Left image shows how the stacks (internet and geo) are visualized in the Homescreen, right shows an opened stack (geo)

[Ed: this is the first post from Diego Petrucci, our new writer hailing from Italy. Cheers!]

There are many ways to organize your Home Screens like using PogoPlank, Orbit and stuff like that. One that we haven’t covered yet is grouping related apps with Stacks, an alpha (but quite stable) app available on Cydia.

This app creates four stacks that can be used the same way as the stacks in Mac OSX. If you are a Windows user or you’re not familiar with this, let’s say stacks are sort of virtual drawers, where you can put stuff without messing around. In Stacks 2.x you are not able to reorganize the icons in the selected stack, but the annoying thing is that you have to keep a stack in the right side of the dock. 3.0 solves this problems.

As I said, after the install you have four stacks in your iPhone. You can put whatever app in there simply dragging it in the selected stack, and when you’re done you can rename the stack by tapping for a while (without releasing) and hitting the red bar in the top of your screen. It’s very simple to use and although it’s an alpha, it’s also quite stable.

I started to need stacks after a re-organize following Marco’s rules when I found out I still had some apps that have similar functions and I really couldn’t decide which one to delete. It usually happens because the apps picked one by one miss some functions, but together are perfectly doing their job.The point in using Stacks is that you can have a sort of mini-category grouping all these similar apps.

Let’s see an example:

I use Aroundme, Tellmewhere and iNeedFuel to discover the nearest fuel station when I’m in trouble. I recognize these three apps do the same thing so I grouped in a “Geo” stack. Once I have grouped them, I used Sbsetting to hide every icon. They are not visible on the screen anymore, but are still present in the Stack. (You have to remember to hide the icons AFTER you put them in a Stack)

This saved two spaces in my screen that I could allocate to other apps, reducing all my overall screens from four to three.

Stacks is developed by the same author of Orbit, so we can assume the final version is going to be released soon. Here‘s a video of it working.

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