Icon View

In 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 Mac religion. (Maybe that’s why it’s called an icon.)

MacOS draws those little icons using sophisticated graphics software. As a result, you can scale them to almost any size without losing quality or clarity. If you choose View→Status Bar so that the bottom-edge strip shown in Figure 2-12 appears, you get a size slider that you can drag to the right or left to make that window’s icons larger or smaller. (For added fun, make little cartoon sounds with your mouth.)

The Mac expands the notion that “an icon is a representation of its contents” to an impressive extreme. As you can see in Figure 2-13, each icon actually looks like a miniature of the first page of the real document.

Because you can make icons so enormous, you can actually watch movies, or read PDF and text documents, right from their icons.

To check out this feature, point to an icon without clicking. A Play button () appears on any movie or sound file; as shown in Figure 2-13, and page buttons appear on multipage documents (like PDF, Pages, or even presentation documents like PowerPoint and Keynote). You can actually page through one of these documents right there on its icon without having to open the program!

MacOS 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). (You can put a View Options button onto your Touch Bar, if you have one, too; see Customizing the Touch Bar.)

The dialog box shown in Figure 2-14 appears.

It’s easy—almost scarily easy—to set up your preferred look for all folder windows on your entire system. With one click on the Use as Defaults button (described in Use as Defaults), you can change the window view of 20,000 folders at once—to icon view, list view, or whatever you like.

The Always open in icon view option lets you override that master setting, just for one window.

For example, you might generally prefer a neat list view with large text. But for your Pictures folder, it probably makes more sense to set up icon view, so you can see a thumbnail of each photo without having to open it.

That’s the idea here. Open Pictures, change it to icon view, and then turn on Always open in icon view. Now every folder on your Mac is in list view except Pictures.

While you’ve got the View Options palette open, try turning on Show item info. Suddenly you get a new line of information (in tiny blue type) for certain icons, saving you the effort of opening up the folder or file to find out what’s in it. For example:

  • Folders. The info line lets you know how many icons are inside each without having to open it up. Now you can spot empties at a glance.

  • Graphics files. Certain other kinds of files may show a helpful info line, too. For example, graphics files display their dimensions in pixels.

  • Sounds and QuickTime movies. The light-blue bonus line tells you how long the sound or movie takes to play. An MP3 file might say “03′ 08″ ” (3 minutes, 8 seconds).

  • .zip files. On compressed archives like .zip files, you get to see an archive’s total size on disk (like “48.9 MB”).

This option is what makes icons display their contents, as shown in Figure 2-12. If you turn it off, then icons no longer look like miniature versions of their contents (tiny photos, tiny PDF files, and so on). Everything takes on generic icons.

You might prefer this arrangement when, for example, you want to be able to pick out all the PDF files in a window full of mixed document types. Thanks to the matching icons, it’s easy now.

Here’s a luxury that other operating systems can only dream about: You can fill the background of any icon-view window on your Mac with a certain color—or even a photo.

Color coordinating or “wallpapering” certain windows is more than just a gimmick. In fact, it can serve as a timesaving visual cue. Once you’ve gotten used to the fact that your main Documents folder has a sky-blue background, you can look at a screen filled with open windows and pick it out like a sharpshooter. Color-coded Finder windows are also especially easy to distinguish at a glance when you’ve minimized them to the Dock.

Once a window is open, choose View→View Options (-J). The bottom of the resulting dialog box offers three choices.

You can wield two different kinds of control over the layout of files in a Finder window: arranging and sorting.

Arranging files means “Put my files into related clumps, separated by headings that identify them.” You can arrange files in any of the views—icon, list, column, Cover Flow—and there are some incredibly useful options here.

For example, you can arrange your documents into application groups (meaning which program opens each one); now you can see at a glance which files will open in, say, iTunes when you double-click them. Or you can organize your Pictures folder into Date Added groups, with headings like “Today,” “Last 7 Days,” and “Earlier.”

Figure 2-16 shows a few examples.

Apple wants to make extra, extra sure you’re aware of the Arrange commands. It gives you four different ways to find them:

Remember, arranging (clumping) is not sorting. You can, in fact, sort the icons differently within each arranged group; read on.

Sorting means just what it says (except that it used to be called “arranging”): You can sort your files alphabetically (by Name), chronologically (by Date), in order of hugeness (by Size), and so on. See Figure 2-17.

You can sort a window whether or not you’ve also arranged (grouped) it. You can even sort by different criteria. For example, you might have the programs in your Applications folder arranged by Application Category but sorted alphabetically within each category.

Once again, Apple gives you four ways to sort:

Whenever you’ve applied an Arrange or a Sort to an icon view, the icons remain rooted to an invisible underlying rows-and-columns grid. You can’t budge them.

But there are two situations when you’re allowed to drag icons freely into any order you want:

Although it doesn’t occur to most people, you can also apply any of the commands described in this section—Clean Up, Arrange, Sort—to icons lying loose on your desktop. Even though they don’t seem to be in any window at all, you can specify small or large icons, automatic alphabetical arrangement, and so on. Just click the desktop before using the View menu or the View Options dialog box.