New Leopard user features – Open and Save Panels

Apple, Cocoa, Coding

Leopard, the new Mac OS 10.5, is out!

There are a lot of new features, but not everything is mentioned on the features page. Here are some of the cool “power user” features which you may not know about:

The Open and Save Panel (implemented in Cocoa, also known as the NSSavePanel and NSOpenPanel)

1. There is a new Icon View mode with options:

However, the way to change the icon size to be small (as seen above) isn’t obvious. Click and hold down on the icon view segmented cell and a popup will occur:

2. You can now insert items in the panel (and Finder) “side bar” by drag and dropping directly from the views (you couldn’t do this on Tiger!) You can also rearrange or remove items.

3. When you have an item selected, cmd-r will “reveal” it in Finder

4. When you have an item selected, cmd-i will give the Finder “info” window.

5. If you perform a search, you can save the search (just like in Finder). In addition, you can save it just for that application:

…and it appears in a special sidebar section for just that app (to remove it, drag it out):

That’s it for now. 5 new features not even included in the top 300!



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[…] features. (What is the inverse of “Death by a thousand cuts”, anyway?) Corbin enumerated 5 very cool new features of the open/save panel. Excellent stuff! Thi […]

stephane

That’s funny because I see more regressions than improvements. For instance:

* The new MEDIA section slows down the opening of the dialog

* The new MEDIA section is almost never visible, you have to scroll to see it.

I would rather have an official API to display hidden files in these dialogs.

Leopard is both a regression and an improvement in different domains. If you look at NSTableView for instance, the fact that when you validate the edition of a cell, it does not move to the next cell and enter edit mode is great on one hand . The fact that the selection is displayed for a specific cell is stupid on the other hand.

Stephane

Still not possible to display invisible items in the Open and Save Panel?

corbin

Stephane — yes and no. If you set the user default AppleShowAllFiles=YES, then the open and save panel will show all hidden files for any app (just like Finder). This is new to Leopard.

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