Stacks and the Dock

When Leopard was shown for the second time publicly at WWDC, I was impressed with Stacks and what they would bring to the Dock. When I got my hands on the WWDC seed later that day, I was a little disappointed to see what had been removed from the Dock to accommodate Stacks. As you already know, Apple removed the ability to drop a folder or a hard drive in the Dock and let the user right/control click on it to get a hierarchy menu of the file system. At the time I wasn’t too worried, because Leopard was still at the Developer Preview stage.

Of course, now that Leopard has shipped, and many of us are using it as our everyday OS, we’re finding out exactly how much we miss this feature.

One of the things that was present in the WWDC 2007 Developer Seed Dock was the ability to grab a bunch items from any folder, and drag them on to the Dock to create a Stack independent of a Folder Stack. This was the feature that made Stacks interesting to me. For example, many people drag their entire Applications folder to the Dock, and then right click on it to select their application. But in reality, most of us use only a handful of these apps on a regular basis. Being able to select the top 9 (to keep the Stack in “Fan” view) and drag them on to the Dock was a very useful feature.

But Apple removed this feature from the shipping version of Leopard as well.

So now we are left with a Dock that doesn’t give you the ability to easily (and quickly) traverse folders and removes the one cool feature of Stacks that was featured in the WWDC 2007 build.

I’m sorry, but there’s little else to call this except a major regression. Sure, the new Dock looks nice (at least to me), but Apple has intentionally crippled it be nothing more than a single app launcher and active app identifier.

There have been calls since 2001 for Apple to “fix the fuckin’ Finder”. I’m afraid there is a new call for Apple to “fix the fuckin’ dock”.

Category: News