Filed under: Tips and tricks, Leopard
Leopard love: Quick Look works on files in the Trash
One of my Mac OS pet peeves from way, way back is how the Finder handles a double-click to a file in the Trash. Sure, I know that opening the file may prevent me from effectively emptying the Trash, but I really would love to know what's in that graphic I tossed weeks ago before I wantonly delete it. Wouldn't it make more sense to open a temporary version of the file, or have that dialog offer to move the file back to my Desktop for me? C'mon, Apple, throw me a bone here.
Much to my glee and moderate surprise, Quick Look works like a charm on files that are trashed; that's exactly what I need to check that the files I'm throwing out are actually what they purport to be (not that I'd throw out the TUAW logo, that's just an example of a file I need to rescue). The more time I spend with Leopard, the more I'm convinced that Quick Look, as humble and subtle as it is, may actually be the killer feature of 10.5.
Get a WordPress.com Blog
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
John Colonna said 10:39AM on 12-07-2007
One month into Leopard and I can't remember how I ever lived without Quicklook. The only application I use more on a minute to minute basis is Quicksilver. Quicklook and Quicksilver let me do the things I need to quicker than ever before. I hate getting on a mac now that doesn't have the two. And when I'm at school and have to use the PC's for my programming classes...it's painful.
Reply
codeman38 said 10:38AM on 12-07-2007
My own solution to this one predates Leopard significantly: just drag the document onto the appropriate application icon in the dock, and voilà, it opens.
Reply
Jon said 10:44AM on 12-07-2007
Does Leopard offer you the option to restore a file to where it was deleted from? On Tiger, you have to drag it out of the trash but it's not much good if you can't remember where it came from (particularly bad if you have the same filenames in different folders). It'd also be nice to see where a file was deleted from so that you can make sure it's the right one before you empty the trash.
Reply
Simon Arch said 11:44AM on 12-07-2007
No, it doesn't. I'm still angry that Apple moved from MacOS 9.2.2 to 10.0 without including all of 9's functionality. Instead they've spent seven years playing catchup.
Luigi193 said 11:10AM on 12-07-2007
OMG me too!!! I found that out a little while ago, and loved it! It always bothered me that you could never look at the dang file... its just a folder right? ~/.Trash? Why not let you open it? This makes me happy.........
Reply
joerussell said 11:27AM on 12-07-2007
Indeed Michael, I too think Quicklook is the cats pajamas -especially if someone wants to, say, view an Excel file and they ain't got Office installed.
All we need now is the ability to print from Quicklook... :)
J.
Reply
Tim said 11:52AM on 12-07-2007
QuickLook is awesome -- with one exception. The Flip4Mac plugin! Try opening a folder full of WMVs. That plugin kicks in and each one gets processed with a progress window popup. Excruciating.
Reply
Eric mazur said 12:56PM on 12-07-2007
Now that we are on the topic of QuickLook, I discovered something really interested. As many users of Adobe's Creative Suite have probably discovered, QuickLook does not show the contents of .eps files. Yesterday I dragged a few .eps files into an email messages, however, and -- much to my surprise they all show up as images (!), not a generic .eps icon. The image shows up nearly instantly, in contrast to opening the file in Preview, where Preview takes considerable time to convert the .eps file to the pdf format.
This makes me believe that either 1) some way of rendering .eps files is built-in to Mail or Leopard or 2) the .eps format has some (reasonably clear) preview built in. Either way, it seems to me that if Mail can show a preview, then Quicklook should be able to do the same.
Reply
Michael Rose said 1:12PM on 12-07-2007
Eric -- that's the nature of Encapsulated Postscript Files, in that the encapsulation provides a preview image for applications that can't parse the Postscript code. You'll notice the various preview formatting options when saving EPS out of Illustrator. While Preview and Acrobat, and any app which links to Ghostscript, can render the actual embedded graphic, most apps just show the preview picture. I agree that it's weird that QuickLook won't show CS3 EPS files, it should.
Applications that don't support EPS correctly will usually print the preview image, which results in crappy output. This used to be a huge problem with MS Word.
alex said 1:05PM on 12-07-2007
i had a photoshoot yesterday, and instead of waiting for adobe bridge to finally load each image to show to the client when we were done, i used quick look-and it was awesome
Reply
MichaelKingery said 1:31PM on 12-07-2007
between the quicklook attachment that changes folders into a list of files, and the one that lets you see the contents of .zip files... quicklook is worth 129$ in and of itself
Reply
Tony Di Giacomo said 2:12PM on 12-07-2007
In looking the image of your Trash I noticed you had a EWSMac.framework file in there. I began getting these every time I launched itunes (since updating to Leopard). Drove me crazy to find out where it was coming from. At first I thought it was coming from my external drive (where my iTunes files live) but after checking Console I saw errors with my VolumeLogic plug in. I deleted the plug in and the problem went away. Just thought I'd share.
Reply
brian said 3:02PM on 12-07-2007
codeman38 - awesome tip! Thanks!
simon - agreed. I really miss being able to open the trash after accidentally deleting something and just pressing 'command-Y' ('put away') to move it back to its original home.* Of course, that only worked on the last-deleted item. Windows lets you right-click on anything in the trash and choose 'restore.' How hard is that to implement? All they have to do is attach a tiny piece of metadata with the original path. Trivial!
* I also miss mounting a volume in the Chooser and checking the little box next to the volume to make it automatically mount at login, the way that the foreground window looked VERY different from background windows, and many many many other things. I'm happy with the stability, UNIXness, etc etc etc, but there are plenty of little things like that that I miss.
Reply
Alan Yeung said 5:52PM on 12-07-2007
Brian, you can have the Finder automount network volumes (AFS anyway, I'm not sure about NFS or SMB). Just drag the volume onto the list of startup things in Preferences -> Accounts -> Login Items.
Thad Garrison said 4:57PM on 12-11-2007
Quicklook is by far the most useful feature in Leopard.
I know this is true because on my non-Leopard work machine I am constantly hitting the spacebar to see previews. Even though I've only been using Leopard for a short time, it's become integral to my workflow. That is the mark of a good feature.
The hideous new dock, on the other hand, causes me constant distress, always feeling like it is eating up space and in my way.
Stacks have proved even more pointless and irritating than I expected - especially since they forced me to get rid of my Applications folder in the dock - something I used constantly. I only keep one folder in the dock as a stack - the downloads folder - just to get the visual feedback when a download is complete. Having more than one in there is confusing, since file preview icons are useless at 25px high.
The other killer app in Leopard is, I think, Safari. The new version is super-speedy and it's search highlighting extremely useful. If they just added a search box with a memory, like Firefox, it'd be pretty perfect.
Reply
Thad Garrison said 5:00PM on 12-11-2007
search box with a memory --> what I meant was a Google search box with Ajax suggestions.
jbright said 2:02PM on 12-17-2007
There is a plugin for Quicklook that lets you view EPS files. A quick google search should find it quickly (im on my evil windows computer at the moment). A couple other plugins ive found that were useful was one to view the contents of zip files, as well as viewing the contents of a folder when doing quicklook on a folder.
Im going to have to agree with the story, im finding that quicklook is my favorite thing about leopard. I work in a pre-press department and with preview, there are all sorts of things it doesn't like to show (comments on pdf's, or forms that have been filled out are 2 things i can think of, beyond a lot of random complex type stuff that people do with advertising). In any case, quicklook has been a great pdf viewer, ive begun to actually trust it instead of opening a file in acrobat pro.
Anyway, keep an eye out on the plugins for quicklook, im sure there will be many more to come.
Reply