Macenstein

Stacks is an interesting yet baffling new feature of the new Leopard. Basically, using Stacks you can quickly display the top 13 or so files (listed alphabetically) in a folder in either a hard-to-read fan-like sweep, or as a giant hard-to-read grid (again, only displaying as many icons as will fit). This is great for small folders of incredibly organized content, but lame if you want to navigate something like the Applications Folder from the dock – something we loved doing in Tiger and had quite frankly grown to depend on.

Above: The lesser of 2 evils? Which is better, to see the first 13 apps in your folder, laid out in a hard to read fan, or the first 119 in an even harder to read grid? As useless as Stacks might be, it gets worse when used over a busy desktop.

Faithful Macenstein reader JR Hoops (apparently in the same boat as we were) recently wrote us suggesting we:

“check out “dockappsmenu” because stacks suck. It works.”

Intrigued by his eloquent description of the app, we headed over to rosscarter.com to check it out.

Sure enough, DockAppsMenu is a simple little app that (sort of) recreates the lost functionality of Tiger’s dock.

Above: DockAppsMenu allows you to once again navigate your Applications folder like you could in Tiger.

DockAppsMenu is not a system modification, but rather an application you launch from the dock which provides you a menu of the contents of the Applications folder. you can then navigate the folde ran launch your apps as you did in Tiger. The only major shortcoming is it is “Applications folder specific”, meaning you do not gain back the ability to drag just any old folder into the dock and have the text-only display option, but hey, it’s free. As a bonus to the geekier readers, Ross provides the source code as well, so perhaps someone will come up with a more system-wide fix.