Mac OS X Leopard: Leopard to usher in much-needed Finder improvements

from Lifehacker

Out of all the Mac OS X Leopard announcements made today, the one that I'm most excited about isn't hologram effects in iChat, it's the whole new revamp of OS X's file manager, Finder. We've long been complaining about Finder's general stuck-in-the-mud suckiness as compared to the rest of OS X, and wishing it would act more like iTunes. Well, the Apple gods today are granting our wish.

Apple's official Leopard marketing around Finder is just what the doctor ordered:

Imagine if browsing the files on your Mac was as easy as browsing music in iTunes. That's the idea behind the new Finder in Leopard. Now you can access everything on your system from an iTunes-style sidebar and flip through your files using Cover Flow.

Preview some screenshots of the new Finder to be launched in Leopard (available in October) after the jump.

Leopard's Finder sidebar displays all the Macs connected to your computer as well as devices.

Bigger, better-looking and more informative preview icons let you know what type of file is listed and previews its contents in a thumbnail:

Select an icon and hit the new "Quick Look" button (or press the Spacebar):

And you can preview it without launching its associated app:

The new CoverFlow view in Leopard's Finder can flip through your documents as if they were album covers in a jukebox (or in iTunes.) You can also page through multi-page documents and play Quicktime videos right inside Finder, courtesy of the aforementioned Quick Look preview.

The new Finder also support saved Spotlight searches, ala iTunes Smart Playlists, which appear in the sidebar.

Finally, you can also use Spotlight + Coverflow to search for files on shared Macs:

Check out Apple's video demos of Finder and Quick Look below.