Stacks is a piece of software for the iPhone which adds spring loaded “stacks” of applications to any or all of the four coveted dock positions on your home screen. We first mentioned it back in the summer but now, despite still being in an alpha state, it is available (sort of) and ready to use. If you have a jailbroken iPhone.

There are a few advantages to cracking your iPhone open with a jailbreaking tool. You can install all sorts of applications that would never make through the Apple approval process, you can run those applications in the background (although your battery life may suffer) and you can install things that tweak the user interface quite drastically. Stacks is the latter.

The picture above shows Stacks in action. Once installed, you get four new icons somewhere amongst your applications. Drag one to the dock and you can rename it. For my first one I chose “News”. From there, press and hold any icon, just as if you were about to rearrange the apps like you normally do. Then drag any icon to the stack and it will pop open, just like a folder in the dock of a Mac. Drop the icon in there and you’re done.

To use the stacks, you just touch one and it will pop open, allowing you to touch one of the icons and launch the app. If you have too many icons in there to make a pop-up stack that will fit on the screen, Stacks switches to a window view which shows the icons arranged in a grid, again like the OS X dock. This is automatic, but you can lock it in as a default view in the preferences.

There are a few alpha giveaways: you can’t add icons for web-apps to a stack. I have a shortcut icon to Gmail on my iPod Touch and wanted to put it alongside the Mail application in a stack. It just won’t go. Second, there is little visual feedback. You don’t know if you have dragged the application onto the stack until you have let go and then popped open the stack to check. Third, there seems to be no way to rearrange the icons to choose which appears atop the stack. And lastly, icon badges are not displayed: If having a notification of unread mails is important to you, don’t put Mail in a stack.

To get the application you need to make a donation of over $1 to the developer via PayPal. You’ll also, of course, need to jailbreak your iPhone or iPod Touch. And you’ll have to be somewhat confident using the command line, as there is no one-click installer yet.

Otherwise, this is a fantastic add-on. It is sleek and feels as if it is actually part of the iPhone OS when you use it. Even if I use no other unofficial add-ons, this one is staying on my iPod.

Product page [Steven Troughton Smith]

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