I’ve been playing around with Windows 7 for a few weeks now, and I must say, its a really refreshing experience. They’ve added a lot of nice UI features to the desktop while cutting away some of the fat from the OS itself.
Along with some other changes to the taskbar, one of the really nifty features that Microsoft added was the JumpList.
JumpLists are application specific menus which come up when you right-click on a taskbar application. If you look at the image above, you’ll see the Jumplist in action. Right-clicking on the Messenger window will give you options to log-in, set your status, check your e-mail, etc.
Along with your regular apps, you can “pin” various folders to your explorer app for quick and easy access. You can also find your frequently accessed files and folders in the JumpList as well.
Given all these nifty features, I wanted to see if I could get a setup similar to my previous Mac + Stacks combination (see previous post). Unfortunately, its not possible to pin entire folders to the taskbar like you can with Stacks. You can only pin the folder itself to the Explorer app on your taskbar.
After a bit of Googling, I found that there were a few 3rd party apps that did similar things: 7stacks, JumpList Launcher (its in German), and a few hacks.
7Stacks was too unresponsive for my tastes, but it exactly replicated the look and feel of Stacks. I never tried the JumpList Launcher, but it definitely looked interesting. I tried using the toolbar hack, but the final product reminded me of Windows 95 for some reason.
So, with nothing that fits the bill, I’ve decided to dive in to C# to remedy this problem.
With a bit of tinkering around, I was able to get JumpStacks v0.01 up and running. I’ll go into the nitty gritty details of how this was done in the coming days/weeks, but I just wanted to get some screenshots of it up and running before hand. 
In the last screenshot, you can see a test run of JumpStacks previewing my system’s Documents folder. Since this is v0.01, there are obviously more than a few issues right now. The first and most obvious ones are the nasty taskbar icons and the ugly default icons for folders; but that can be easily fixed (sidenote: graphic designer wanted for drawing icons!).
However, by far one of my biggest problems is with Windows’ inherent limit on the maximum number of displayable JumpList entries. The maximum number of displayable JumpList entries can be modified from your Start Menu Properties. However, even if you jack up the maximum number of JumpList entries, the JumpList menu itself has a maximum height that it will not extend beyond,. This will be a highly limiting factor for folders with more than, oh let’s say 10 items.
Anyways, I’m going to release an early version of the binary executable so people can try it. For those of you who are using Windows 7 and are bored enough to try this out, you can download the goods below.
As for usage, the code runs using the following command: JumpList.exe [path-to-folder]
You can either run this command in the command line/PowerShell (console cowboy), or you could create a desktop shortcut with the command as your shortcut and pin it to your taskbar (for the mere mortals).
Stay tuned for more info!