7stacks 1.5 beta 2

7stacks is an easy to use, free app that lets Windows 7 (and 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.

7stacks was created because of my own frustrations with Windows 7, as great an OS as Win7 is. Because Windows 7′s new taskbar, called the SuperBar is very similar to the Mac OS X Dock, many comparisons are going to be made. But Windows 7 seemed to have one glaring omission of OSX: stacks. Now, with 7stacks, you get almost the same functionality as the OS X stacks, but with a more “Windows 7″ appearance.