David Morganstern of ZDNet’s The Apple Core writes about his distaste for the Cover Flow view option when browsing files in Mac OSX Leopard:

However, why flip through the images sequentially in Cover Flow? Isn’t it faster to present users with many documents at once, letting viewers scan the field of vision on their screen?

I wholeheartedly agree. This sounds like a terrible way to browse files, but, then, I’m just a lowly Windows XP user. I’d imagine exploring your music in a random, haphazard way with the visual stimulus of the album covers appeals to people because we don’t really care too much about what song comes next. As music listeners, the next song we listen to is pretty much open to suggestion if we see something that grabs our attention. Files, on the other hand, are usually subject to very specific demand. I need a specific file right now, and I don’t want to flick randomly through my file icons until I find it.

What do you think? Do you ever scroll through your documents or system files just to see what you come across?