I put together a Finder plug-in to easily access file metadata (in response to Mark Hunte's hint.) After installing, you can control-click on files and select this script from the new "Automator" menu. The results are displayed in Terminal windows.

You can find instructions, screenshots, and the workflow to download right here.

In the 10.4 Finder, keep the mouse over an item in the Toolbar of a Finder window, and a help tag will soon pop up. This tag shows the full name of, and the path to, the item.

I was just working a second ago and I pressed the Option key while I was doing a Spotlight finder search. When I did so, the Save button (by the plus sign) turned into a Save As button.

This seems like a much faster way to modify an existing smart folder into a similar but different new one.

I am not sure if this is new in 10.4 or not. If it isn't, I appologize, but I don't have a non-Tiger system to test it on. In the Finder, do a File -> Get Info on an item (application, image, whatever). Click on the small icon near the top (the icon pasting area) and hit Command-C to copy it. Now launch Preview and choose File -> New from Clipboard. The resulting new file will have all of the icon sizes and resolutions available for viewing/editing.

[robg adds: If you can test this on a 10.3 machine, please do so -- if it's 10.4 only, I'll edit the hint to reflect that fact.]

Ok so I'm not sure if I'm the only clueless one on this, but I figure since it took me awhile to find it, it might be useful to others out there.

When using the new Burn folders in Tiger, the system creates aliases to the files you want to burn. It's a good idea since it now (finally) allows a Finder burn without the dreaded disk image creation. But since the Burn folder consists of nothing but aliases, the size report you get for it (or the items it contains) doesn't reflect the original items. This makes it impossible to know the actual size of the backup you're creating!

Well, it turns out that if you simply click the Burn button -- without a blank disk inserted -- you get a dialog telling you the size of the disk needed for the operation. I still think they should put this in the Burn folder's window (a la Toast), but at least I can now actually use this feature.

I haven't seen this documented elsewhere and thought it was worth mentioning.

In previous versions of the OS, when you would trash files with identical names, the Finder would simply add copy after the name, making it hard to distinguish which was which. But in Tiger, the Finder replaces the useless copy appendage with the time (shown as Hour-Min-Sec, as seen in the screenshot at right).

Many thanks to the developer who thought about this; it's probably saved me a good couple of files already!

Tiger users will have used the RSS Visualizer screen saver; if not check it out. But, by accident, I managed to set it as my desktop as well -- and it's really cool. I had already installed DesktopEffects when I was running Panther, and the app picked up the RSS screen saver I had set in 10.4.

This appears to be stable under Tiger. The setup is straight-forward; launch and open the RSS Visualizer located in /System/Library/Screen Savers/RSS Visualizer.qtz. The only drawback is that it's not keyboard interactive like the screen saver is.

For a long time, I was very annoyed with the lack of a Refresh command in Finder windows, until I found out that I could force any Finder window to refresh just by creating a new folder and then deleting it. So I wrote the following simple script to automate it:

tell application "Finder"
  delete (make new folder at (front window))
end tell

I've added the script to the Finder toolbar, so that refreshing any Finder window takes just one click.

I don't know if this has been addressed, but I noticed that you can hide/show the Sidebar in a Finder window with this key combination:

Control-Option-Command-T

[robg adds: The Finder's View menu shows Command-Option-T, which hides the Toolbar and the Sidebar, but I can't find any mention of this method of hiding just the Sidebar. I also don't know if it works on 10.3 -- if someone can test it, please comment. For now, I have not marked it Tiger-only...]

The other night, I was trying to explain to a buddy how I had used Spotlight to find the new intro movie in the Setup Assistant. Despite my step-by-step directions, he couldn't replicate what I was seeing. After a while, we gave up for the night. He came back the next day and told me he'd figured it out. After he walked me through the problem, I thought it was worth sharing here as a general heads-up that might catch you by surprise.

To see the issue for yourself, select your Pictures (or any) folder, and then hit Command-F. More than likely, the "bar" portion of the Find window will show Servers, Computer, Home, and (selected) Folder "Pictures." On his machine, though, he was seeing Server, Computers, (selected) Home, and Others. This made it really difficult for him to run a Spotlight search inside the package folder where we were digging -- his machine kept popping back up to his home folder. It's possible to work around this by using the Others button, and then dragging in the folder from the Finder, but that's a major hassle.

So what was the problem and the solution? In his Finder Preferences, he had enabled "Always open folders in a new window." With this setting enabled, when you hit Command-F, a new window opens, since the new Find is now really a folder. And since it's a new folder, it doesn't know anything about its parent, so it shows the default settings, with the highlighted item matching the Finder's settings for "New windows open in." So the fix was to, at least temporarily, disable the "Always open folders in a new window" option. Since most people I've met leave this disabled, you may not ever run into this glitch. I'm not sure it's a bug, but it's certainly not the behavior I was expecting, although it makes logical sense.

Update: This "feature" (and the setting that disables it) only seems to work in column-view windows. After testing based on the comment below, I found that both Icon and List views do not contain the currently selected folder as a Spotlight option. Yet another reason to use Column view, I guess! Can anyone else confirm this?]