Leopard up close – Cover Flow
Winner of our recent “What’s your fa.vo.rit poll gave us the new mac finder as reader’s favorite new application in Leopard. With good reason. The new finder is faster, more intuitive and 100% more useful than the previous version.
Cover flow allows you to flip through the contents of your computer with a screen not unlike the iTunes cover art browser, a la 1970’s jukebox. It takes a lot to impress me, and I’m impressed. Preview photos, flip through document pages without opening them, even play a video in the winder window; all effortlessly and considerably faster than with Tiger.
Combined with a new version of spotlight, finding those long-forgotten files is no longer an issue. I can only speak for myself, but I have collected a huge array of files over the last few months and finding them with Tiger could be a chore. Leopard may not be a massive upgrade, but it’s far superior to Tiger.
You can, if you wish, go “old school” and use the more traditional hierarchical view. Even with this there is massive improvements. Photo and movie previews load quickly and accurately. And once again, you can play videos and flip through multi page documents, although it’s rather hard to read any pages of a document without a magnifying glass.
Apple have certainly upped the ante with Leopard and it’s my fa.vo.rit app so far.
