Filed under: Leopard
24 Hours of Leopard: Cover Flow
Feature: Cover Flow in the Finder.
How it works: Just like album Cover Flow in iTunes, Leopard brings the side-scrolling view to the Finder, allowing your "flip" through your files and see live previews (including paging through mutli-page documents and playing movies).
Who will use it: Everyone at one time or another. When I first heard of Cover Flow in the Finder, like Matt Neuburg, it seemed like pointless eye candy. But like him I'm beginning to think otherwise. Cover Flow makes quickly flipping through a bunch of files to look for something much easier. This becomes particularly important when you're looking through folders you're not that familiar with. So even if you're more inclined to keep the Finder in a conventional view, Cover Flow will still probably come in handy on occasion.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Wil Stobbart said 6:23AM on 10-26-2007
Just got mine ( I live in the UK) - lunch break sorted
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ajvankesteren said 6:32AM on 10-26-2007
I just hope we won't have to see some error like "Finder is unable to show the content of your folder in CoverFlow mode".
I have this in iTunes and just can't get it resolved...
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Berklee said 6:37AM on 10-26-2007
All the Leopard coverage so far has ommitted any reports on resolution independence. Is it safe to assume it's not in there?
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jonathan ober said 8:16AM on 10-26-2007
browsing just got a lot more visually pleasing. paging through multi-page documents looks like a good feature that I will use. I was curious to know if that means paging through, say, an InDesign file or similar? Playing flash swf files. Or anything else that a designer/developer could think up.
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PoorBoy said 10:55AM on 10-26-2007
"...handy on occasion." -- Proponents of the dark ages at TUAW of all places??? You must be kidding.
But you are probably just feigning skepticism to provoke reactions. Well, you succeeded. It's like night and day. Just compare the upper and lower views in the picture above and tell me which one you intuitively look at to orient yourself and find something? Tense up, put your nose to the grindstone and poke around in list view? Or relax, lean back and effortlessly flick through the actual documents?
It's like switching on the light in a dark room. It eliminates one full layer of indirection between you and your documents.
Old mental path: brain / eye -- file name / icon -- document
New mental path: brain / eye -- document
We can grasp the large-scale visual representation (the real thing, actually) ten times faster than some abstract file name, and with one tenth the effort. That's how we have evolved to function. And we love leverage: small flick of finger, big bang. Makes us happy. It sums up over a day, believe me.
List view is looking old already, like source code, a lowly hardware layer about which I don't want to know, an engine compartment, all dirty and complicated. Just show me my documents, and quick.
And it is not going to stop at Cover Flow. In fact, the current situation qua capabilities and sharing of the workload between me and my computer is a joke, grotesque. Me: stressed, scrambling, mistake making. Computer: idle, with a shameless grin on his face. There are some very concrete and obvious possibilities for shifting the balance in our favor, which I am sure are in the works, available for purchase in a year or two, at $129.
Don't despair, though. Your cherished list view will stay around, just like the command line (of which I am a heavy user, btw), but it will be the exception, not the rule.
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JD said 2:11PM on 10-26-2007
So I guess I'm the only Mac user out there who's not impressed by Cover Flow, huh? Even in iTunes, my reaction was, "Huh...that's cute. OK, back to list view."
I just don't get what's supposed to be handy about it. If I'm looking for a known file, I'm going to use list view, or possibly icon view. If I'm just exploring the directory to see what's there, I'm going to use...well, list view, probably.
I can "quickly flip through files"? You mean by having to look at them one at a time in Cover Flow? How is this easier than looking at a list I can scan with the good old Mark One Eyeball? To me, it's like the difference between having to flip through every page of a catalog to find the item you're interested in, and being able to look it up in the index: the number of times I'm going to choose the first one, given a choice, is really small.
And live previews leave me kind of cold, too. If I look at a folder full of documents, I see...a bunch of files with paragraphs of unreadably tiny text! Wow, THAT was useful. If I have to open them to see what they are, what's the benefit? The one place I could see it being useful is with a folder full of images, although I tend to either name my images descriptively, or to handle them from within a dedicated image-manipulation program.
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Simon Arch said 8:09PM on 10-26-2007
@PoorBoy: "Tense up, put your nose to the grindstone and poke around in list view? Or relax, lean back and effortlessly flick through the actual documents?"
OR type the first few characters of the file name in list view and jump right to where you want to be rather than having to slog through dozens of potentially very similar icons. I think the only time I'd want to use it was for flipping through a bunch of JPGs. It's less likely to be useful if I'm searching amongst a bunch of text files with similar previews or generic icons.
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Phuong said 5:06AM on 10-29-2007
I have power points for my class labeled by lecture number. Cover Flow allows me to see what topic is actually inside without taking the time and laptop resources to open the file.
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sjk said 4:16PM on 10-29-2007
AFAIK there's no way to select multiple items in the Cover Flow view.
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Alexander said 1:49AM on 11-01-2007
I just recieved my copy (preordered the Family Pack)!
(I live in Holland)
YES!
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