Finder facelift for Mac OS X 10.5

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 12 June 2007 14:00

Business IT - Technology

Quick Look provides instant previews of files without having to open a supporting application. "It works with of course all the popular file types: text, images, movies, PDFs, Word documents, [and] Excel documents" said Jobs. A plug-in architecture means developers can add support for other file types. Pressing the space bar gives a preview of the document selected in the Finder, optionally using the full screen.

Some other new features aren't technically part of the Finder, but users are likely to lump them into the overall desktop experience.

The Dock gains a 3D look to stand out more against desktop pictures, and its 'plinth' shows reflections of windows as well as those of icons in the Dock.

"All of us have really messy desktops and we'd like to clean up our desktops," said Jobs. Stacks are folders in the Dock allowing rapid access to their contents. Many users already put folders into the Dock, using a right-click to view their contents as a contextual menu. With Stacks, clicking on the Dock icon causes the folder's contents to appear as either a teetering stack of icons or arranged more neatly in a grid.

Leopard will include a default Stack called Downloads, containing (naturally enough) downloaded files. Many users send downloaded files to the Desktop folder, but this can impact on overall system performance. Each desktop icon is treated as a separate window by the OS, and as the number of windows increases so does the load on the WindowServer process, diverting processor cycles from more useful tasks.

The desktop has been redesigned to better suit having digital photos as background, includes menu bar that adapts to the picture and has a translucent appearance when that suits.

A previously announced feature called Spaces will allow users to organise applications into multiple virtual displays, reducing clutter while keeping related tools together.

Dashboard is being enhanced with a widget for finding movie screenings and session times, viewing trailers and booking tickets. Jobs did not mention whether this will work outside the US. Dashboard will also include WebClip, a technology shown at Macworld Expo in January that allows "almost anything on the Internet" to be turned into a widget. A button in the new version of Safari will transfer the current page into a WebClip widget.

"We want you guys to keep making widgets," Jobs told developers.

Jobs also promised a consistent window look across the operating system, including greater prominence for the active window.