Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Panther Edition

Icon View

In an icon view, every file, folder, and disk is represented by a small picture—an icon. This humble image, a visual representation of electronic bits and bytes, is the cornerstone of the entire Macintosh religion. (Maybe that’s why it’s called an icon.)

Icon View Options

Mac OS X offers a number of useful icon view options, all of which are worth exploring. Start by opening any icon view window, and then choose View→Show View Options (-J).

Choosing icon sizes

Mac OS X draws the little pictures that represent your icons using sophisticated graphics software. As a result, you (or the Mac) can scale them to almost any size without losing any quality or clarity. You can specify a new icon size either for a single window or for every icon view window on your machine (Figure 1-13).

In the View Options window (Figure 1-14), click one of the buttons at the top of the window—either “This window only” or “All windows”—to indicate whether you want to change the icon sizes in just the frontmost window or everywhere on the Mac.

Figure 1-13. Mac OS X lets you choose an icon size to suit your personality. For picture folders, it can often be very handy to pick a jumbo size, in effect creating a slide-sorter “light table” effect. Just use the slider in the View Options dialog box, shown in Figure ...