Get More From Your Quick Look With These Plugins

Quick Look is a great tool pre-installed in OS X that allows for information about a highlighted file to be brought up with a press of the space bar. While this feature is handy and nice, it could be much better. Here are a few plugins you can install to get more from Quick Look.

For all plugins: To install, drag the .qlgenerator file into /Library/QuickLook/ for all users, or to /Users/”username”/Library/QuickLooks/ for only one user.

1: BetterZip. BetterZip is a Quick Look plugin that allows you to see the files contained in zip, rar, 7z, and other compressed formats without extracting them. To activate, press space while an archive is selected. To edit the BetterZip preferences, click Configuration while Quick Look is in use.

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2: Suspicious Package. Ever downloaded a pkg or an mkpg file that you were unsure about? With Suspicious Package, you can browse the contents of a packaged file without opening it.

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3: FLV Quick Look Plugin. This plugin will allow for the watching of flash(.flv) video files using Quick Look. Requires Perian, which is a free toolkit that adds compatibility for various video formats to Quicktime.

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4: Animated GIF Quick Look Plugin. This plugin will allow Finder to display animated GIF images in their animated form through Quick Look. This is something that I personally believe should’ve been built in natively.

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5: NDS Quick Look Plugin. For those of you involved in the DS Homebrew scene, and those of you who use Flash Carts on your Nintendo handhelds, the NDS Quick Look plugin will generate a preview for the selected ROM using the game’s logo. Disclaimer: Here at iTD we do not support the use of devices such as Flash Carts for the purpose of pirating games and encourage those who do to delete their game copies or buy the game from an authorized seller.

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For more Quick Look plugins, click here.

About the Author

I am a technology enthusiast who's first major computer experience was with hacking the Sony PSP. I am an Apple Dev, and I'm currently studying Computer Programming and 3D Animation.

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