The following Open Letter was deleted from the Apple Discussion Forums 42 minutes after it was posted.

I understand the need to control your message and keep a lid on bad PR, but if this is a trend that continues, I think Apple is heading for trouble. Biting the hand of your customers–especially those of your evangelists–is no way to do business, in my humble opinion.

Dear Apple,

To be blunt, the new Stacks feature is useless. On behalf of the legion of users and fans who upgraded to Leopard, I implore you to give us the ability to turn off Stacks and return to the 10.4 method of docking folders.

There are several reasons Stacks fails as a productivity enhancer:

1) The dock icon changes as the contents change. From a UI perspective, this is a bad idea that simply works against the user’s ability to act without thinking. Instead, he/she must roll-over each Stack and read its name to differentiate it from the other Stacks in the dock..

2) The Stack, especially in grid mode, truncates file names (e.g. “My Scrip…s.txt”), making it nearly impossible to differentiate one item from next.

3) An open Stack takes up far too much screen space. I just need a hierarchical menu of file names, not preview-able icons.

4) I can’t navigate into sub-folders, forcing me to open the Stack’s finder item almost invariably.

5) The leaning stack forces me to tilt my head just to read and interpret its contents.

In other words, the Stacks feature fails in every way to make it easy to click and select an item. The old method that let me dock a folder and right-click to view its contents was perfect. Why change something that wasn’t broken? The new Stacks feature may demo the OS well, but it is useless in a real-world production environment.

Please provide an option to revert back to the 10.4 method.

Many thanks,
Steve Stringer
Web Developer
Dallas, TX