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Finder Looks More Like iTunes in Leopard

The Finder has gone through quite the overhaul in OS X 10.5 Leopard. Not only is the interface designed to look a whole lot like iTunes, CoverFlow is now a view option, icons have “resolution independence”, any document can be previewed directly in the Finder with the new Quick Look feature. The toolbar and left column are bascially the same, but throw away the old brushed metal look of OS X Tiger. New icons and search options can be found in the Sidebar.

I find it hard to use a small Finder window anymore with all these new features. I had to stretch out the Finder window to make it larger, using the bottom right corner of the window. Cover Flow needed a larger space to work properly with PDF previews and the new Search For items get cut off at the bottom of the Sidebar if the window is too short. I can minimize each section in the Sidebar or even eliminate unnecessary items by dragging them outside the Sidebar to gain a shorter window.

Whats even more phenomenal about the Finder is that I can now change View Options for each folder independently. I can make different sized icons and background images and really customize the look and feel of the contents of folders. Why should every folder look the same? If I take advantage of these new customization options, I can easily distinguish one folder from the next. This comes in real handy when working with multiple Finder windows in Expose. And since icons can now be resolution independent, I find myself in icon view much more often than in Tiger.

CoverFlow inside the Finder

CoverFlow has become a view option found in the View Menu in the Finder’s Toolbar. It is the right most View Option available.

Click the CoverFlow button in the View Menu and the contents of a folder will be viewed with CoverFlow. If a PDF or MOV is the frontmost file in CoverFlow, I can hover over the PDF or MOV and preview pages of the PDF or even watch the MOV! Cover Flow doesn’t seem to preview audio files however (yet I can preview an audio file in Column view). Or, I can use the ultimate method of Previewing anything, Quick Look…

Use Quick Look to Preview Files

Never open another application ever again to find the file you are looking for! Kick that nasty habit of double clicking everything in sight!

Just use Quick Look, which is found in the Toolbar of the Finder (if it isn’t there, Ctrl+Click any empty space in the Toolbar and Select Customize Toolbar, drag and drop the default toolbar). Click the Eye Icon in the Toolbar to Preview any file selected in The Finder.

Quick Look will pop up a black and transparent preview window for the currently highlighted item in the Finder. I can even select another item with Quick Look still open and the preview window will change to the newly selected file. PDFs are viewable down to every page. MP3s and MOVs can be played in their entirety. When I press the two diagonal arrows icon, the file will be previewed in Full Screen. This method can be used for pretty much any filetype. If something doesn’t work, somebody will write a plug-in soon, so don’t worry about that. No more need for Quicktime Pro to view MOVs in Full Screen now!

Custom Folders in Finder Icon View

Look at the image below and you will notice two Finder windows, each viewing icons at completely different sizes and grid spacing. This is what is called resolution independence. OS X Tiger would allow me to set the icons sizing in the Finder globally, across all the folders on my Mac in Icon View. Now it is possible to not only change the size of icons in each folder separately, but the grid spacing, background color and image as well.

To view the contents of a folder in Icon View, click the leftmost icon in the View row at the top of the Finder Toolbar.

To change the View Options of a particular folder, Ctrl + Click or Right Click any whitespace in the Finder and Select Show View Options from the drop down menu. The View Options Palette will appear.

I can open any file or folder in the Finder or the Desktop and the View Options Palette will automatically know which Finder window I am talking about and adjust the settings for that particular window. Once I have the View Options window open, click the Desktop and notice the header in the palette changes to Desktop. Click inside the Finder window again and View Options is directed to the Finder. This is useful if I want to customize a bunch of folders in one sitting.

I can change a variety of settings in the View Options palette. Firstly, I can select the view I want the folder to always have by clicking Icon, List, Column, or Cover Flow in the Finder’s Toolbar and checking the first box. Icon size and Grid Spacing are the most useful. If I have a lot of icons in a folder, I may want to make the Grid Spacing and Icon Size smaller. A folder with few icons may deserve large icons spaced far apart.I can also designate the text size and position of the filename. I can toggle icon previews, meaning if this is on I can see the front page of PDFs, specific photos, and the poster frame of movies. Disabling this may lead to faster performance on slower Macs. I can also arrange the icons to snap to grid, by name, date modified, date created, size, kind or label. I can also select a background color or image for the folder as well.

Since I can change the settings for all icons on my entire Mac in the View Options Palette by pressing the Set as Default button, I can automatically snap all of my icons to a grid at once. The catch is, once I edit these folders individually they will retain their settings. To prevent cluttered icon views and the much annoying clean up in the Finder, set icons to be Snap to Grid as the default when you first start customizing folders.