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damage your system. We strongly recommend that users exercise caution and save all mission-critical data before installing or
using this software.
7Stacks ports the Mac OS X stacking feature to Windows 7, Vista, and XP in a reasonable but not quite perfect manner. If you're not familiar, the "stack" jargon here refers to creating a container of folders or files and making it accessible with one click on your taskbar.
The program does an effective job once you've created your stack, but it lacks some of the smoothness that hallmarks its Mac progenitor. A clean design makes creating a stack easy, but what's not clear about the process is that the "Create shortcut on Desktop" button is a necessary step. Once you've created the shortcut, you can drag it onto your unlocked taskbar. Left-click on a stack to access its contents.
When creating a stack, you can customize the folder you choose to stack including Libraries, use the default folder icon or select your own, and toggle options for exploring the folder, browsing subfolders, hiding file extensions, or displaying image thumbnails. There are three stack view options: vertical, which presents the stack in a column; grid, which arranges the stack into rows and columns; and menu, which makes the stack look like a Windows Explorer right-click context menu. Text for each item can be turned on or off in grid and vertical modes, and both icon size and text size can be adjusted via slider.
You can't drag and drop items directly into or off of a stack, which means that you can only change what's in a stack from Windows Explorer. The utility could use a hot-key hook to create a new stack, although you can right-click on an already-existing stack to see stack options such as create new stack, edit current stack, and browse as menu. More than that, the process for creating and editing stacks should be smoother, and even on computers with top-shelf hardware, stacks don't open or close as fast as they should. Still, 7stacks brings an entirely new feature to Windows, and there's no harm in that.
From Alastria Software:
7stacks is an easy to use, free app that lets Windows 7 (Vista and XP) users have "stacks" of icons in their Taskbar (in 7) or QuickLaunch Toolbar (in Vista and XP). By using stacks, users can reduce icon clutter, and combine a group of related icons into a single icon. For instance, if you use application suites such as Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, or Adobe CS4, you can have all the suite's icons combined into one icon. You can also use it to browse and access documents within a folder very quickly. Usually, when you want to edit a series of frequently used documents, you'd have to either launch the app, and go to File|Open, or open the (My) Computer icon and go into your (My) Documents folder and pick the file you want. With 7stacks, just create a stack to that document's folder, and open that document in a couple of clicks.
4Denise
July 24, 2013
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Version: 7stacks 1.5 beta 2
2013-07-24 01:11:01
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By 4Denise
Pros
Does exactly what I wanted it to.
Cons
None that I know of.
Summary
This little program adds in the one thing that I desperately needed: a way to organize my documents, programs, and puzzles. In Windows XP I used the start menu to organize everything, and it worked very well. In Windows 7 that option was gone. I have been searching ever since. This is exactly what I need. I could not ask for more.
