Author Archives: Corey Butler

Smart Folders a first class citizen in Lion

July 21, 2011

Smart Folders have always been a feature of (Mac) OS X that I’ve wanted to use.  On paper, they sound perfect: a custom, predefined search that appears just like any other folder in the Finder.  But that’s just the problem – in Leopard and Snow Leopard, the contents of the Smart Folder would not display in Column view. Instead, a preview was given – basically, the Finder in Column view treated Smart Folders like files. Dumb files.

Thankfully, that has been remedied in Lion. Smart Folders now work just like any other folder:

And they’re fast.  Really fast.  I’ve noticed all of Spotlight to be markedly faster in Lion (so, if you’ve just upgraded to Lion and you’re waiting for your Spotlight to reindex, it’s worth it), and that definitely carries through to opening and manipulating Smart Folders.

In fact, they’re so fast, a Smart Folder is now the default folder when you open a Finder window in Lion — All My Files.  This is just a smart folder querying all your drives for all of your files: PDFs, Images, Movies, Spreadsheets, and so on.  As others have mentioned, the power here really comes when you start refining the search using the Finder’s search bar, searching not just file names, but contents as well.

Smart Folders were Apple’s first attempt to change the way that the average person manages files on their Mac.  With Lion, they’ve really become a suitable accompaniment to the ragged folder hierarchy that we’ve had to deal with, allowing us to group files and folders from anywhere on our machines into one “folder.” That said, I’m not quite ready to dump all my files into one folder and just use search queries to find what I’m looking for.  Not yet, anyways.

 

Get your Library folder back in OS X Lion

July 21, 2011 » Source

Shawn Blanc gives us all a tip on how to make your ~/Library folder reappear in Lion in his review — Use the terminal command:

chflags nohidden /Users/YOUR USERNAME/Library

An alternative is to use the menu command Go -> Go to Folder (or Shift + Command + G) and type in “~/Library”, but this seems rather tedious every time you want to the Library folder, especially if you use it often and with different folders (it pre-populates with the last used folder).

Given that so many other changes have ‘revert’ switches (mail layout, indicator light for open apps, scroll direction, etc), I’m surprised there isn’t one buried in System Preferences. That said, as with most of the bigger changes in Lion, this will end up benefiting a huge majority of users who don’t know – and don’t care to know –  about how their system files are organized.

When my iPhone camera trumps my DSLR

July 15, 2011

This photo was taken with an iPhone 4, using the Pro HDR app (iTunes link) to make a 2-exposure HDR.  The remarkable thing is that I took the same exact shot using my Canon XTi DSLR, exposure bracketing ±2 stops to make a 3-exposure HDR, merging in Photomatix and post-processing in Photoshop, and I still couldn’t get an image that was as powerful as this one.

People, including myself, rave about the camera in the iPhone 4, not just because it’s the decent ‘camera you always have with you’, but because of the ridiculous number of photography apps that let you edit your images to your liking.  The iPhone really is the digital Polaroid — you can capture, edit and share images all from one device.