When Leopard was introduced, one of my favorite features got a mighty cold reception from either a very large or very vocal group of users. I speak of Stacks of course. It’s fast and shows me just the recent stuff that I’m most likely to care about. For my workflow, that’s perfect. Others, not so much. They really liked the dreadfully slow hierarchal menus one could get by dragging a folder into the dock.
Luckily for hierarchal menu fans, Quay will be bringing them back to the dock. I’m not sure how it works, but it’s like magic. You start up Quay, drag a folder into it, then drag from there to the dock. When you click that icon, the menu is back. Additionally, you can option click to change several options, something the Tiger dock never had. In its current beta form, you can have but one icon, but more are promised with final release (along with a $10ish price).
I would have rather seen them speed up the hiearchical menus than change to "stacks". Having lived with Leopard for a while now I believe that Stacks are so broken as to be unusable.
My downloads folder has about 20 items in it. It would be easy to find the file I downloaded if the folder was rendered as a menu in either download order or alphabetical order.
The "stack" renders as an icon grid. Every file name is cut off with a ... Most of the icons are generic folder or disk image icons. The items are in download order, but arranged in a grid right to left, top to bottom.
Rather than scanning a quick list I have to parse this inscrutable grid. I literally have to open the folder just to find the file I want sometimes.
And then, in the stack for "Applications" I have "Adob...n CS", "Adob... CS2", "Adob... CS3", "Adob... Op 7" and 12 other variations. Want to guess what those represent? Half have generic icons so even the folder appearance doesn't help. Applications now renders in the dock as a generic folder. How is this progress over the custom icon it used to have?
It is even worse on my "Documents" folder. There are about 300 items in there and the stack won't even show all of them. To top it off the "Documents" icon in the doc is just an ugly black square.
I would plead with Apple to bring back the hierarchical menu option and the custom icons.