[fryke]

The fact that Cover Flow in Leo's Finder is resizable and the preview-pane in Column View is not is in no way an excuse or a reason for Cover Flow. They could've simply improved the preview-pane instead.

Let's look at it from the user-need perspective...

So you have, say, a folder with 100+ poorly-named PDFs, Word-files or images and need to find the correct one visually. Cover Flow shows you, basically, _one_ at a time. You'll go through them one by one (though you can select the speed) until you've found a suspect. Then have to decide whether it's the correct one - and if it's not, move on.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but that sounds like an idea from the eightteenhundreds. Why not use icon view instead with large previews instead of icons? Show me ten or twenty at a time. If I'm working visually, I can decide _much_ faster when I look at a couple documents at the same time instead of just one (plus maybe a glimpse of the ones next to that).

Cover Flow is very linear. Plus: When I'm scrolling quickly, it's often too slow, so I have to wait for it updating again. If I miss the correct one because of this, I'll look at the next 50 ones individually until the end of the list before either (incorrectly!) deciding the document is not in this folder or starting all over again, because there's no hint as to _where_ I lost track.

They should at least have invested a little more into updating the preview-pane of Column View (which _does_ replace list and small icon view very well for me, or at least is a very good addition) plus updating icon view.