OS X Finder tutorial and customizations (Part 2)

Written by: Scott Haneda on Thursday January 10th 2008, 12:23 pm

Filed under: Finder, OS X 10.5

In yesterdays post, we covered the Apple menu. Today we will dig into the “Finder” menu.

The Finder menu item is to the right of the Apple menu. If you are in another application, you will not see this menu, which at times can be confusing. Just click on your Desktop, which is the main area of your computer screen, and the Finder menu will show up.

About Finder
About Finder is rather lackluster. Most applications have an “About” menu item, generally giving version and credit information.

Preferences
Preferences is where you can start to have a little fun, or at least make your computer more custom to your specific needs. Selecting Preferences will pop open a preference window.

There are four icons at the top, General, Labels, Sidebar, and Advanced.

General
First is a set of checkboxes. These define what is shown on your Desktop. If, for example, you uncheck the “Hard disks” checkbox, you will see your hard drive, usually in the upper right corner of your Desktop, will disappear.

Some people love a super clean desktop, and will turn all of these off. Myself, I like to see what drives and other items are connected, so I leave them on. With one exception, which is “Connected servers”. Most users will rarely connect to a remote server, and when you do, there are other ways to get to that server, which will be covered in a future post.

The second section allows you to define where new Finder windows open. Moving ahead a little, and selecting “New Finder Window” from the “File” menu will open a new window on your screen. You can change this behavior to open to any location you desire. Logically, your “Home” folder is where most people will set it. Another good choice may be your “Documents” folder. Wherever you find yourself going to the most often would be a good choice for this setting.

This is a great example of a user customization that can save you time. If you leave this setting at “Home”, yet always work in your “Documents” folder, you are wasting time. The steps would be to create a new Finder window, then double click on Documents. Save yourself the double click and set it to “Documents”.

Always open folders in a new window. I check this setting as it is how Macintosh’s worked before OS X was around. With this checked, every folder you open will open a new Finder window above the folder you were just in. Most people do not like this, as it tends to clutter up your work experience. Disabling this setting will generally mean you only have one window open at any given time. Opening a new folder will open that folder, and replace the current window you are looking at with the contents of a new window.

Spring-loaded folders are a handy feature from the days of old. Enabling this will allow you to drag a file, or folder, over another folder, hold it there for a period of time, and that folder will pop open. You can continue this process and move a file from one place to another, with only your mouse. The slider sets the duration you need to hold the file over a folder for before the folder pops open.

Spring-loaded folders are an interesting concept. Turn it on and play with it, see if it suits your needs. It has never been something I personally got comfortable with, but there are others who swear by this feature.

Labels
A label is simply a color you can apply to a file or folder. When you look at that file or folder, you will see it colored. Select a file, go to the File menu in the Finder, and apply the color you like.

Labels are also a feature from long ago. In my opinion this preference is rather silly. At any rate, feel free to change the name of each label to suit your liking. Since you cannot change the color, changing the name seems pretty confusing to me though.

Sidebar
The sidebar preferences define what you see in the left most area of a Finder window. This is one of a few ways to change the sidebar items.

In a future post we will talk more about sidebar customizations. Feel free to uncheck items that are of no use to you. This will free up more space in your sidebar for you to put items that are useful to you.

I do not use iDisk, so as you can see, that has been deselected. Since I run my computer on a small home network, and want to see the other computers connected to my network, I have the Servers checked. I rarely use the “Search For” items, and more than likely will be unchecking those soon.

Feel free to remove as many checkboxes as you see fit for your workflow. You can always turn them back on. In many cases, less is more; less is certainly less confusing, so winnow that list down to something that works for you.

Advanced
The Advanced preference area is one of my favorites.

Almost all files on the Macintosh end in a file extension. Something like .mov for movie, or .html for a web file. I want to see these file extensions, so I have enabled that checkbox. Take for example a folder of images:

This is how I see the files with show all file extensions set.
pic1.jpg
pic2.jpg
pic3.jpg

And this is how I see the files with show all file extensions turned off.
pic1
pic2
pic3

While totally up to you, I would suggest you check this setting. You want to see the filename, as it really is, not as an interpretation of the real file name.

Show warnings before changing an extension is a new addition to system 10.5. If you have a file called image.jpg, and change the name to image.txt, you will get a warning. This is good. Changing a files extension can break certain files.

I do a lot of development work, so for me, I have disabled this feature. Often times I need to change a file from .html to .txt, and the warning slowed me down. Another good example of a setting that is not right one way or the other, but great to have the ability to change depending on how you use your computer.

Show warnings before emptying trash will alert you every time you empty the trash. I am of the mindset that since I just told the trash to be emptied, there is little point in nagging me to make sure I want to empty the trash.

However, if you have ever accidentally deleted a file this will add one more layer to prevent that from happening.

Empty trash securely will do the same as a normal empty of your trash, but more thoroughly. Emptying your trash does not technically delete the files, but rather sets the files to be written over by other files. It also hides them from you. This is why you can use special drive recovery software to get files back after you have deleted them.

A secure trash empty will really delete your files. Files will be written over with random data, making the chances of those files being recovered slim. This added layer of security comes at the expense of time. A secure trash empty takes longer.

Since the Finder menu also has a “Secure Empty Trash” menu item, you can perform this function on demand. If you work with sensitive files all the time, you may opt to set this preference, for most users, the extra time is not worth it.

Empty Trash and Secure Empty Trash
Next in the Finder menu are the Empty Trash and Secure Empty Trash menu items. As mentioned above, these control the two ways in which you empty your trash.

Services
The Services menu item could probably justify an article of it’s own. In short, it gives you special access and tools to applications. Some applications will register an item in the Services menu. If it does, you can perform custom routines on data and files. Not all applications will register an item in the Services menu.

The services menu is handy and diverse. Play around with it and see what it does.

Hide Finder, Hide Others, Show All
The last three items allow you to change the visible or hidden state of applications. If you have ten applications open, you can select “Hide Others” and they will all disappear. No data is lost, applications are still open, and they are just moved out of your way. “Show All” brings them back to where you were. This is a fairly useful menu item. Sometimes you have so much going on you need a clean perspective, this will clear your screen up to focus on just one thing.

Hopefully this rather long post has helped to show you a few of the ways you can tweak your computer to better suit your personal needs and tastes. In part 3 we will cover the “File” menu, which is your main access point for working with your files.

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