a collection of related files that can be located anywhere in the file system. Pictures related to an event, located in the Pictures folder, could be stacked with a PDF related to the event, located in the Documents folder. That seemed damn useful to me.
Now, at release +16 hours, I read this in Help:
Folders in the Dock are called “stacks.†A stack can be a handful of documents, a group of applications, or a set of folders—anything you need to use frequently. When you click a stack, it springs open in an arc or a grid, depending on the number of items.
The Dock comes with two stacks already in place: the Downloads folder, where items you download from the Internet are stored, and the Documents folder, the default location for new documents you create. You can add more stacks by dragging folders to the Dock. You can create as many stacks as you like.
And indeed, through my own experimentation of dragging files to the Dock, stacks don’t work the way I remember them. (And the help explicitly says, “dragging folders to the Dock”.) Reading the help, it seems like stacks are an improved way to view the folders we’ve always had.
1. Am I hallucinating a previous demo of Stacks that never happened?
2. If the demo I remember really did happen, when were stacks dumbed down, and why?
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October 27th, 2007 at 8:41 pm
Stacks remind me of the tabbed windows of Mac OS 9. The functionality is the same, even if the look is different.
Some bad things about stacks:
- it takes the icon of the first item in the folder. Great. I now have items in the dock that look like different files or generic folders. I have no way to distinguish the different stacks, other than putting a fake item as the first item in the folder. Very kludgy.
- Folders in the dock in previous versions allowed you to navigate the sub-folder hierarchy from the dock. You can’t do that with stacks. It only displays one level.
What would be great is the option to have it the old way for folders, as well as having the functionality you describe. I can easily see the use of create stacks on the fly by dragging a group of items to the dock, and being able to add to the stack. It would be a good way of organising ‘projects’ as I work on them.
October 29th, 2007 at 10:19 pm
Initially, I said stacks were an “improved” way of viewing folders in the Dock. After your comment, Matthew, and after using stacks for a bit, I wish to retract my use of the word “improved.
You’re right, the constantly changing or duplicated icons are confusing, and the inability to directly navigate subfolders is a functional loss.