Mac Experience : The Finder
The Finder is your first stop when working with files in MacOS X. Think of it as Windows Explorer on a Mac. The first major difference that you will notice is that Mac’s Finder doesn’t present you with any kind of tree or hierarchical structure of your file system. Coming from a Windows background, this may seem like huge setback however after a few days of usage, Finder’s layout may not be as bad as it seems. Historically the Mac never used a tree metaphor to represent the file system and soon you’ll know why its not a problem.
The MacOS X is based on the Unix file system which is hierarchical in nature with system folders that are not meant to be fiddled with. So instead of presenting you with the entire file structure, the Finder simply starts with your local home folder that contains all your personal storage like Documents, Downloads and Pictures. Just as in any Unix environment, the moment you log into a terminal, you are always presented with your home folder. All your personal files are stored in the home folder and you seldom need to navigate to other parts of the file system. I kinda like this approach as it helps reduce the clutter and I can concentrate more at the task at hand.
The Finder
The Finder allows you to create shortcuts to your commonly accessed folder in the toolbar which is the left panel you see above by dragging and dropping folders. Since it allows you to easily define your own personal “Places” you do not actually need to have a complete hierarchical file structure. The Finder has 4 modes of the display, the top most screenshot you see is the default icon view, followed by the list view above, the column view below and lastly the cover flow view.
The column view is handy for navigating deep into folders. As you explore the folders from the left, the folder pane expands to the right until you finally click on a file which shows up as a preview dialog on the last pane. For media files, you can just click to view or listen to it. It even displays embedded album covers if it has one.
The Coverflow view which was was first introduced in iTunes is pretty nifty as well. iTunes originally used this view to let the users browse through their album cover collection. In the Finder however, the Coverflow view displays a preview of the file instead. For images and most text documents, it will display the actual preview but for audio and video file, you would still need to click on the QuickLook button to preview it. It would be cool if the preview could be done directly from the CoverFlow pane itself.
Smart Folders
One of the more interesting feature introduced in Leopard are the Smart Folders. Smart Folders are basically folders that has predefined search fields that searches for files that meets your criteria. To create one, you simply start with a blank Smart Folder template. As you enter the keywords for your searches, Finder immediately populates the window with any files that matches your keyword, you can also limit the scope of searches to only your home folder, or the entire Mac or within other Smart Folders. The search can also look into the contents of the files or just by the filename.
Once you have entered the keyword, you may tweak the fields by selecting the files to be matched to be limited to images, documents or other formats. You can add and remove additional criteria at this point until you feel the search results meets your requirement.
Once you are satisfied, you may save the Smart Folder and it will be added to your Saved Searches and added to the toolbar. Looking at the detail of the newly created Smart Folder, you will notice that the folder is actually a form of a search query. There is no limit to how you can use the Smart Folder. This is quite possibly one of the most useful feature that I’ve used on Leopard so far.
And there you have it, a quick walkthrough of Finder’s basic interface and features. Stay tune as I uncover more gems built into Leopard.
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