The old adage, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” applies when it comes to Leopard’s new Stacks feature. Stacks has been highly touted by Apple to be a boost to productivity:

Organize files in a neat stack on the Dock.
One click and the stack springs open,
revealing items in an elegant arc or an
at-a-glance grid. [link]

Nothing could be further from the truth. I believe that Stacks fails in every way to enhance productivity.

Illustration 1: Poor User Interface with Changing Dock Icons

1. The dock icon changes as the contents change (see above). 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 (see below).
3. An open Stack takes up far too much screen space (see below). The user just needs a hierarchical menu of file names, not preview-able icons.
4. The user can’t navigate into sub-folders, forcing her to open the Stack’s finder item almost invariably.
5. While Apple may consider the leaning stack to be “elegant,” the reality is that this makes it very difficfult for the user to quickly scan the folder’s contents.

Illustration 2: Unreadable, truncated file names and useless icons

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.

In the hope that David (one of Apple’s customers) can beat Goliath (Apple), I have written an open letter on this topic imploring Apple to bring back the old hierarchical menus for dockable folders from 10.4. If you agree with this letter, I encourage you to add your voice by commenting on it in the Apple forums.

[Update: 11/04/07 4:15p] The open letter described above was pulled from Apples Discussion Forums 42 minutes after it was posted. I’ve moved the Open Letter here. If you agree, feel free to post your comments below.

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