Macking 5

by Michael Pearce
From the Nov. '95 Computer Bits

Many times I go to a customer site and find that, even after using their Mac for a year, the Views are still set in the default position. Learning and using this most basic control panel can enhance the user experience dramatically, but one wrong setting can, on some Macs, give the illusion of a hung machine and cause high blood pressure and serious loss of hair.

First, the font and size choice. Even though I have many fonts to choose from, I keep mine set at Geneva 9, because this font was hand-tuned by Apple (anyone know the designer's name?) back in the first year of Macintosh to look best on screen at this small size. If you have a large monitor, or eye-strain problems, consider choosing a larger Geneva, or any other font in your System. A good alternative liked by many is Tekton 12. When you enlarge the point size you will not be able to display as many lines per inch in the View By Name (or other text view), and in Icon View you will need more space between icons to fit the names in. Do not, by the way, type your file names with the CAPS LOCK key down; the names take up a lot more space.

Do not select the "Always snap to grid" option because sometimes you will want to place an icon in a specific place in a window, or on the desktop, and this will not let you. If you want to quickly align icons to each other or to the invisible grid, just hold down the Command key while dragging the icon. Conversely, holding the Command key down will temporarily toggle the Snap feature OFF if it is set to ON. If you size the window to the desired width, then hold down the Option key while selecting "Clean Up..." (the first item under the Special menu), all the icons will align themselves to the grid, out to the width of the window and as deep as necessary to store all the icons. Notice that "Clean Up Window" changes to "Clean Up By Name" if View by Name was the last choice you made under the Views menu before changing to View by Icon. If you chose to View by Kind instead, then this is how the icons will sort themselves when you use the Option key. Try this now. Notice also how holes will be left in the grid next to items with long filenames.

Staggered grid is preferable to Straight grid if you routinely use long filenames. Normally, icons will not occupy a spot on the grid if its name would step on the icon next door. Staggering the grid lets you cluster icons closer to each other.

Under List Views, I prefer the middle (SICN or Small Icon) setting over the default first setting. Every icon resource includes a small icon that gives you some idea of what the large icon looks like, and gives you instant clues as to what kind of document you are viewing, especially if the Kind column simply says "Document," which it will do if you do not have the application that created it on your hard drive. I have rarely seen the third setting used, which displays the full-size icon in the View by Name, Size, Kind, etc. setting, and wastes huge amounts of space in the window.

The most efficient setting in the Views menu is By Small Icon, in terms of cramming the most items into a given window size. Since no information is included besides the name and small icon, sometimes you will need to switch to View By Date setting to find the most recently modified files, or View by Size to find the largest. View by Kind is useful if you have documents created by different applications in the same folder and you want to cluster them alphabetically by type.

It is with the Calculate Folder Sizes option, very useful in faster Macs and good in slower ones (if you are careful), and View by Kind that some users get into trouble.

Calculate Folder Sizes is great in that it tells you at a glance just how much data a given folder contains (in K), but to do those calculations takes processor time every time a window is opened. Under most conditions, that information is NOT cached and if you close a window the calculation process starts over unless you reopen it immediately.

Now imagine you have a given folder set to the View by Size option, with Calculate Folder Sizes turned on. The folder will not open until the enclosed folders have all been calculated! On a IIsi, or Classic, or similar machine, this could stop you dead in your tracks for several minutes, if you have a dozen or two folders, each containing 20-100K of data. If you are a new user sitting there for several minutes while nothing appears to be happening, you will assume that the machine has hung, and hit the reset. Worse, the next restart will return you to the same place as before, if you already had an open window in View by Size sitting on the desktop. I have gotten pleas for help from people with just this problem.

Remember that View by Size is useful, but NEVER close a window with that setting. Return to View by Name before closing it. Even if you have Calculate Folder Sizes turned off, a folder with 100 files of varying sizes will take a while to open on a slower Mac. Beware!

The View by Kind option can also cause a folder to open slowly, because a sort must be done of all the different kinds of files within before it can open. Even on a IIci or Quadra 605 this can take an inordinantly long time.

The last item on the left, Show disk info in header, is very important to keep turned on, especially if you have a small hard drive and like to work with the View by Name setting in all your windows. If this option is not toggled on, you will have no way to tell that your hard drive is filling up without switching to View by Icon (or Small Icon) and looking at the window header. I have found people with less than 500K remaining on an 80-meg drive. At this point, the clipboard starts to fail, it will be impossible to save new files, and even a directory error could result, causing the Finder to crash at startup. Never let your hard drive get more than 90% full. Delete something or buy a new HD. Since $199 will buy you a new drive with over 400 megs of space these days, and give you the bonus of faster disk access, it's time to upgrade. Don't mess around with AutoDoubler, Stacker or other file-compression schemes; they cause more headaches than they are worth. If only RAM was as cheap as new HDs.

The remaining settings, Show size, kind, label, date, version and comments determine what you see in the View By... anything but Small Icon and Icon options. If you assign colors via the Labels menu, but do not use the Labels themselves, the Show Label option is pointless and can be unchecked. The View by Label menu option will disappear, but you will still be able to assign colors to items, yet not waste a column of space in the window for the label names. Those names, by the way, can be changed in the Labels control panel. When I had a B&W Mac, I changed them to the name of the color that was being displayed! That way I could still assign "colors" to items in folders and sort by them later.

The Show version option includes the version of any application, panel or other file that contains a VERS resource, set by the developer. I find this column useless because if I want to know the version number of something I select it and choose Get Info from the File menu. That window tells me the version, as well as when it was created and last modified. If you have never used Get Info, start doing it. There is a lot of useful info there. But do not type anything into the Comments section; those comments are destroyed any time you do a Rebuild Desktop. This is one of the prime peeves of long-time Mackers: the fact that Apple has not yet, after 11 years, figured out how to preserve those Comments in the Get Info box. The Show comments option puts your comments at the end of the line in View By... and adds by comment to the Views menu. Don't think "Wow, I can really use that feature!" because the next time you rebuild the desktop, something you will have to do when you install some new software or fix a corrupted desktop database, your comments are gone.

As if all this weren't enough to think about, there is a free package of special Finder Preferences that have been hacked to create a wider name field in the List View setting. If you use these instead you cannot change the settings in the control panel (it will destroy the special hack), but if you have a large monitor you will find this to be quite a nice touch. It's called Finder Preferences 7, and was created by W. John Carlsen of Boston <74766.1164@compuserve.com>. It must have taken him weeks; it is very well produced with extensive documentation. FTP it from here or from most online services and better Bulletin Boards everywhere.

No Microsoft products were used in the production of this column.