While many of the features in Leopard that Jobs announced today are ones from last August, some are new. One of the most exciting of these new features is Leopard’s new Desktop.
Yes, today Steve Jobs unveiled the new Desktop in Leopard. Some parts of the new Desktop are just appearance updates — a nicer-looking Dock, a transparent menu bar, and a unified window look (which also signals the death of brushed metal — yay!) But, the new Desktop also has a very cool new feature — Stacks. Stacks are essentially folders in your Dock that fan out from it to reveal their contents. Stacks offer an easy way to rapidly access files, and also help relieve Desktop clutter, as Leopard automatically gives you a Downloads Stack. Personally, this is a godsend, as I am at consent odds with the huge amount of download clutter that accumulates on my Desktop.
Overall, the new Desktop in Leopard looks awesome, and should be a great compliment to the redesigned Finder.
Hey! there is no Dashboard icon in the Dock...
A godsend? You know you can create your own download folder, right? Just tell Safari that Downloads should default there. Really, I've had one for as long as I've used Mac OS X.
Not sure I understand why you should differentiate between a Stack and a folder. They're both collections of files but one acts one way and the other acts another and there doesn't seem to be a clear differentiation between what they are.