Seb's Rant of the Week - Finder in Lion

[theSeb]

I have a real bug bear with Apple about what they've done to Finder in Lion, especially with the "All my files" favourite and the equally useless About This Mac --> Storage graphics, which only confuse most new users. The Storage graphics will be the subject of my next rant of the week though.

The "All My Files" favourite is useless in my opinion. I don't know why Apple have decided to make Finder in Lion useless with the default options and this is why we have 10 threads a week asking about space issues and files and so forth. I understand they are trying to abstract the idea of folders and files away from the user, but why. There is no need to. Files and folders are simple and natural to understand for anybody with an IQ above that of an amoeba. A folder can store files or folders. A file can be user data, an executable, user preferences or system data. What's hard to understand about that?

Before you start downloading pointless applications to show you the biggest files, consider that Finder can do all of that and more for you. Once you have made it somewhat more useful, the next thing is Spotlight, which I'll discuss some other time.

Click on Finder --> Preferences

Change the default "New Finder window shows" to your home directory (your username)



Now click on Sidebar at the top of the window and choose which shortcuts to view in the sidebar. You'll see that I have pretty much all of them, except for "All My Files", which, in my opinion, is useless.



Now close the preferences window and go to to the finder menu

Select "Show Path Bar" and "Show Status Bar"



Now click on Show View Options



You'll see I've ticked the columns that I use, but you may have no need for Version and Label

Click on "Calculate All Sizes", then click on "Use as Defaults"



Voila - you now have a useable file manager.

[maflynn]

Originally Posted by theSeb

Before you start downloading pointless applications to show you the biggest files

Does this trick show you all the files sorted by file size or do you have to navigate to each folder?

Personally speaking I don't find Omni DiskKeeper useless, it does a great job at locating my large files and includes files that are typically hidden by the Finder.

[theSeb]

Originally Posted by maflynn

Does this trick show you all the files sorted by file size or do you have to navigate to each folder?

Personally speaking I don't find Omni DiskKeeper useless, it does a great job at locating my large files and includes files that are typically hidden by the Finder.

No. You would still have to check out folders by navigating to them yourself. You can combine what I've posted with spotlight to show you similar info to what DiskKeeper shows you.

I didn't say it was useless, I said it was pointless. There is a distinction. It's certainly not useless, since it gives you the info you need and as long as you're not paying money for it, that's great. I think they are pointless however since you can get the same info from Finder and the command line.

Edit: Out of interest, what's the difference between timg and img tags on vbulletin?

[Partron22]

Originally Posted by theSeb

The "All My Files" favourite is useless in my opinion.
...
Change the default "New Finder window shows" to your home directory (your username)

But why would I not want to be constantly confronted with a list view of "More than 10,000 Items"? That lets me know I'm a 'power user' from which ego-satisfying position I can click around for half a minute or more trying to isolate the single file I want.

[theSeb]

Originally Posted by Partron22

But why would I not want to be constantly confronted with a list view of "More than 10,000 Items"? That lets me know I'm a 'power user' from which ego-satisfying position I can click around for half a minute or more trying to isolate the single file I want.

Of course. It makes far more sense to simply throw all of your documents onto your desk and start digging through the piles, rather than having them sorted into separate folders in drawers.

[bdodds1985]

very useful. but i like to browse in colum view for previews of pictures. coming from a windows pc it was complicated to get used to this way of browsing and i found that this works best for me. I wish I could browse through finder in list view and still get a preview to the side like a windows folder.

[rpincowes]

Do you know how to get Lion to open folders in the same view in which you last looked at them? That's what they did with previous operating systems. I want folders containing other folders to open in list view, and folders with images in to open as icons so I can see the thumbnails. But very often, having set the view I want, the next time I open that folder the view has changed of its own accord.

[VirtualRain]

I'm not sure I get it... What productivity use case requires knowledge of files or folder size?

I'm with Apple in that I'm moving more and more away from ever using Finder to more of an App centric model to file management. Load the app first and then load the file you want, which 90% of the time is the last one I was working on, a recent one, or a new one. I rarely see a need to work on the largest or smallest file...

[Partron22]

Originally Posted by VirtualRain

What productivity use case requires knowledge of files or folder size?

Finding stuff. Sometimes name, doc type, date created or modified don't do it.
If your "All my files" only contains a hundred docs you won't usually need file or folder size. If you've got tens of thousands of files dating back years, file size can be helpful in sorting them out.
Lots of files can be opened by more than one app, and sometimes you don't even know which current Apps are capable of opening the file you want. Many Apps wont even show docs they can't open, so the App first, then doc approach fails.