Ever wonder what that PKG installer is going to put on your Mac when you install it? With Suspicious Package, you don’t have to wonder.
Suspicious Package is a Quick Look plugin that shows you what’s being installed and where, including scripts that will be run, and where the files will be placed. It’s free, and doesn’t even require a restart.
Quick Look is a handy feature of Mac OS X that allows you to preview a file simply by hitting the Space Bar while the file is selected. A large preview window opens allowing you to see what the file is (provided the file format is supported by OS X.
Quick Look can open files with a simple mouse shortcut
With OS X Lion, you can open the image by clicking the small button in the upper right corner of the Quick Look window, but it’s much easier to simply double-click the Quick Look window. Not a huge time-saver, but every click saved is a click earned, I always say.
Quick Look is more than just image previews
The Quick Look feature in Mac OS X Lion is useful for previewing images, text files and websites. But you can also use it to quickly check the free space remaining on your hard drive.
Simply click on the Mac HD icon on the Desktop or in a Finder window and hit the spacebar.
Another quick way to check your free space is to turn on the Status Bar in Finder windows by visiting View>Show Status Bar (Command + /) and click on the Mac HD icon in the Finder window. The Status Bar at the bottom of the Finder window will display your free space.
When Apple introduced Quick Look in the Mac OS it was a huge productivity boost to many designers and photographers. Quick Look allows you to view QuickTime compatible files in an overlay right in the Finder simply by selecting the icon of the file and pressing the Space Bar. It wasn’t long before users began seeking out plugins to view more file types than just PDFs and JPG images though.
SneakPeek Pro, by Code Line Communications (the company that brought us Art Directors Toolkit, arrived on the scene and took Quick Look to a new level. This simple Preference Pane allows you to view layered Adobe Photoshop files, Illustrator .ai and .eps files, and InDesign documents. SneakPeek doesn’t stop with just a preview image of your document though. The Quick Look overlay SneakPeek provides also displays information about Illustrator and InDesign files, such as the colors used, the images placed in the document, fonts used, and general file information such as multiple page previews (see the image below).
SneakPeek Pro for Mac allows you to view your graphics files in the Finder
I’ve found SneakPeek Pro for Mac to be a valuable addition to any designer’s toolbox. But with more and more designers working on the road, the ability to view graphics files on the iPhone would be nice addition. Thankfully, Code Line has finally brought the power and usefulness of SneakPeek to iOS device users.
SneakPeek renders previews of graphics files stored on your iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. It works by providing an “Open in SneakPeek” button to your favorite iOS applications like Mail, Dropbox, Safari and just about any app that gives you access to files.
SneakPeek for iOS allows you to view the same file information as the desktop version
With SneakPeek installed on your iPhone, you can check the InDesign file for a client’s new business card layout that just got emailed to you without waiting to get back to the office. And rather than viewing a jagged JPG file attached to an email of a new logo, you can view the actual Illustrator file. SneakPeek for iOS also offers you the same file information as SneakPeek Pro for the Mac – such as fonts, images and colors used.
SneakPeek Pro for Mac is available for $19.95, and offers a 15-day demo for you to test out. SneakPeek for iOS devices can be had for only $9.99 directly from the Apple App Store. Both versions of SneakPeek can save you a lot of time, and are well worth the cost of ownership.
One of the handiest features of Mac OS X for me has been Quick Look, the ability to quickly view a compatible file simply by selecting it in the Finder and hitting the Space bar.
The two faces of Mac OS X's Quick Look feature: Regular and full screen
But OS X has the annoying habit of displaying the selected graphic at an arbitrary size on your screen (as seen on the left in the image above). You can then hit the double-arrow icon in the Quick Look preview to zoom it to full screen. This is doubly annoying for anyone with a large screen because not only do you not use the full size of your screen, but you then have to move your mouse all the way down to the bottom of the screen to click the icon.
Thankfully, you can avoid all that mousing around and enjoy a full screen Quick Look preview (as seen on the right in the image above) simply by using the keyboard shortcut of Option + Space bar instead of just the Space bar.
You can also view a slideshow in full screen mode by selecting multiple files before entering Quick Look. To exit full screen Quick Look, simply hit the ESC key in the upper left of your keyboard.
If you’ve updated to Snow Leopard, you may be interested to know that you can use Quick Look in Open and Save dialog boxes; just select the image you wish to view and hit the Spacebar. Of particular interest to designers, this tip also works in the Place dialog box in all the Adobe Creative Suite applications. This means you can now get a better/larger preview of the image(s) you’re going to place in your document. If you’re still running a G5 Mac, you can’t upgrade to Snow Leopard, but you can get this feature using Default Folder X – my all-time favorite piece of shareware!
One of my favorite features of Leopard (OSX 10.5) is Quick Look. Normally, selecting a file in the Finder and hitting the Spacebar invokes a small Quick Look window with a preview of your file. If you need a larger view of the file, you normally have to drag the corner to make the Quick Look window larger. But hitting Command + Option + Y will automatically open your Quick Look preview in full screen mode.
Reader RhymingDesigner sent me a great tip for arranging the order in which OSX displays files using Quick Look that I thought was pretty cool, so I thought I would share it with everyone. You can force Quick Look to display files in a desired order by Command + clicking on files in the Finder in the order you want to view them before hitting the space bar to launch Quick Look. Quick Look will then display the images in the order you clicked on them, rather than the order in which they appear in the Finder window. In the image above, I Command + clicked the stickynotes image first, then the other two files. So even though the Pages document is first in the folder listing, the stickynotes image appears first in Quick Look. Pretty cool!