This may seem like a really obvious life hack, but for all the rankling about the new Stacks feature, I wanted to share the thing that has really won we over to Stacks and the new Dock.
Maybe some people take pride in having a tiny dock filled with a ton of apps, but I find that if the icons are too small, and there are simply too many of them, it's not usable. At the same time, I want to have all my apps, even infrequently used ones, immediately accessible. I've tried launchers, but it just feels like too much clutter.
So in Tiger, my dock had 30+ hard to see tiny tiny app icons. But in Leopard, using the following method, I am finding the 10.5 dock to be the best launcher ever. I've created little stacks of apps for each app area and the big suites:
- Productivity: MS Office and iWork
- Creative: Adobe CS3
- Utilities: Just the ones I use most
- iLife: iLife applications
- Media: Players, download tools, etc.
The result is that my dock is down to 18 reasonably-sized app icons, easy to see and use. Seldom-used apps are all easily found and launched. It's exactly what I have always wanted since the OS 9 days, a simple gateway to managing active and available apps. And as long as you keep the number of things in the stack down to less than 10, it looks cool and is very usable.
One additional stack for key project folders, and I am much happier than I ever was in Tiger. I hated those identical folder icons. Note that contrary to the online demos, you can't really grab a set of items and put them on the dock to create a stack. You can only create a stack with a real filesystem folder as far as I can see.

