Have you used Quicklook?
A person that goes by the handle RG-6 mentioned in the comments of yesterday's post that Quicklook was an amazing feature that a lot of Mac users either don't know about or even use. I had heard about it but I never bothered to try it out. Instead I did what I used to do in Windows if I wanted to see what was in a file - I'd open it in the program that normally works with a file of that type.This is such a slow process. It's just a PDF file, do I really need to load Acrobat Reader? Do I have to get Excel fired up just to take a quick look at some of the values in a spreadsheet? Quicklook saves all that and is about as easy to use as it get.
All you need to do is open the Finder and select a file, then hit the Space bar. Quicklook loads a preview nearly instantly that shows you the contents of most files. Since I've been moving a lot of files between machines lately this is a great way to look at a file really quickly.
You can even select a group of files (Command-Click) and then hit Space and you will have the option of viewing an index sheet of your files so you can scan through them quickly. It really is a fantastic little feature.
If you haven't used Quicklook yet you should take a quick look at it.
Sorry about that last one, I had to.
Comments
Mind you, I have watched all the Steve Jobs Keynotes about Leopard and also the tour that Apple posted on their site about Leopard. So I have seen many demo's of the larger features of Leopard.
Still, there has been so much talk about the top features of Leopard, I am just surprised that there could be some folks that don't know about them.
There are a couple of "tips" sites that I keep up with that help me learn, not only about things like QuickLook, but a bunch of "hidden" features that can be found by holding the Option and/or Command keys down when looking at menu items or just keyboard shortcuts.
http://www.macosxtips.co.uk/
http://www.macosxhints.com/
http://tips4mac.blogspot.com/
Those are just a few of them. They are great for newer Mac users (including myself) for learning about things that I otherwise didn't know about.
For example, did you know that if you hold down the Control and Shift keys while moving your mouse cursor over your Dock, that even though you have Dock magnification turned off, it will be turned on temporarily while Shift and Control are held down? I had no idea about that until I read about it on one of those hints/tips sites.
Didn't know about the Ctrl-Shift feature for the Dock. Don't know that I'd use it but it is cool. Heck, this morning I just found out what Option-Shift-K does when you are typing into text! Only appears for Safari users though:
To date though one of my favorite comments was on my post about the Option key functionality. Someone that had been using Macs for 17 years learned something from one of my posts!
Since this is all still new to me I'm spending an inordinate amount of time playing and discovering. After 16+ years of using Windows everything had become... meh. A utility. It has breathed some fresh life into my passion for this stuff.
After I upgraded to Leopard, I had a now what moment. I checked out Apple's website that lists all 300+ new features and tried out things that sounded interesting / useful. There is a lot of stuff in 10.5.
Speaking of cool new in Leopard things. Have you tried the Screen Saver using Photos and the Mosaic or Collage setting? Cool Stuff!
That must look amazing on a dual screen 8-core Mac!
My 1.5GHz Powerbook can't process that much information :/
As for Quick Look, I haven't done this myself, but there are tons of plugins out there for it, most of them adding functionality for file types that wouldn't already be compatible with Quick Look.
Very handy.
Karl C.