The thing that boggles my mind though is the “Stack”. What in Earth are these people on? It’s a damn MESS. Step back, close your eyes, power through the distortion field and open them to take a good look at that screen shot above. It’s INSANE. You’ve got a grid of folders and icons with microscopic text thrown in a pile - that’s not useful or efficient, I don’t care WHO you are. It’s a mess!”

(Via Russell Beattie.)

This criticism is to be expected based solely on screenshots.

I don’t want to start a war of words, but his post is frankly, bull.

What Russell misses, is what most of us miss when flying our particular fanboy flags high. If you haven’t tried it, don’t knock it.

Compare the two screen shots below, the first a typical Ubuntu window and the second a Grid Stack from Leopard:

Both are similar in appearance and usability. Typical “grids” of icons with tiny text beneath.

Where stacks is an improvement is when the directories begin to grow.

With Stacks, after the directory exceeds a certain number of items, it switches to a Fan mode.

For a download directory Fan mode rocks. The latest items are always quickly accessible.

While for a projects or documents folder I like grid mode, since I am navigating to a sub directory in most cases.

Right clicking on a folder in the Dock lets you customize the Stack behavior. You can switch from Automatic to either Grid or Fan mode as the default.

The usability difference between typical windows, in either Mac OS X or Ubuntu, and Stacks is subtle.

The experience I have with Stacks is, I find what I am looking for faster, with fewer mouse or key clicks. When I do find that certain item, the Stack gets out of my way without me doing anything.

Stacks is one of the small features that appears superficial, or even eye candy to some, but when used you find yourself rely on it more and more.

With regards to eye candy being implemented to drive hardware sales, give me a break.