2007-11-05

Leopard: Quick Look and Finder's Cover Flow

Seriously. How cool is this? When viewing fonts in Leopard we can Quick Look them to get a preview! In fact, Quick Look works on most everything I've tried and has turned out to be my favorite Leopard feature. I can quickly view iCal events, emails, previous iChats, and client web pages all from one finder window. It is instant and I cannot imagine using a computer without it. Not only does it work well on my MacBook Pro but even on older G4 systems it opens quickly and fluidly.

Also very handy is the Finder Cover Flow feature which is not too much of a surprise for me... I fully expected I'd find it very useful. Like Quick Look, Finder's Cover Flow seems to handle practically anything I throw at it though sometimes in unexpected ways: fonts display a two letter preview, html documents display as fully rendered webpages while address book entries display simply as a contact photo.

With Leopard I'm finding that there are new reasons to create Smart Folders for the Finder Sidebar. For example, I've created a Smart Folder of my contacts and can scroll through their images and then use Quick Look to get their details. In fact, when I Quick Look a contact all the normal Address Book data is active with live links so I can send email, initiate an iChat, or jump to a Google map!

Images in Cover Flow are, of course, fantastic and I've created a Smart Folder so that I can view all of the images in Aperture's library right in the Finder... very cool! This would work for iPhoto as well and is very handy for quick access to images without opening the application.

One last note. Screenshots and window grabs in Leopard automatically generate drop shadows! How nifty is that?

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