It’s probably unreasonable for me to be so conceited as to think that my blog serieses (what’s the plural of “series”?) are spectator sports, but if there was speculation around this Leopard Feature Presentation, I bet that the odds would be pretty good that I would review Quick Look, well, rather quickly. A simple feature it may be, and it may make some people wonder about the purpose of it, but indeed, it is a handy new feature that opens up a glimpse to powerful potential.

The best way to describe Quick Look would probably be these two words: instant preview. Essentially, Apple has built-into Mac OS X the ability to quickly launch an instant preview of any file/document. In Finder, if there’s a selected item, just tap the space bar and a preview immediately opens. By default, Quick Look includes support for text files, rich text (RTF/RTFD) files, most audio and video formats, most of the standard image formats, iWork documents, and Microsoft Word and Excel documents, which covers practically all the files you use on your computer. Quick Look not only lets you scroll through traditional documents, but in the case of media files, you can play/watch them. In the case of images, buttons are provided for instantly importing them into iPhoto. Essentially, Quick Look replaces and expands the slideshow function that came in Mac OS X Tiger. However, Quick Look does not make the action of actually opening files obsolete; Quick Look is 100% read-only.

Quick Look even works great on groups of documents. Open a group of documents, and controls appear along the bottom to let you navigate through the set of previews, or click on the Index Sheet button to see all the open Quick Look previews show up in an Exposé-style list. If you’re Quick Looking a group of images, you can have these play in a slideshow as well, completely mimicking Tiger’s slideshow feature.

But what about those documents that Quick Look doesn’t support? Well, in many cases, you can expect the developers of those applications to offer Quick Look support in the near future, but even until then, Quick Look is useful. Quick Look turns itself into a miniature Get Info panel, highlighting such information as the filename, the file size, and when it was last modified. I actually consider this a much more convenient way for me to, for example, find out how big a particular folder or ZIP archive is, which is actually quite a bit easier than going into the Get Info panel, as I would have done before.

The one place where Quick Look gets a little iffy is when it comes to full screen mode. Now granted, when you’re looking at photos or movies, full screen view is awesome. But for documents, having the option to take a document full screen seemed kind of weird. Another thing with Quick Look is that when I’ve tried previewing certain more complex PDF and Microsoft Office files, Quick Look hasn’t been able to display them completely perfectly, although I’ve never had any problems with any iWork or rich text/plain text files. Makes sense, considering which of those file formats are Apple’s.

Quick Look really offers potential to become a staple feature in Mac OS X. Although its primary residence is in Finder, Mail also includes Quick Look for previewing attachments, which I’ve really enjoyed having at my disposal. I think it would be great to see Quick Look potentially integrated into third party apps as well, such as in FTP clients, or in the downloads window of my web browser so I could quickly Quick Look what I just downloaded without having to go to the Finder first. (I’m very surprised that Safari doesn’t have Quick Look built-in in this way.) Quick Look technology even appears in other settings as well. For example, iChat Theater (full review later this month) is compatible with any file format that Quick Look is compatible with, utilizing the now-existing capability to be able to open a file without having to open its application (albeit in a read-only fashion). I don’t know about you, but I think that this lays the groundwork for a whole new layer of innovation that could bring some exciting new ideas to the Macintosh world.

So that’s Quick Look, a nifty tool for instant previews. It may seem like a small idea and make a short demo, but in practice, it’s really useful, easily addictive, and brings a brand new layer of potential into the Mac market.

Feature Satisfaction Rating:

Be sure to check out the other articles in the Leopard Feature Presentation, occurring throughout the month of November here on Webmacster87.info.

Tags: features, innovation, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac OS X Leopard, potential, preview, Quick Look, review, simple