Leopard 10.5.2 update adds functionality to Stacks.

Stacks is probably the most criticized feature in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Why? Because while Apple added functionality to the Dock with Stacks, it also removed functionality that many Tiger users liked and depended upon.

Fortunately, Apple was listening to users’ complaints. In the recent Leopard 10.5.2 upgrade, it changed the way Stacks works, adding back features that were available in Tiger. Here’s an overview of the new features in Stacks and how you can set stacks options.

Seeing — and Setting — Options

As with the original iteration of Stacks, you can set the options for a specific Stack by Control-clicking or right-clicking it. This displays a menu of options like the one shown here.

I’m pleased to see that Apple has done away with the submenus it used in the original version of Stacks in favor of a stacked (no pun intended) set of options that is organized by category. This will make it easier to see and choose the option you want.

New Sort Options

There are now five sort options:

• Name
• Date Added
• Date Modified
• Date Created
• Kind

This should make a lot of people happy, since not everyone likes to view lists by name or date.

New Display Options

There are now two options for the Stacks icon display in the Dock:

• Folder displays the stack as a folder. If you’ve assigned a custom icon to the Stacks folder, that’s the folder icon that appears.
• Stack display the stacked icons for folder contents. This means the first icon in the folder is what appears in the Dock, with other icons mostly hidden “beneath” it. This was the only display option in the original release of Mac OS X 10.5.

The new Folder display option was added to satisfy users who complained that the icon was not intuitive or consistent. For example, if the Downloads stack folder was sorted in date order, each time you downloaded a file, the icon would change. Now you can elect to show each Stack icon as a folder that doesn’t change.

Although I’d come up with a good workaround for this — which I presented at my Peachpit Press presentation at Macworld Expo — I’m glad I don’t need a workaround anymore.

New View Option

There’s now an additional view option: List. This displays the contents of a stack the same way Tiger displayed the contents of folders on the Dock — complete with hierarchical menus, which I covered as a useful tip in my Tiger book. In fact, this is the feature I personally missed most when I upgraded to Leopard — I used hierarchical menus in the Dock extensively on all of my Macs.

Page References

You can learn more about Stacks as it was originally released in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard on pages 172-174 of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: Visual QuickStart Guide.