This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Finder Status Bar
Not quite the toolbar but useful nonetheless, the status bar has long supplied Mac users with important information about their system. The Finder's status bar shows the number of items contained in a folder and the amount of space available on the drive. The status bar can be toggled on and off using the Show/Hide Status Bar item in the View menu of the Finder. Figure 3.15 shows a window with the status bar turned on and the toolbar off.
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Figure 3.15 The status bar is standard fare in earlier versions of the Mac
OS—it's optional in Mac OS X.
CAUTION
Even if you add up the sizes of all the folders that you use, you're probably going to come up short. There are many hidden Unix directories that also count when calculating the amount of available space. Unfortunately, to an end user, it's going to appear as if he's lost several hundred megabytes on his hard drive.
In addition to the disk space available and number of items in a folder, the status bar also can contain one of three icons in the left corner of the bar:
Grid Pattern—If a small grid pattern appears, the view is set to snap to grid, allowing minimal flexibility in the movement of icons.
Arranged Icons—If you've chosen to keep the icons automatically arranged, you'll see four tiny folders.
Slash Pencil—A pencil with a line through it means that you can read the items in the directory, but not store files within it (in other words, the directory is read only).