Macintosh Tip #2b
The Finder—The Sidebar and Content Section
Sidebar
The Sidebar is a list of selected files and folders. It is actually an “enhanced list,” but more about that later. The sidebar comes pre-populated with some default folders, saved searches, devices and shared devices.
The first section of the Sidebar is Devices. This section shows your hard drives, both internal and external. It also shows CDs, and DVDs. The second section, Shared, shows all shared network volumes. This section also shows any computers on your network that have Screen Sharing turned on. So if you are sharing files between computers, this is where you will find them.
Places is the most commonly used section of the sidebar. It is used for quick access to any file or folder that you select. Apple starts you out by placing these folders in the sidebar; Desktop, Your Home folder, Applications, and Documents. I usually recommend that you rearrange the folders into this order; Applications, Home Folder, Desktop and Documents. This order makes more sense to most people.
Other folders that often find a home in the sidebar include; Downloads, Shared and any other folder that you access routinely If you click on any of these, you will be shown the contents of the corresponding folder. You can add any folder you wish to the sidebar by simply dragging them to the sidebar. Drop them in the Places section, above, below or in-between the current items. You can also rearrange the folders that are there, by dragging them into a different order. If you have a folder that you would like to remove, simply drag it off to the left, and it will disappear in a “poof”.
I mentioned that the sidebar is an Enhanced List. The enhancement comes in when you want to add an item to the folder listed in the sidebar. You can drag and drop files or other folders onto the sidebar listing to add the items to that folder. It actually moves the items into the listed folder.
Here is a small movie illustrating the actions outlined above.
The last section of the Sidebar is Search For. Here again, Apple has given us some items to start with. These items act just like folders in the Places section. If you click one of them you will see its contents. However you cannot drop items onto these folders. These folders are actually the results of searches using Spotlight (We will cover Spotlight in a later entry). In order to create a new item in the Search For section, you need to create a Saved Search. So first click in the Search Field and start typing your search. When you have your search criteria entered, you will notice a small button labeled “Save”. This will create an item in the Search For section, allowing you to retrieve these files easily in the future. This feature might allow you to have an Search For item for Project A, without the need to move the files from their original spot.
One significant attribute of the Sidebar displays itself outside of the Finder. When you are in an application and choose Open… or Save As… from the File menu, the Sidebar is available in the dialog box. This gives you quick access to the items you place there from any application.
The Content Section
The main section of the window is where you interact with the actual files and folders. This window is in icon mode.
A Finder window can be viewed in 4 modes; icon, list, column and “cover flow”.
You can change between these modes using the icons in the Toolbar, or the command key equivalents of Command-1 through Command-4. Each of the modes has its uses. Icon mode makes it easier to find items that have unique icons, e.g. photos. In Snow Leopard, you can even dynamically change the size of the icons. Just drag the slicer in the lower right corner of the window. List mode makes it easier to sort your files and folders by different properties. You can sort by name, size, date created, etc. To change the sort order, just click on the header of the column you wish to sort by. You can change the direction of the sort by clicking the same header again.
Here is a window sorted by name, ascending from A to Z.
Here is a window sorted by the date the file was last modified, descending from most recent to earliest.
You can also add columns to the list view. Use the View menu and select “Show View Options” or command-J. Here you will see a list of the columns you can display. Just check the box next to each column you wish to view. If you haven’t tried Column View, you should. Many people find this view confusing at first, but once they use it for a few days, it quickly becomes their favorite view. This view shows you not only the folder you are in, but the surrounding folders and the enclosing folders, and their surrounding folders. It also offers a preview of the document you select (In Snow Leopard this preview is very powerful. It plays movies and sound files, it even allows you to page through multi-page pdf files.) The column view is generally the easiest way to navigate to the various folders on your drive. The fourth view option is Cover Flow. This view allows you to search visually much like Icon mode, but instead of showing you many smaller icons, you see one larger icon, with other files to either side. You can scroll these files in many ways; clicking with the mouse, using the scroll ball and an Apple Mighty Mouse, or two finger swiping with a trackpad on a MacBook or MacBook Pro. These icons give the same functionality as the preview items in column mode.
There are obvious ways to navigate in the content area. You can click a folder in column mode to enter it. Double-click a folder in icon, list or Cover Flow modes to enter them. You open a file by double-clicking it as well. You can use the Forward and Back arrows in the Toolbar. There are also command-key shortcuts for many of the actions. Command-O will open the selected file of folder. Command-up-arrow, will move you to the enclosing folder. In Cover Flow you can use the left and right arrow keys to scroll through the documents.
There is one last section to a Finder window. This information section is directly below the content section. It shows how many items are in the current folder, and how many of them you have selected. It also shows the available space on the currently
