Cover Flow Remains Superfluous

[ScottW]

The advantage over preview is they are much larger and you can resize cover-flow to your liking. So you can easily flip through them and much better than preview in that fashion.

Once cover-flow has built the "preview" image for a given file, then it doesn't have to generate it again.

Yes, I agree, if I could reach up with my finger and flip through it like on the iPhone, that would be awesome and yes, cover-flow is not the same using your mouse vs your finger.

Obviously, it will have very specific useful purposes, but outside that, your probably not going to use it. I know I won't be flipping through my Applications to figure out which one I want to launch today.

[Timotheos]

Originally Posted by ScottW

Yes, I agree, if I could reach up with my finger and flip through it like on the iPhone, that would be awesome and yes, cover-flow is not the same using your mouse vs your finger.

Sounds abit like they are training us for touch screen GUI if you ask me

[symphonix]

Originally Posted by Lt Major Burns

i'm just curious to see how a 1.3gb psd would fare in coverflow. will i get spinny beachball hell?

Nope. The spotlight / metadata file system creates preview images of all files as they are written. This means if you save a 100 slide Keynote presentation, it'll process in the background just after saving and store all 100 slides as fairly-low-resolution preview images in the metadata system.

When you open it in Finder, you can flip through these pages in the finder preview instantly.

Because the previews are stored using PDF, 1000 page word documents might only use a couple of kilobytes of metadata to store a pretty-good quality preview.

The system that Apple have implemented is pretty impressive, and I think it'll make 10.5 a must-do upgrade.

[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.

[symphonix]

Well, Fryke, you'll be pleased to hear that the Finder's icon view and preview pane have both been improved dramatically in Leo (as I shall now call it). You can (at least on some of the developer previews) flick through the pages of a document, and bring it up to a very large size, right in icon view or in the preview pane.

I stand my my claim that the new Finder in Leo is very good. That isn't an endorsement of Coverflow, though, which is really just eye candy.

[Mikuro]

^^ I agree with Fryke.

I'm glad to hear the icon view has been beefed up. I was afraid they would neglect it.

I seem to recall Apple adding a 256x256 size to the icns format. They've never used it as far as I know, but I assume they intend to upgrade their file icons at some point. That would make icon view's previews more useful. They could also make a new dedicated preview view that works basically just like the current icon view, but with all dynamic icons and at larger sizes. i.e., Cover Flow without gimmicks. (Edit: After re-reading Symphonix's last post, I guess this is possible. Excellent.)

The underlying technology of Cover Flow is great (or so it seems from what I've heard), but that doesn't make the implementation great. I think if Cover Flow actually turns out to be the best way to accomplish much, it will only prove that Apple isn't trying very hard to make efficient alternatives! (But again, as long as it's not replacing anything it's not fit to replace, I'm all for it. It's cool, and it's bound to be well-suited to something.)

Going by what Symphonix said, though, it sounds like third-party developers will be able to access the same images Cover Flow uses, so a screamin' implementation is inevitable, even if it's not in the Finder.

[fryke]

Originally Posted by symphonix

Well, Fryke, you'll be pleased to hear that the Finder's icon view and preview pane have both been improved dramatically in Leo (as I shall now call it). You can (at least on some of the developer previews) flick through the pages of a document, and bring it up to a very large size, right in icon view or in the preview pane.

I'm using them from time to time. I thought the preview pane on the right of Column View was not settable for future uses, i.e. you can set the preview up for one view, but closing the window and starting anew would switch to a default.
Unless you mean the Quick Look thingie, which isn't the same, of course, since it _again_ adds a new layer instead of using what's there. (I love Quick Look though.)