Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Panther Edition

Column View

Icon view and list view should certainly be familiar to anyone who’s used a personal computer before. But for many computer fans, column view is something new—and welcome.

The goal is simple: to create a means of burrowing down through nested folders without leaving a trail of messy, overlapping windows in your wake.

The solution is shown in Figure 1-21. It’s a list view that’s divided into several vertical panes. The first pane (not counting the Sidebar) shows all the icons of your disks, including your main hard drive.

Figure 1-21. If the rightmost folder contains pictures, sounds, or movies, Mac OS X even lets you look at them or play them, right there in the Finder. If it’s a certain kind of text document (AppleWorks or PDF, for example), you actually see a tiny image of the first page. If it’s any other kind of document, you see a blowup of its icon and a few file statistics. You can drag this jumbo icon anywhere—into another folder, for example.

When you click a disk (once), the second pane shows a list of all the folders in it. Each time you click a folder in one pane, the pane to its right shows what’s inside. The other panes slide to the left, sometimes out of view. (Use the horizontal scroll bar to bring them back.) You can keep clicking until you’re actually looking at the file icons inside the most deeply nested folder.

If you discover that your hunt for a particular ...