February 22, 2008, Newsletter Issue #178: Secrets #4

Tip of the Week

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Until now, the Views control panel has forced you to apply your List and Icon View preferences on a systemwide basis. For example, you could choose to show columns such as label, size, and date in List Views or hide them. You could turn Calculate Folder Sizes on or off. In each case, your settings applied to every List View in the Finder.

All of that has changed with Mac OS 8. Now you can set all such preferences on a window-by-window basis. When you choose the View Options command from the Finder´s View menu, your List View settings apply only to the currently opened window. This means, for the first time in Mac history, you can set one window to display a List View with small icons, showing the full complement of file info columns, while another window displays large icons with only the Size field visible.

Pull the Shades

The WindowShade control panel is gone, but you can still collapse windows in WindowShade fashion by clicking on the new collapse box that´s been added in the upper right corner of each window.

Close all windows

Here´s the new twist: option-clicking on the collapse box rolls up not only that window, but every open window on your screen--a quick way to clean up a cluttered screen quickly without having to close and reopen a lot of windows. (Option-double-clicking anywhere on a window´s title bar does the same thing, if you have that option enabled in the Appearance Settings control panel.)

(Guru Note: except for the name, I don´t know the source for these tips. If anyone does, please contact me at macmaven@hotpop.com so I can give proper credit!)

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