Mac OS X Leopard stacks in Windows XP

So many Windows users may be wondering if it is possible to get “Stacks” inside of Windows. The answer is that it has always been available. I will quickly point out that it isn’t as graphically rich but it is certainly functional.

So why do you care? Why would you want this? In my case I have liked the quick launch toolbar but I always found that it took up too much room on the taskbar. I even moved it to the top of my screen where I have worked with it for several years. This sometimes caused problems with applications falling under the toolbar. This made it hard to close or move the application. In addition I had created another toolbar with shortcuts to favorite folders. Now I know I could have put them in my “My Documents” area but it was too many clicks to get to where I wanted to go. Ideally I wanted one click.

To make my experience better I used toolbars directly on the taskbar which then popup with a list of all of my desired folders or applications. To create these I created a folder to hold my toolbar folders. I named this toolbar. 🙂 I then created a few more folders inside of this folder.

To make the actual toolbars just right click on your taskbar and select new toolbar. You will be prompted with a file browser. Just navigate to one of your previous folders and click the select button

OK, not very exciting you have a toolbar that is now empty. All you have to do to populate it, is to copy or create shortcuts in the folder that you originally created. Once you are done, your shortcuts will show up when you click on the arrows to the right of your toolbar title.

I do find that the toolbars are more stable if you lock the taskbar. You can do this by right clicking on your taskbar and selected “lock the taskbar”.