I have no idea how to word this without inviting flame upon flame, because I know some people will take this to be what they want it to be, not what I intend, but here goes anyway. If you don't like even the faintest suggestion of "I want what Windows has", please look away now: This is one tiny little, isolated, NOT to suggest everything else is so, thing that Windows does better IMHO. I'm NOT arguing for a start menu, but the fact that when a new app is installed in Windows a shortcut is automatically created, which you can then move and re-name to your hearts content without risking a non-working app, rather than just putting everything into a single folder with no organisation and that we're not meant to touch, helps no end. In other words, I'd just like an automatically created duplicate of the Applications folder, which contained Aliases instead of the actual .apps, that I could then arrange as I see fit ready to use with stacks, or hierarchical folder menu's (yep, taking them out was a pretty thick move Apple), or even just a better organised folder in Finder. Again - I DON'T WANT A START MENU! I do want an equivalent of Windows' start menu folder though, to allow better organisation of my apps. I imagine that the original stacks concept was an attempt to provide something along these lines - a way to organise things to the users desires, without messing up actual folders. Mark

[ Reply to This | # ]

Urrggghhh. How do I get carriage returns into HTML formatted posts? Sorry about the wall of text.

[ Reply to This | # ]

I use <br>; not sure if there's a better option...

[ Reply to This | # ]

I've been thinking about something I'd like to see with stacks and the dock and, like you, have been worried about the notion that I "want what Windows has." But since you brought it up...

The thing that always clutters up my dock is the crazy collection of minimized Safari browser windows (each of which contains any number of tabs). My dock just fills up with minimized windows. It also happens with Preview and minimized PDFs. In fact, it happens all the time, even when I separate applications into Spaces (because the dock remembers everything that's minimized, no matter which Space the application resides in).

With OS X (and lately Safari) never crashing, I end up browsing and working in so many directions that I can easily have a dozen windows from Safari, Preview, or Word lined up in the dock. After a while, the dock fills up and becomes cumbersome to access and (to me) rather unsightly.

What Windows does when you have too many application windows open at once is to create, you guessed it, a dynamic stack of buttons. Suppose you have six IE windows open. Instead of having six buttons down on the start bar, you have one button. Click on it and you get a list of all the open IE windows from which you can pick the one that you want to un-minimize.

I want the Leopard dock to do that. If I have more than one Safari (or Preview, or Word, etc.) window minimized to the dock, I want Leopard to dynamically create a stack of Safari windows that I can click on to see thumbnails from which I can pick one window to view.

[ Reply to This | # ]