Sunday, February 27, 2011, 07:00 pm

Inside Mac OS X 10.7 Lion: New Finder search, item arrangement views

By AppleInsider Staff

Finder view organization

A new "item arrangement" view control in the Finder can group items by their file type kind, their primary application (default app that opens them), their modification or creation date or the date they were last opened or added, their file size, or their user assigned Finder label.

Within certain types of files, the selection changes to fit; when viewing applications, for example, the Finder presents an "Application Category" option, which groups apps by their Mac App Store category (such as Games, Internet, Media, Productivity, Utilities, or Other for unknown apps).

These organizations serve to integrate the traditional list view (which presents items with sortable columns of metadata) with either the classical Mac icon views (presenting boundaries between items' kinds, size, dates and labels), the NeXT-originated column view (similarly grouping items into related categories as selected by the user), the list view itself (creating a fixed grouping of items with the rest of their metadata also visible), and even Cover Flow, which merges the list view with a graphical representation.

Item arrangement popup menus

The popup control, adjacent to the view settings, changes depending on the files being arranged. On the left, general file arrangement options; on the right, arrangement options specific to viewing apps.



Item arrangement within icon view

When in icon view, the item arrangement control separates icons into rows of Cover Flow navigated items. Below are icon views arranged by file size, creation date, and app icons arranged by category.




On page 3 of 3: More Finder view organization: list, column and Cover Flow views.