I try not to shill products or special deals in my posts, but this one's too good to keep to myself: If you've got a Mac user on your Christmas list — or if you just want to freshen your own OS X software library — you should check out the bundle currently being offered at MacUpdate's promotional site, www.mupromo.com (and no, I'm not getting any referral money for this).

For $49.95, they've packaged together eight real and useful programs that might otherwise cost more than $500 if bought separately. Sure, I'll probably never use the Marine Aquarium screensaver, but it will make someone else happy — and I've already got my money's worth with the discounted Forklift and Yep utilities. The other programs, which include the top-rated RapidWeaver, MemoryMiner, XSlimmer, Swift Publisher and XMIND 2008 PRO, are just great gravy that I can now explore with a full license.

So why am I bothering to tell everyone else? Because if enough people buy the bundle, MacUpdate promises to throw in a couple of additional programs for free. And I could really use iStabilize myself…

Love editing your Flash ActionScript files in jEdit, but want better debugging tools within the editor itself? Maybe you'd like to jump directly to errors indicated within your code without resorting to the Flash IDE?

Today's tip just makes me plain happy.

It may take a few minutes to set up, but it definitely shows off the power and expandability of jEdit — while also providing a heckuva nice (and long awaited) feature for us cross-platform Flashers.

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Several people have been asking for a slightly modified version of AutoStacks since we released the little utility this month, so I figured I'd revisit the tool today.

In its original incarnation, AutoStacks moved selected files to a new folder and created a new Leopard "Stack" by adding the folder to the right-hand side of the dock. This is the way I expected Apple's Stacks functionality to work out-of-the-box, but apparently, others have their own ideas as to how Stacks should act: In particular, many people seem to want their Stacks to contain aliases to existing files, rather than the files themselves.

Not to begrudge these people, I've made some changes to AutoStacks that should appease both camps: Starting with version 0.2, AutoStacks will now prompt the user upon first use as to which way they would like to have it behave from then on (move the files, or create aliases to them).

After the first use, it will assume you always want it to behave the same way, and it will refrain from asking again until you decide it's time for a change; On the off chance you change your mind, you can always double-click the AutoStacks application icon (i.e., launch it without dragging files to it), and it will be happy to ask you again.

Oh! And I almost forgot… Thanks to the the original creator of a nice set of overlay icons and information provided by these fine folks, I've also added an extra icon to each new AutoStack to help restore some order to your AutoStacked dock. Hope you enjoy the extra touch!

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Thanks to the great feedback I've received here, I released AutoStacks 0.2 on Nov. 21, 2007. The source code below is still that of version 0.1, but all download links in this article have been updated to the new version. The original 0.1 version can still be downloaded here.

Remember how cool you once thought OS X Leopard's new Stacks feature was going to be? And remember how disappointed you were when you discovered it didn't actually do what you thought it would: i.e., create a new stack any time you dragged a collection of unrelated files onto the dock?

For some reason, I was heartbroken when I discovered a Stack was nothing more than a spiffed-down image of an existing folder, and I was even more irritated when I discovered you couldn't just drag a bunch of files to make a new one. I couldn't do much about the look, but I could at least make something that acted as I wanted it to: A convenient dock icon that sits patiently waiting for a collection of files, and then magically turns them into a new stack.

It's a simple AppleScript application, and it seems to work. Unzip the application file, place it in your dock, then select a few files in your finder and drag them to the icon. It will ask you for a label (a default label is generated according to the current date and time), and then it will magically add the new Stack and (perhaps annoyingly) reload the Dock.

Tada!

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Check out more recent articles to see how I stopped worrying and learned to love the Stacks.

I've been enjoying my first few days with the new OS X 10.5 operating system (aka Leopard), and I'm really looking forward to seeing what the development community is going to be able to do with the hundreds of cool new features and API hooks built into the OS. But that said: Does anybody really think that the "Stacks" feature has been well implemented in Leopard?

I was actually looking forward to using Stacks: Along with Time Machine (which it turns out is currently useless on my existing network storage system), it was one of the things that drew me to buy the latest upgrade as soon as possible. But it turns out that "stacks" are just folders — not smart folders, and not "on the fly" collections of files. Just folders. And really, really, really sh*tty looking ones, at that.

What the hell are these supposed to be? I challenge anyone to identify these folders!

I won't go into details here, as I'm sure anyone looking for more info will find it in abundance elsewhere on the Web (The entire Ars Technica review is a great read, by the way).

In fact, Leopard is indeed a great system, but the two main things that Apple has been using to promote it to the masses — Time Machine and Stacks — have turned out to be sorely disappointing. I'm sure somebody will figure out a way to get Time Machine to work on a networked drive soon enough, so I'm not actually worried about that one. After all, we've already seen "fixes" for other features, such as this fix to disable the miserable 3D Dock.

But Stacks? Stacks just sucks.