OS X Finder tutorial and customizations (Part 5)

Written by: Scott Haneda on Monday January 21st 2008, 5:45 am

Filed under: Finder, OS X 10.5

The “View” menu in the Finder is one I find myself using often. In short, it controls the view of folders and files. Starting at the top, you have view as Icons, List, Columns, and Cover Flow.

Each of these selections is dependent on the current window you have selected, or in focus. To the best of my memory, the default, and what you are probably most familiar with is icon view. Let’s go through each view mode.

Icons
Icon view will show you your files and folders in icons. If you tend to work visually, and are able to notice files and folders based on their look, this may be the best view mode for you. It can fall short of you tend to have an abundance of files and folders in one area.

Icon view will generally show you a small picture of the file, or in the case of a folder, it will show you a small picture of the folder. As you can see by the picture below, icon view has a limited ability to show you a lot of data at one time. I also find the ordering and sorting of files and folders to be less than intuitive.

It may be just what you want, if it is, I suggest you select it, as there is no correct view mode, just what works best for your workflow.

List
List view is probably the most widely used view mode. List view will show you your files in a list, sorted alphabetically. You can clearly see the name of each folder or file, and a good deal of folders and files will fit in a relatively small view area.

In this mode you will see there are small triangles to the left of each folder. You can click these, and they will expand to show you the contents of that folder. Click the triangle again, and it will collapse to restore your folder back to a closed view.

As you can see, icons on folders are still legible, as are those on files. The files are forced into a strict alphabetical listing order, making it simple and quick to find files and folders at a glance. All this with a minimal amount of moving your mouse around looking for what you want.

Columns
Column view is something new as of OS X’s release, though has been in OS X since the earliest of pre-release versions.

I would call this a hybrid view. It incorporates list view, with the ability to expand the above-mentioned triangles into a separate pane off to the right. Some would call it file browsing. With each new file or folder you select, your view is traversed to the right, digging in a little deeper into your files.

Once people discover this method, I tend to notice they use it more often than not. I see users getting a little lost, as they do not know where they are in their files, as it tends to hide where you have been. Of course, if you have a large enough monitor, you can open up your window wide enough to see your entire file pat you have traversed.

Cover Flow
Cover Flow is new to System 10.5 (Leopard). Cover flow will render a picture of your current files and folders, and allow you to “slideshow” through them. It has a lot of flare to it, but I am yet to find any truly useful ways in which to take advantage of this view.

If you have a ton of images dropped into a folder, it will be very useful. Why you would not put those images into iPhoto and have an even better means to manage your images is beyond me. However, that alone makes this view mode less useful.

It will prove highly useful when used in combination with “Smart Folders”, which will get an entire post at a later time. Aside from some very specific cases, I do not see users taking advantage of this view mode, and would even suggest you test it with caution, as it can be confusing to some.

Clean Up
The “Clean Up” menu has been around as long as I can remember. It will do it’s best to take a mess of scattered files and folders and make order to them. It only works to files and folders that are in icon view. It further tends to have a mind of it’s own.

Clean up is depended on a many settings. Depending on the file name, its current placement, and your grid preferences, will depends on where the files get moved to in a clean up effort. It further complicates things as there is a good chance that selecting it will perfectly stack a set of files right on top of each other, giving the illusion that some files have gone missing.

Arrange By
The “Arrange By” menu item is actually very handy. The default is to arrange by name, which means sort items by the alphabet. However, there are times when you may want to find the most resent file you worked on, sorting by date modified will do that for you. You can also sort by size, which can help you locate really large files, or really small files.

Hide/Show Path Bar
The “Path Bar” men item will change from either hide or show depending on how it was let set. If you look at any window in the Finder, near the bottom, you can see the path bar. If it is not enabled, turn it on now so you can see what I am talking about, or take a peek at the picture below.

The Path Bar will show you the entire file system path to the current file or folder you are working on. In my example, you can see I started at the hard drive, went into a users folder, and into the Library folder, down into Application Support, and finally into the Calculator folder.

Were it not for the Path Bar, I would have no idea where I was, at least not at a quick glance. As we move on and get into more technical details, you will learn the many other ways of finding out where you are on your computer, for now, the Path Bar is a great time saver. I say turn it, it takes little space, and comes in handy many times a day.

Hide Tool Bar
The “Tool Bar” is the big grey area with the buttons on the top of all windows. It is also the area off to the left that gives you quick access to different areas on your computer. It is also a large space waster to some.

Previous versions of OS X have never been able to set this preference correct. Try as you might, the Tool Bar would sometimes come back, or sometimes disappear. As a result, rather than waste time with it, I left it on. The image below shows you a folder window with the Tool Bar hidden. As you can see, much of the space that was wasted, is now saved, however, you have also lost some quick functionality as well.

Hide/Show Status Bar
With the Tool Bar hidden, you can also hide and show the “Status Bar”. The Status Bar is simply a small bit of text that shows how many files are in the window, and how many, if any, of those files are selected. It also reports how much drive space you have remaining.

The interesting thing is that if you have the Toolbar turned on, this data is shown at the bottom of all windows, whether you want it there or not. I tend to think it is a good thing to have on one-way or the other. Often you will have 50 files in a folder, and know you need to remove half of them. You select half, but are not certain. Seeing the window say “25 of 50 files selected” confirms that you have in fact selected just half.

View Options
The “View Options” are very cool. They are also rarely touched by users, though they should be. They are also darn confusing.

View options affect the window you currently have selected. It is not a global preference, even though I tend to think it should be. Open up your View Options, and you should see in the header it will show the word “Desktop”. Now if you open a new folder, you will see the title changes to the name of that new folder. This is a very subtle note to let you know that you are changing your selected folder, not the entire set of folders on your entire computer.

Within this palette there is icon size. Slide it around, and you will see your icons grow and shrink in size. Of course, this will only work in icon view, or assuming you are working on your Desktop files, it will always work. I tend to think the default size of the icons is too large, so I make them smaller.

People with vision issues may want to make them larger. Which is also a great reason why some people may like icon view over list view as I mentioned earlier.

Grid spacing is the next slider. This is new to System 10.5 (Leopard) as well, and greatly appreciated. I mentioned this with the “Clean Up” command a few paragraphs above. Imagine there is an invisible grid of squares on your computer. This slider defines the size of this grid, or the spaces between each grid item.

It is set to a rather large value, so in icon view, your icons will be very spaces apart. You can fit more icons, and more data into a single view by altering the grid to a smaller value. There is no set rule to an ideal setting; whatever works for you is perfect.

Clean Up also relies on this grid. It is this grid that the Clean Up command uses to decide, in part, where to shove your files and folders, in a futile attempt to clean up your icons for you.

The Text Size menu will let you change the size of the text that files and folders are labeled with. I find the default to be just about right. If you have Superman vision, make is smaller, if you have old man eyes like me, you may want to bump it up a little.

Label Position will move the file names you see on files and folders from their usual position on the bottom, to the right. Again, this only affects you if you are in icon view.

And finally, you can alter the background of a window, from a color, or even put in a custom picture of your own. A nice feature for sure, and I would not get rid of it if I could. I word of caution, the more you tweak, the more you tend to clutter, and the less real work you will get done as your modifications get in the way.

That was a quick run down of your view options. Keep in mind, the view options palette may not look exactly like the one in my screenshot above. It is very dynamic, it will change depending on if you are in list view, icon view, column view, or cover flow view.

Below are shots of each palette and how it changes depending on your view.

View Options when list view is selected:

View Options when icon view is selected:

View Options when cover flow view is selected:

View Options when column view is selected:

Hopefully this sheds some light on what the View menu in the Finder can do for you. We have one menu left, and then we can move onto other things. More than likely Safari, since that is probably the second most used application on OS X.

This is not at all to say we are done in the Finder, there is a lot more to be learned, I just need a break from pages on pages of writing about a few menus at the top of your screen.

Hope you are enjoying, if you are, leave a comment, it helps motivate me to keep on keeping on.

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