OK, lets get this out of the way first: Leopard is by far the most amazing product Apple has ever shipped and Apple deserves all the praise they are getting.

But….

What the hell were they thinking with stacks? This has been a gripe for mine for several months, but I haven’t been able to vent my frustration at this step back due to NDA. In Tiger there was what were essentially old school stacks, folder. Now you could drag a folder, or even an entire drive, into your dock and then click and hold to get a menu, allowing you to drill down the file system quickly. Even more helpful is a single click would open a new Finder window at that folder. Even though I sometimes didn’t need that particular directory, it became the standard way for me to open a new Finder window.

Now Leopard introduced an extremely cool feature called Quick Look and another extremely cool developer feature called Core Animation. Obviously if there was a way put those together with dock folders it would be exceedingly cool. And at WWDC it looked like that was what stacks would be. In the final build it looks like they remembered the Quick Look and Core Animation parts but completely forgot the dock folders parts, to the point that stacks (beyond the downloads stack) are pretty much useless.

You can’t drill down the file system, instead it opens a finder window when you click on a folder. But what’s worse is that it now means it takes 2 clicks to get a new finder window. The Applications stack is pretty pointless for power users, as it only seems to go up to 79 items shown and you can usually get to the application faster by using spotlight (which may I say is amazingly fast now). The downloads stack is the only useful one of the lot.

Other than stacks there isn’t a huge amount I can find fault for with Leopard. I’m a bit disappointed with Apple in over promising in some areas, but what they have put in is amazing enough to make up for that. About the only other small thing I can complain about is that Apple now has Core Animation, but has opted to change the front row transition to a simple fade, rather than the exceedingly cool transition Front Row 1.0 had.

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