Apple and Mac OS X Tips: Snow Leopard Features & Quirks: Finder

The Finder in OS X Snow Leopard 10.6 is not exactly the same Finder application that was in Leopard 10.5. Rewriting an application has obvious advantages, but can also introduce new issues. I will try to highlight both below within a features list.

Performance: Rewritten in Cocoa for Snow Leopard, so Finder is more responsive from top to bottom. Add 64-bit support and Grand Central Dispatch (which makes Finder multi-core-capable) to the list. Navigating around mounted volumes is also faster.

Spotlight: Customizable Spotlight search locations. Using View/Show View Options (Action/Show View Options, or cmd-J), adjust view options and sortable search results. According to some users, these last 2 features were Leopard 10.5 bugs and available options in OS X Tiger. iChat buddies can also be searched in Spotlight.

Users can also search iPhoto Faces and Places in Spotlight. Spotlight should index Faces and Places in iPhoto '09, but I had to force OS X to reindex first. After reindexing, Spotlight now appears to be much slower than before. I moved contacts to the top of the Spotlight "seach results" in preferences, but it appears to be one of the last categories populated during a search. Strange.

Icons: Enhanced live icon previews that let you thumb through a multipage document or watch a QuickTime movie. This is all done using the icons themselves, but I can't seem to get it to work on Word docs (.doc or .docx), although it does work on Pages docs. Finder also supports larger icon sizes up to 512x512.
Quick Look: Option-spacebar opens QL in full-screen mode. Selecting multiple items and then doing QL will include a button at the bottom of the QL window to switch between the selected items.
Column View: Select a folder in column view and press cmd-a it will select all the folders and files in that folder's containing folder, rather than all the items inside the folder itself.
Trash: Restore deleted items to original folders. Right click (or option click) on any item in the trash. When the contextual menu pops up, you should see an option that says "put back." Alternatively, you can also find that option in the action menu when you have your trash open. I did find that the "put back" feature is not consistent. Doing a "move to trash" from Finder will give me a "put back" option in the Trash, but doing a "move to trash" from Preview will not produce a "put back" option in the Trash.
Pinch & open multitouch gesture when in a finder window in icon view changes the size of the icons (works on desktop, too.). The same gesture in cover-flow view changes the size of the cover-flow window.
More reliable disk eject. The Finder will tell you which application is keeping a disk from being ejectable. Half bug fix, half user enhancement. In OS X 10.5, the message just stated the device was busy.
Flagged viruses. Snow Leopard has basic malware protection for Safari downloads. If you download an executable that contains a virus, the OS will warn you, and recommend you abort. Files that are infected will be marked as such in the Finder
Removable sidebar headers. If you prefer a minimal sidebar, you can remove all items under a sidebar header (Devices, Shared, Places, Search For). The sidebar header will then disappear. This is another "feature" that actually might be classified a bug fix.
Stacks. Stacks has had some improvements in Snow Leopard, but, unfortunately is still just a glorified document/application launcher, missing many of the Finder features noted above. I will cover Stacks in a separate article.