I upgraded to Leopard a few days after it came out. Overall, it’s cool. I didn’t find many of the interface look and feel stuff that drastic. People are freaking out because the dock or menu bar looks different. OMG. For me, meh, whatever.
But the one feature that keeps growing on me is Quick Look. This is way more useful than I ever imagined. Open a Finder window, click on a file, press the space bar, you see the file. Click a button, it’s in full screen. So cool for finding a Word document, or PDF you are looking for without having to open it. It even works with files on the desktop. Also, once you have the Quick Look window open, you can use the arrow keys to scroll through other files in the same directory and preview all of them.
Even better than that, it works out of the box for ActionScript, PHP, JavaScript, HTML and probably many other text-based source code files.
It’s also a great way to view pictures and even movies and listen to music. Navigate to just about any type of video file, even on the network, and press space. You’re watching a movie. Go full screen, pause, play, scrub, etc. Same for most music / sound files.
Quick Look is even integrated into Mail. Get an email with an attachment, you have a Quick Look button in your email that lets you view the attachment.
One annoyance is the number of file types it doesn’t handle. XML and CSS for example. Come on. These are simple text files. I can’t believe it knows how to handle .as but not .xml. I did find an XML plugin which works great – ColorXML. There are also solutions out there for FLV and ZIP which I am checking into now.
The biggest thing I’d like to see now is a SWF plugin. Anybody up for creating one?
I think that quicklooking SWFs would be great. But it could be tricky seeing as SWFs aren’t really documents, they’re executables – and can potentially mess with things even though you just want to “look” at them. Perhaps if it was completely sandboxed (no net access, no file access) it would not be a problem.
I’ve been trying to figure out how to quick look XML files for a few weeks now — thanks. I did some searching around and it appears there are several quick look plugins available for FLV. Which one did you end up choosing for FLV? This one seems to work quite well:
http://www.macclubindonesia.com/forums/showthread.php?t=8836
When i Quick look an AS file, i just get the icon and general info on the side of it, i don’t see the actual text. Yours works the way images do?
Matt, yeah, I see a text document when i view .as files.
Simon. I don’t think a .swf really qualifies as an executable. it is byte code that runs in the flash player, which is an executable. In that you can view a html file with swf content in quick look, I think it shouldn’t be too hard to extend that to just viewing a swf. The same way that firefox can view a swf directly without an html wrapper. But if I really knew what I was talking about, I’d make my own plugin. 🙂
Jon, I haven’t tried any of the flv solutions yet. Just gathering data. I’ll check into that one.
Man, I would love to use this lovely feature, but Apple doesn’t seem to want to release Java 6! Damn Apple, come on guys, you are making it very difficult for us Java folks. Some of our developers are even stooping to running two startup disks on their computers. One runs Leopard the other Tiger (for Java development). I’m just holding back on upgrading all together until they release it.
Ok Keith, sorry to continue my rant on your blog. I know you are sick of hearing about it by now. 😉