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Mac 101: Using Quick Look
So far as I can tell, practically everybody loves Leopard's Quick Look previewer. For today's Mac 101 I thought I'd share a few tips about using Quick Look. First is nice little tip from Mac OS X Hints about zooming in Quick Look. If you invoke Quick Look with the spacebar you can actually zoom in on the image in a couple of ways. You can hold down the option key and use your mouse's scrollwheel/ball (or two-finder scrolling on a touchpad) to zoom in and out. You can also zoom in by holding down the option key and clicking on the image, or zoom out by holding shift-option. While zoomed in you can also click and drag to pan the image. Strangely, the same shortcuts don't work with PDFs, but you can still zoom in and out with ??? + and ??? - (command plus/minus) with the Quick Look HUD selected. The second is that you can use Quick Look with more than one file at a time. So if you select several files in the Finder by command-clicking and then invoke Quick Look with the spacebar, you can scroll between the images with the arrow keys. However, there's also a nifty index sheet icon at the bottom that will bring up a kind of contact sheet with the selected files (as above). Finally, I know some folks had complained that the slideshow option has disappeared from the Finder's contextual menu. But if you select a group of files in the Finder and then invoke Quick Look you'll also see a play button that runs a slideshow in the Quick Look HUD.
Terminal Tip: Use Quick Look from the Leopard command line
TUAW reader Shaun Haber sent us a link to his personal blog with a great post about using Leopard's Quick Look from the command line, which is wonderfully handy for anyone who spends a chunk of their day in Terminal. The qlmanage utility gives you direct access to many Quick Look functions; of specific interest is the -p flag. This option displays the Quick Look generated preview for any file. So if you tell it to qlmanage -p foo.png, the image immediately pops up in a Quick Look pane. Even better, Quick Look supports slide shows. So if you cd into a folder of images and run qlmanage -p *.jpg, you'll be rewarded with a full-on presentation of your pictures. Other qlmanage flags of interest include -h (displays a help message) -t (thumbnail generation) and -f (a zoom factor to display with). The downside of qlmanage is that it's full of NSLog-style messages. Haber recommends you pipe the output into /dev/null as follows: qlmanage -p *.jpg >& /dev/null.
24 Hours of Leopard: Quick Look
Feature: Quick Look How it works: Quick Look has the potential to change the way Mac users interact with their computers. It brings super-quick access to your files by allowing you to preview a variety of files without opening them in their associated applications. Instead of opening a file by double-clicking on it in the Finder, if you hit the spacebar you'll see a live preview pop up. Also with Quick Look, the various supported document icons become live preview thumbnails. Supported file types include "images, text files, PDF documents, movies, Keynote presentations, Mail attachments, and Microsoft Word and Excel files." Third Who will use it: Everyone. Like Cover Flow, Quick Look has the potential to really speed up the process of finding a particular document since you can scan contents without opening them.
New Leopard Build Introduces New Feature, Tweaks
The latest build of Leopard, (9A303) introduced some small but nifty features to the list of enhancements that will ship with the new OS next year. Lets take a look: QuickLook is a new feature which allows users to view a full size preview of any image by right clicking on it, without having to open up the full Preview application. The workflow for creating Dashboard Web Clips has changed. Instead of having to first open Dashboard, users can now create Web Clips directly within Safari. When connecting a new external storage device, Leopard will ask you if would like to use the drive as a Time Machine backup drive. The Spaces switching dialog is now a glossy black. Small news, but news none the less, and we'll take anything we can get until we see some new announcements from Mr. Jobs himself.
