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Getting the Most Out of Leopard’s Quick Look Feature

Charles Moore — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 18:41:07 +0000

I imagine most people using OS 10.5 have become acquainted with Quick Look, which is one of my favorite Leopard features. Quick Look’s basic function, as its name suggests, is as a quick and convenient way to take a peek at what’s in a file without actually opening the file, switching Finder views or opening the file’s corresponding application.

A quick recap for folks who may have gotten their first Mac for Christmas or recently upgraded to Leopard and not yet discovered Quick Look, just highlight the desired file’s icon in the Finder and press the Spacebar.

If the file is a text document, you’ll see a preview something like this. If it’s not big enough, click an arrow button at the bottom of the Quick Look window and it will zoom to full screen display.

If it’s an image file, the preview will appear like this with another icon beside the full screen zoom toggle icon that you can click if you want to add the picture to your iPhoto photo collection. Quick Look can preview all popular graphics formats such as JPG, TIFF, GIF, PNG, Camera RAW, and Photoshop, as well as PDF.

Speaking of PDFs, Quick Look can not only open PDF images, but also is able to scroll through multipage PDF documents right in the QL preview window, which is draggable and resizable.

Quick Look can also preview movie and audio files, which are playable in the preview window, which includes a navigation slider. As with graphics, most popular file formats are supported, including MP3, MIDI, AIFF, AAC, and MPEG4.

Document files of Apple’s iLife apps are supported by Quick Look. Some third-party productivity application formats may not be, but certain widely-used ones like Microsoft Office documents are. Quick Look also previews HTML documents.

Folders opened in Quick Look appear like this, with contents data shown.

There’s more. How cool is this? Open a font file in Quick Look and the preview displays a preview of the typeface.

Finally, if you highlight and open a group of documents simultaneously in Quick Look, more viewing options are offered, including a nifty built-in full-screen slideshow in which images change at about three-second intervals. The Quick Look slideshow feature works with any type of file QL supports — not just images.

There is also an index view that displays thumbnail previews of all items in a folder.

Do you find yourself using Quick Look often? What items do you tend to preview most?

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Quick Look Plugins List

Josh Pigford — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 16:06:27 +0000

Apple’s Quick Look has quickly become a feature I use on a daily basis. It’s integration with Finder (and other apps) is done so well that it’s become second nature to use it.

One thing that’s becoming clear is that Apple’s developers had the end user in mind more than we thought by making Quick Look extremely easy to extend.

Jon MacDonald realized this and has started compiling a solid list of Quick Look plugins.

My favorite plugin by far is qlcolorcode, which gives Quick Look some syntax-highlighting magic.

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Leopard Lots of Show, Little Go?

Nick Santilli — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 18:49:54 +0000

So the argument goes that we saw a lot of eye candy from the Keynote yesterday, but there was a lack of useful features – of substance. In order from disagreement with this position, to moderate agreement, I present you the list of features.

First off, Stacks. We’ve been hearing about patents along these lines for maybe a couple of years now. It’s nice to see that come to fruition. And I see a lot of potential in this new feature, for helping to keep my Desktop clean. I like it spotless as much as possible… So having Stacks at the ready is an interesting new feature I’m excited to play with, and expect will enhance my workflow. Will it knock Quicksilver off the top spot for accessing files quickly??? We’ll see.

Icon Previews will be huge for me. I love that I’ll be able to see the document in icon form as a super quick preview – quicker even than Quick Look, which looks decent in and of itself. This new feature seems like a no-brainer, but I’m sure will enhance many a user’s experience while looking through their documents. Spring cleaning anyone? The prospect of switching my icons from their current extreme (small, small, small) to the other end of things (big, big, big) suddenly seems like a good idea. (mental note, get larger LCD…)

Quick Look is a nice idea in practice, but I wonder how useful it’ll actually be to me, if only for the above mentioned reason. Couple the preview icons with the new CoverFlow capability and I doubt I’ll get much use from Quick Look.

Transparent Menu Bar. Um, short of [maybe] looking neat, why? Either hide the whole darn thing, or leave it be is my stance. I don’t see the use in the partially visible Menu Bar. Sorry Steve.

So I think the All Show and No Go argument is a bit harsh. There’s definitely some usability in the features we saw demonstrated. Don’t forget this is Apple, who’s design-centric strategies are partially to thank for where they are today. Just because Windows Vista tries to copy the eye candy and lacks in the functional area, doesn’t mean Apple’s following Redmond now.

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