I’m always on the look out for cool and useful stuff to beef up the Windows Taskbar. I like RocketDock, but it’s not good enough to steer me away from the standard Windows XP Taskbar, simply because it doesn’t handle system tray elegantly. Although I don’t use it, but one thing good did came out of it is - Standalone Stack. Check out the video below to see what I mean.

 

 

I’ve put 2 stacks in the QuickLaunch Bar. The first one simply displays all the items in My Documents folder in Grid mode, while the second one stack up thumbnails of one of my sample photos folder. All the items/thumbnails will open up the files when you click on them. In the last Stack icon, I’ve put another Stack shortcut on my desktop to display games for my kids. After clicking on any of the icons in the expanded grid/stack, it will collapse back to the Stack icon automatically – no need to manually close any windows, way cooler than the standard Windows Explorer windows!

Simple steps to set it up:

1. 1. Download and install the Standalone Stack into your computer.
2. 2. Create a shortcut to the StandaloneStack.exe on your desktop, QuickLaunch Bar, etc.
3. 3. Right-click and choose ‘Properties’ to bring up the Property Page of your Standalone Stack shortcut. At the end of the Target field, give this shortcut a unique name, for e.g. ‘MyNewStack’ as shown below. Click OK.

4. Double-click on your new Standalone Stack shortcut icon. The Standalone Stacks Docklet setting page will be shown.

5. Key in/select the path of the folder that you wish to open using this shortcut. The Icon and ‘Sort by’ settings are optional.

6. Choose the Mode (either automatic, Fan (stack) or Grid) mode. The Automatic mode will guess the best setting based on the number of items in the specified folder. Experiment this to give it the best setting.

7. You can have multiple shortcut icon, each with a different name. For e.g. ‘MyNewStsack’, ‘My Documents’, ‘My Favorites’, etc.

8. At any time when you wish to change the settings for that shortcut again, simply press Ctrl or Shift, while click/double-click on the shortcut icon to bring up the Setting page again.

 

Woot! Enjoy it!