I had planned on doing a full review of Leopard within the first couple days of its release based on a whole slew of notes that I took as I fiddled with the system. However, the problems with my server and this weblog precluded my getting that posted in any sort of timely manner and there are many other reviews of Leopard available now, many of which are better than mine would have been. Therefore, I have decided instead to simply post a few thoughts here and there about things that specifically jump out at me about the new system.
The first of these things is the new Finder.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the new Finder is, at minimum, what Apple should have provided back in the early Mac OS X days (maybe not 10.0, but at least 10.1). The new Finder is such an incredible improvement over the Tiger Finder as to make me laugh when I think about dealing with the old Finder.
Let's be clear here: I had no problem with the Tiger Finder. There were the minor annoyance or two, but overall, it serviced in most of the ways I thought it should.
Wow, was I wrong!
Let's start with the most obvious thing about the Finder: the new look.
Although I never really liked the brushed metal look in previous versions of Mac OS X, it didn't really bother me enough for me to care all that much about it. Its use in the Finder in Panther and Tiger somewhat stretched Apple's guidelines of when brushed metal should be used, but whatever. Brushed metal in the Finder was relegated to the background for me and was pretty much a non-issue.
After 15 minutes of the brushed-metal-less Finder in Leopard on my MacBook, I went back to another computer still running Tiger to look for a file. I was stunned to look at how—dated—it looked. It was truly painful for me to use the Finder in Tiger because it looked so ugly.
The new standard look of Windows in Tiger is a very welcome change, especially in the new Finder. It looks much more professional and allows me to take the system much more seriously when its built-in file browser takes itself seriously. The new look allows me to know that this is a serious tool and is meant to be a serious tool. It may sound strange, but it's true that the look does have that kind of psychological impact on me.
Functionally, the new Finder's windows are much the same as they were in Tiger. The main view allows you to see your files in whatever directly you are currently browsing. The toolbar allows navigation and customization of the view as well as easy access to those same options that can be found in the Finder's contextual menu.
The sidebar has been refined and now much more closely resembles the sidebar found in iTunes. I like the fact that the sidebar has been further organized with a variety of categories for items placed there to be filed under. It makes much more sense to me than the willy-nilly method that Tiger's Finder used. Some people have barked about the fact that the category headers in the sidebar are in all caps. It doesn't bug me.
Speaking of the Sidebar, I really like the new icon for the Desktop found under the "Places" category. I'm not sure if this appears anywhere else in the system and, indeed, I'm not sure if any of the other icons found in the "Places" category appear anywhere else in the system either. But, they look really nice in the sidebar.
I also really like the new look of the list-view in Finder windows. I tended to avoid list-view in previous versions of the Finder (I mostly used icon-view) because it could be very difficult to distinguish between rows—the rows were too compressed together and there were no visual cues to help separate one row from another. The new Finder spaces the rows a little further apart and adds an alternating-color background. This works very well to quickly separate different items in the list and it blends in very well with the rest of the interface. I like the new look so well that I've made it my default view for Finder windows.
This brings me to one minor gripe about the new Finder: how it handles default views. The new Finder insists on using whatever view is selected in the toolbar as the view for any folder it displays. The only way to override this is to display a folder, set the view you want and then use the "Show View Options" window to set the "Always Open in {whatever} View" option. Plus, this option does affect subfolders. Annoying and cumbersome.
As long as I'm talking about Finder views, I might as well touch on the Cover Flow view. In fact, I'll get right to the point: eh. This is not the revolutionary technology that Steve Jobs makes it out to be. I have no desire to browse my files with Cover Flow. I'll admit that when viewing a folder of pictures, Cover Flow would probably be useful. But that's it. I can't see any other situation I'd want to use it.
Quick Look, on the other hand, is something that I'll use all the time. It is so very handy to be able to click on a file, press the spacebar and instantly have a preview of the file appear in its own little window. I'm looking forward to third parties providing the necessary plugins for they file formats. This is probably one of the absolute best improvements in the new Finder.
Speed in the new Finder is amazing. Everything is snappier (and, indeed, appears to be so in the system as a whole). The previous Finders, there was always a sense of sluggishness that you couldn't always put your finger on. Not so in Leopard. Windows fly open. Lists are drawn quickly, including icons. Scrolling flies by.
Much has been said by others about how much faster connecting to servers in the Finder has become. I have to admit that I'm not seeing this. Although the Finder doesn't become hopelessly bogged down with a spinning pizza of death when a server unexpectedly drops of the network, I still see things being rather slow in this area. File transfers from another computer on my LAN to the Leopard machine actually seem slower than they did in Tiger. I'm wondering, however, if there might not be something more going on here. I have another Mac on my LAN acting as a file server and it shows up in the Network window on all the other Macs on the LAN running Tiger. However, it does not show up in the "Shared" category of the sidebar (another computer running a VNC server does show up). More investigation is needed here.
These are really just my first impressions of the Finder. I haven't messed with everything yet (such as searches). However, from my first impressions, I would say that Leopard is a must-have upgrade if only for the Finder itself. Thank you Apple for finally providing Mac OS X with a Finder that it can be proud of!
Subscribe