Finder Changes in Mac OS X Leopard

Series Summary

In 2007 Apple computers launched the sixth major release of the Mac operating system, Leopard. Mac OS X Leopard succeeds the Tiger operating system, and offers over 300 new features, changes and enhancements. The Doc has been redesigned, the Finder uses the Cover Flow navigation interface you may have seen in iTunes, and the Stacks feature allows you to have quicker access to more programs and applications from the menu bar.

In these free videos you'll learn more about the new features of Mac OS X Leopard from Mac aficionado Brandon Sarkis. He demonstrates how to use some of the new features of the operating system, including how to use the Quick Look feature, how to use the Time Machine automated backup utility, and how to set up Stacks. He shows you how to use the new features in iChat, how to use the movies dashboard widget, and how to use the screen sharing feature to show your friends all of those interesting things you can find on the internet. And for those of you who don't particularly care for the glossy, semi-transparent look of the menu bar, Brandon shows you how to change that as well.

Video Transcript

"My name is Brandon Sarkis on behalf of Expert Village. Today I'll be showing you some of the new features in Mac OS 10.5 Leopard. One of the first things I want to show you is some the new things they've done with the finder. So I'm going to come over here down to the bottom of the screen and click on my finder. It opens up. The first thing you'll notice right away is the sidebar on the left-hand side looks pretty different than it used to, actually looks a lot like the current version of iTunes. At the top it's going to list all of your devices, which are all your hard drives, the flash drives, removable storage things like that. Right below that you'll see all your local network computers or computers that are on the same network as you at least. If you have other Macs on your network like I do you can actually get in and actually play with those machines and actually move stuff around on them and things like that but I'll show you that later. Below that you'll see your places which is, this was in the old versions of OS 10. You see like your pictures here. You'll see your movies, applications, documents. One other neat feature I want to show you is obviously at the top, is that all the documents here are in cover flow which is just like iTunes. So I can go to for example this which is a manual for a digital camera. I can hit this little icon right here which looks like an eye and it brings up the new quick look feature, and I can look at the entire document without actually having to open it in preview or open it in acrobat or whatever I would use to open it. Pretty neat feature. You can close that. It works on any file type that can be previewed, if it's a compressed file it won't show you but you can sit there and scroll through that. And it even works on photographs which I'll show you right here, find a photograph here. There we go, this is a picture of my Rottweiler Gerty. And you pop that open, there you go. You'll also notice here at the top that here are your view options. You got your cover flow, you have your three pane preview that we've always had. You have your line by line details and you also have your icon view. I'm going to switch back to cover flow for the time being. At the bottom down here your going to have some neat little features. This actually goes through all the images you have on any attached drives. And you can scroll through those as such. And below that is all the movies you have on attached drives. And you can see that this is all just a bunch of quick time renders and quick time place holders. And you can also go through all the documents. And the neat thing about this is it actually goes through all of the documents movies or images you have on any attached drive. Even network attached drives. Which is really neat. So that's a pretty cool feature."