Apple Mac OS X Tips and Tricks Blog
Finally, there is the option to turn off the translucent menu bar in Leopard, if you update to OS X 10.5.2 using Software Update.
Just Open System Preferences and Choose the Desktop and Screen Saver Pane. At the bottom you will see the checkbox for Translucent Menu Bar.
Can’t remember the name of a file you created or edited the other day, last week, or even in the past month?
The Finder makes searching for files really easy in OS X Leopard. Open a Finder window and look for The SEARCH FOR section of the Side Bar. Click “Past Week” and all the files you have edited in the past week will open chronologically, starting with the latest.
But what if the document you are looking for was created in the past month? The Spotlight in the Finder allows you to make searches using AND, OR, and NOT in OS X 10.5 Leopard. You can use the Finder window to add specifications to the search as well. Furthermore, you can Save Searches and then add them to the Side Bar.
In this short tutorial, I will show you how to set up a Saved Search for the Past Month in the Side Bar. The ideas in this tutorial can be expanded for other search criteria too.
Open the Finder, Select the Mac from the Side Bar, put a period (.) in the Spotlight Search Bar (you will erase this period later) and Hit Return.
Notice how a new Search Bar appears under the Tool Bar. It tells you where you are searching, and even gives the options to search the contents of files or just the file names. But look directly to the right and you will see a plus (+) sign. Click the plus sign. A new search criteria will appear, and it will say “Kind is Any”. Change these variables to say “Created date is within last 31 days”.
The following is not necessary for these steps but good to know when making customizable searches in the Finder.
If you hold down Option at this point the plus sign will become a … button. This will allow you to add further criteria to the search string using Any (OR), All (AND), or None (NOT).
Remove the . (period) from the Search bar you originally used to start the Search.
Click the Save Button. Name the new Search something meaningful like “Past Month”. Make sure Add to Sidebar is checked. Hit Save. A new Search called “Past Month” will now be available in the Search For section of the Sidebar.
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 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…
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!
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.
When I first start up Leopard, I am greeted with a familiar yet distinctly polished new look. There are a few key innovations we will review that go beyond just a new stylish look for Leopard. The largest additions to the new Desktop are Stacks and Spaces. Spaces allow me to have more than one desktop and select various desktops by pressing F8 (this must be turned on in System Preferences). Stacks is a new organizational feature that will hopefully clean up the desktop and help to organize files. Did you know keeping files on the Desktop slows down your OS X system? I was told that by a Mac Genius during a stop at the Apple Store. This is why Apple created Stacks and reorganized the Desktop in Leopard. So, get out of those old habits of placing files on the Desktop and start using Stacks today!
The first thing I noticed was the translucent Menu Bar. This new look helps the menu bar blend in with any photo I choose for the Desktop image. The Menu Bar is relatively the same in function, with the exception of a slightly different look to the Help and Airport menus. All drop down menus now have rounded corners.
The Dock has a 3 dimensional appearance now. The floor of the Dock reflects any windows that are close to it. The bubbles that announce each Application or Folder have a fresh new look. So does the activation light below every open Application.
In an effort to clean up everyone’s Desktop, Apple now offers Stacks in the right side of the Dock, just to the left of the Trash. When I first start up Leopard, a Stack called “Downloads” will already be ready to accept new files. All Downloads from Safari, iChat or Mail will go to this Downloads Stack (I need to set this for 3rd party Applications like Firefox in Firefox’s Preferences).
I can drag and drop a folder to this region of the Dock (to the right of the pedestrian crosswalk) and a Stack will appear. If more than 9 items make up a stack, it will turn into a grid.
Options for the stack appear if I Ctrl + Click or Right Click any Stack. I can sort items in a Stack by Name, Date Added, Date Modified, Date Created, Kind or Label Color. Ctrl + Click or Right Click a file in the Stack and go directly to that item in the Finder. I can also click Show in Finder among the items in the Stack.
Delete a Stack just by dragging and dropping it right outside of the Dock. Deleting a Stack will not delete the original files associated with the Stack. A Stack is merely just an alias for a set of files.
To make a Stack into an App Launcher, it takes just a few steps. It might be good to sort Application stacks by function. I have different Stacks for Web Apps, Abode CS3, and Video Editing. Create a new folder that will be the stack (I have a Stacks folder inside the Applications folder). This folder will contain aliases of the Applications I want to include in the Stack. In the Finder, Ctrl + Click and Application to bring up a menu. Select Make Alias from this list. Now drag the Alias for the Application to the Stack Folder you originally created. When you are finished filling up the Stack folder, drag the folder to the right side of the Dock. This will create the Stack. Now a Grid filled with your Applications will appear with a cool transparent black background. To open a file with an Application in a Stack, similar to the drag and drop nature of the Dock in previous OS X versions: Drag the file to the stack, wait for the stack to open, then drag the file to the Application icon.
To turn on Spaces: Navigate to the System Preferences from the Apple Menu, Click the Expose and Spaces icon, in the next window pane Click the Spaces Tab, and then Check Enable Spaces.
Now Press F8 (or on a MacBook, press Fn + F8). Welcome to Spaces. Click and drag Application windows between Spaces using the mouse and select a space using the mouse. The easiest way to switch between spaces is by holding down Ctrl + Arrow Key for the direction of the space I wish to travel to. This is a huge time saver for switching between spaces.
The Trash now has a more unique look, to differentiate it from an ordinary Finder window. Click Empty to empty the Trash.
Go into the Desktop System Preferences by Selecting Apple -> System Preferences and Click Desktop and Screen Saver in the resulting window. Here I will find new nature and plants desktop images or even add my own by clicking the plus sign.
Sometimes when I drag and drop files in Icon view to the Finder, they end up looking like a messy bunch of files.
To clean them up, just make sure nothing is selected and Select View -> Clean Up from the View Menu in the Finder Menu Bar.
Ta da! The icons will now be arranged in a grid fashion!
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