24 Hours of Leopard: Finder
Feature: The new FinderHow it works: People have been complaining about the Finder since OS X was first released. Finally, Leopard brings a variety of long-awaited features. Perhaps most important is the one-two punch Quick Look and Cover Flow, but there are a many other new features as well. The new Finder takes its design cues from iTunes, with the sidebar now looking very much just like the source list. Taking a cue from Cocoatech's Path Finder, Leopard adds a live path bar to the bottom of the Finder windows. There are also new folder view settings and the option to make particular folders sharable.
Who will use it: Everyone, and while it's unlikely all the critics will be fully satisfied, the improvements will likely make third-party Finder replacements seem less necessary.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
twolf1 said 11:08AM on 10-26-2007
FedEx just delivered my copy of Leopard. The fedex dude asked me : "i gotta ask you, what is in these boxes? because i have a truck full of 'em."
me: "It's the new Mac operating system"
him: "they require a signature and most people aren't home"
me: "I will hold on to all of them for the recipients."
him: "ha ha ha, have a good weekend"
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Pete said 11:22AM on 10-26-2007
Is there an easy way to drag a file up one directory? It always annoyed me that spring-loaded folders allow me to go deep into the hierarchy without cut & pasting, but not back up it again.
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JoeAD said 11:44AM on 10-26-2007
Is there a quick way to browse to network locations in the finder?
What I miss about Windows explorer is the ability to type "\\server-name\directory\path\etc" directly into the address bar and also in the "open" dialog boxes.
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jonathan ober said 11:46AM on 10-26-2007
twolf...you get a couple of those and I'd take one off your hands for you!!
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Jeremy Forehand said 11:47AM on 10-26-2007
does the finder have tabs now? i thought i remember seeing something about that, but i can't find it mentioned on apple's website.
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Bram said 11:48AM on 10-26-2007
@twolf1: I am soooo mad at FedEx/Apple right now. My copy of Leopard got put on the truck at 8:15 this morning and by 8:55 the FedEx website said "Delivery Exception: Future delivery requested" Aarrrgggghh! Just deliver the f@#king thing! Don't make me wait until some arbitrary time (6pm, I presume). Ugh!
-Bram
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Craig said 12:06PM on 10-26-2007
Did anyone else notice that Leopard Bonjour Syncs with your iPhone without being asked to or even without you saying you want it to or not. And that is with iPhone firmware 1.02
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Chris said 12:09PM on 10-26-2007
Apple added a icon scale slider to Spotlight searches and saved search views yet they didn't add it to the standard Finder view. I have to wonder if there is much interaction between the Spotlight team and the Finder team at Apple or if the Finder team actually uses Spotlight. If they had, they might have noticed they forgot to add the scale slider. In addition, the scale slider in spotlight view allows you to scale up much larger than possible when you Apple-J in a Finder view. The "breadcrumb" bar made the transition from being limited to spotlight searches to being available all the time, why not the scale slider? There are still these inconsistencies that make no sense.
Also, they have added many more query parameters. You can create a saved search folder that contains only images larger than 800 pixels high for instance. You can query spotlight comments. Oddly, they left to the ability to query files that DO NOT contain a particular comment. If you want to use spotlight comments to add keywords it becomes more difficult since you can't filter out of view files which have already had that particular keyword added. Spotlight comments are also just as fragile as before. Thus continues Apple's half-hearted attempt to give metadata a role in organization.
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Chris said 12:11PM on 10-26-2007
To answer the question above, Finder doesn't have tabs. Why Apple, why?
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Eliah Hecht said 12:32PM on 10-26-2007
"Leopard adds a live path bar to the bottom of the Finder windows"
What? I can't see any such thing...
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Samuel said 1:06PM on 10-26-2007
Does finder support XMP metadata?
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Dylan said 1:01PM on 10-26-2007
@Eliah: It looks like this is turned off by default. YOu have to go to View > Show Path Bar
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Andy said 1:04PM on 10-26-2007
Finder?
find . -type f
Bwahahahahaha!
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jln said 1:15PM on 10-26-2007
I have far too much folders in my Finder side-bar which makes it almost unusable. When I read about its new design I thought I'd be able to set up some categories and reduce/expand them when needed. But from what I saw, so far, it doesn't seem to be the case. You can only have one "PLaces" menu. Too bad. I'd be glad to be wrong, but...
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Raghu said 2:05PM on 10-26-2007
Craig, what do you mean Bonjour sync? Is it syncing over WiFi, and if so what is it syncing?
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Simon Arch said 2:43PM on 10-26-2007
@Chris: "Finder doesn't have tabs. Why Apple, why?"
Why do you want tabs? I'm not being a wiseacre here...I really don't understand what they'd be good for. All I ever see is complaints that Apple hasn't implemented tabs, not reasons why they'd be desirable. Maybe if enough people could explain that Apple might implement it.
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Chris Johnson said 3:09PM on 10-26-2007
Simon,
I don't know about you, but I always seem to have about 5 finder windows open at any one time. Tabs would definitely reduce the clutter, but it would also add a step if you wanted to drag from one folder to the other while viewing both... A split pane could be good :-)
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darryll.stone said 4:33PM on 10-26-2007
I like when you look under shares and through coverflow you look at a windows machine. Take a look at the coverflow picture BSOD
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Chris said 3:22PM on 10-26-2007
Simon,
Because none of the other methods for moving a set of selected files from one folder hierarchy to another satisfy me. Selecting files in column view and navigating to the destination is slow and prone to error and if you discover you missed some files you have to do the navigation all over again. You can open 2 Finder windows but then you have to spend time arranging them. There is no cut & paste of files like there is in Windows.
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ahacop said 5:30PM on 10-26-2007
Having used tabs in Path Finder: I have to agree they actually are very useful.
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