Back in early November, as part of my review of Leopard, I wrote a review of Leopard’s “Stacks” feature. If you haven’t yet read my initial review, please do so, so you know what on Earth I’m talking about here.

Earlier today, Apple released Mac OS X 10.5.2, which addressed numerous issues, including some involving Stacks. Where does this leave Stacks now? Let’s take a second look…

Changes in 10.5.2

There have been two major complaints regarding Stacks:

1. It’s hard to tell which stack is which at a glance.
2. There’s no equivalent to Tiger’s behavior, and Stacks are arguably inferior.

My friends, lo and behold, Apple hath heard your cries!

Stacks in 10.5.2 add an assortment of new options. The ability to view as a fan or grid are still there, of course, but now there is a third option: List. First a brief history lesson: both fan and grid view have the advantage of being very visual with their larger icons, and you can drag items out of a stack. +2 over Tiger. At the same time, you couldn’t view a large number of files in either mode; you would have to open a Finder window to access something not shown in the fan or grid, thus partially defeating the point of stacks. It works great for downloads, where you will mostly be interested in the newest item anyway, but for a Documents folder, for example, it’s less than ideal.

Guess who’s back!

10.5.2 fixes this with the addition of List view. List view is almost identical to the hierarchical menus spawned by right-clicking (or control-clicking, or clicking-and-holding) a folder icon in the Dock. And no longer do you need to hold down the mouse button or a modifier key; a regular click will open the listing of items. On the down side, items displayed in list view can not be dragged out of the folder.

10.5.2 also corrects the icon issue. Now you have the choice of whether you want the folder icon displayed or a “stack” of icons. This partially fixes the problem of of stacks being hard to discern. I say “partially” because while this change makes it easier to identify your Documents folder from your Downloads folder (or any folders with custom icons for example), it can still be downright confusing when you have two identical folder icons sitting next to each other in the Dock. This is more an issue with the Dock metaphor itself and not stacks as a feature, per se, but it’d be nice for the clever engineers at Apple to figure out a way to fix this at some point. Still, I’ll take what I can.

Other small tweaks...

10.5.0 text labels (top) vs.
10.5.2 labels (bottom).
Note the more pronounced
drop shadow under text
labels in 10.5.2

Dock labels and Stack labels are slightly more readable under 10.5.2. It appears Apple added a slight drop shadow under the label text. Also, the grid view background has been prettified a little bit. Ooooo.

The bottom line

Stacks, you’ve come a long way, baby. Uh, that is, you went back to where you were in Tiger, sorta. Ahem. Either way, 10.5.2 brings stacks to where they should have been when Leopard was initially released in October. (Yup, we’re closing in on 4 months since Leopard’s release. Hard to believe, isn’t it?) It’s a marked improvement, but I’d love to see Apple tweak a couple more things. Still, I am pleased with the result, and am more than happy to see Apple respond to their users.