As you can sort of see from Figure 2-12, Cover Flow is a visual display that Apple stole from its own iTunes software, where Cover Flow simulates the flipping “pages” of a jukebox, or the CDs in a record-store bin. There, you can flip through your music collection, marveling as the CD covers flip over in 3-D space while you browse.
Figure 2-12. The top half of a Cover Flow window is an interactive, scrolling “record bin” full of your own stuff. It’s especially useful for photos, PDF files, Office documents, and text documents. When a PDF or presentation document comes up in this virtual data jukebox, you can click the arrow buttons to page through it; for a movie, click the little ▸ button to play the video, right in place.
The idea is the same in Mac OS X, except that now it’s not CD covers you’re flipping—it’s gigantic file and folder icons.
To fire up Cover Flow, open a window. Then click the
button highlighted in Figure 2-12, or choose
View→as Cover Flow, or press 
-4.
Now the window splits. On the bottom: a traditional list view, complete with sortable columns, exactly as described above.
On the top: the gleaming, reflective, black Cover Flow display. Your primary interest here is the scroll bar. As you drag it left or right, you see your own files and folders float by and flip in 3-D space. Fun for the whole family!
The effect is spectacular, sure. It’s probably not something you’d want to set up for every folder, though, because browsing is a pretty inefficient way to find something. But in folders containing photos or movies (that aren’t filled with hundreds of files), Cover Flow can be a handy and satisfying way to browse.
And now, notes on Cover Flow:
You can adjust the size of Cover Flow display (relative to the list-view half) by dragging up or down on the grip strip area just beneath the Cover Flow scroll bar.
Multipage PDF documents are special. When you point to one, circled arrow buttons appear on the jumbo icon. You can click them to page through the document—without even opening it for real (Figure 2-12).
QuickTime movies are special, too. When you point to one’s jumbo display, a ▸ button appears. Click it to play the movie, right there in the Cover Flow window.
You can navigate with the keyboard, too. Any icon that’s highlighted in the list view (bottom half of the window) is also front and center in the Cover Flow view. Therefore, you can use all the usual list-view shortcuts to navigate both at once. Use the up or down arrow keys, type the first few letters of an icon’s name, press Tab or Shift-Tab to highlight the next or previous icon alphabetically, and so on.
Cover Flow shows whatever the list view shows. If you expand a flippy triangle to reveal an indented list of what’s in a folder, the contents of that folder now become part of the Cover Flow.
The previews are actual icons. When you’re looking at a Cover Flow minidocument, you can drag it with your mouse—you’ve got the world’s biggest target—anywhere you’d like to drag it: another folder, the Trash, whatever.