Part 1: Piles, the Ancient Ancestor of the Stack
How MacOS Mojave’s “Stacks” compares with its 1992 predecessor
Introduction
To some, MacOS Mojave’s “Stacks” may appear to be a unique and new way of organizing content on a desktop, but the idea — originally coined “Piles” — has actually be stowed away in Apple’s archives since 1992. If this was conceived 26 years ago, why are we just seeing it today? Why has the name been changed to “Stacks?” Whats different between the original idea for Piles and todays implementation in Stacks? In this article, we’ll discuss the answers to these questions and more.
Piles: The Original Idea
In 1992, Richard Mander, Gitta Salomon, Yin Yin Wong — then, working for Apple — filed a patent for an idea called Piles.
Upon first hearing about a UX patent written in 1992, I was skeptical about how detailed the document would be, but after reading about the original idea for Piles, I was severely humbled. The documentation is incredibly thorough and demonstrates a level of thought and attention to detail only seen in the most extensive case studies.
You might be asking, “why even have piles/stacks if I can just use a folder?” Gitta Salomon explained the draw for Piles as an addition to folders in her recent Medium article:
“Our key finding: loose organization schemes — that is, piles of stuff — are super useful. They allow us to keep current work ready at hand. We can avoid having to name and file things away. Piles are forgiving — they don’t need to be narrowly defined, their disheveled nature is part of their attraction.”
To help further expound on that idea, heres an excerpt from the Semantic Scholar article briefly explaining what Piles is and where it came from:
A user study was conducted to investigate how people deal with the flow of information in their workspaces. Subjects reported that, in an attempt to quickly and informally manage their information, they created piles of documents. Piles were seen as complementary to the folder filing system, which was used for more formal archiving. A new desktop interface element–the pile– was developed and prototyped through an iterative process. The design includes direct manipulation techniques and support for browsing, and goes beyond physical world functionality by providing system assistance for automatic pile construction and reorganization. Preliminary user tests indicate the design is promising and raise issues that will be addressed in future work.
Piles intended to use technology to enhance the way humans organize on a desktop by simulating and adding upon organization methods seen in the physical realm. In the following section, we’ll discuss how it was designed to accomplish this goal. Several of the features for Piles that we’ll highlight are:
- Different types of piles
- Visual appearance of piles
- Modifying the system’s piling scripts
- Gesture controls for viewing pile content
Types of Piles
Piles came in two different types: user-created and system-created. As in real life, when a pile is created by a user, it's not a formal action requiring much effort. Users simply had to drag a file on top of another file to add to a pile. The objective of this type of pile “was to allow users to create piles of mixed content and multiple data types.”
The system could also create piles based on scripts developed through user-system collaboration or as specifically directed by the user alone. These piles are originally created from the user supplying sample documents which the system would use to form future piles.
Visual Appearance
The two types of piles could be distinguished by their visual appearance. User-created piles, to simulate the informality of how physical piles are created, appear disheveled. System-created piles were clean and orderly.
Not only were piles displayed to distinguish creation method, but also indicated the type and size of the file. Documents with many pages would be thicker to inform users about how large the document was.
Scripting a Pile
As mentioned above, users could work with the system to create scripts that the system would use to create future piles. These scripts were based off sample files given to the system by the user. At any point in time, users had the ability to tell the system to ignore the script for a particular file or could use that file to modify the script and have the system reorganize piles using the newly created script.
Gesture Controls
Two types of gestures were introduced to enhance users ability to view a piles content. Firstly was the horizontal zig-zag which would cause the pile to spread itself out so individual items could be grabbed and manupulated.
A vertical zig-zag also was introduced to provide users the ability to view each file in the pile individually. Zig-zagging vertically would pull up a “viewing cone” of the top file in the pile. As the user moved their cursor vertically over the pile, the file displayed in the viewing cone would correlate with where the cursor was in the pile. Users could also manipulate other controls on the keyboard to enhance and expound upon this viewing experience.
Piles, in its original implementation, was a well thought through concept with a lot of features that would provide users a dynamic and helpful way to organize and maintain their desktops as well as being a beneficial piece to workflows.
