Quick Look is one of my favorite features of OS 10.5 Leopard and OS 10.6 Snow Leopard. Quick Look provides instant, full resolution (but not editable) previews of many files simply by selecting the document and pressing the space bar. I use Quick Look to preview photos, read Pages documents without launching Pages, skim through movies and to scan PDFs. It’s great to have access to a file without having to wait for its parent application to launch. I would pay for Quick Look; it’s great that it’s built into the Mac OS.
Quick Look can natively open PDFs, HTML, any QuickTime readable media including of types of images, ASCII and RTF text documents, Apple Keynote, Pages and Numbers, Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, and most RAW camera images.
However, Quick Look can’t natively open Illustrator, InDesign, Swatch Exchange (ASE), EPS and Freehand documents. Many times during the week I have to access Illustrator files in particular. Thankfully, there is a plugin for Quick Look called SneakPeek Pro that enables this functionality. SneakPeek Pro also allows you to see fonts, images and colors used in many CS3, CS4 and CS5 documents. That’s right, SneakPeek Pro is already CS5 Compatible.
SneakPeek Pro costs $19.99, and is worth every penny considering how much time it has saved me.
Click here to download SneakPeek Pro as a free, fully functional 15-day demo.
Once SneakPeek Pro is installed, you can configure its options from within System Preferences. The software publisher includes an uninstaller on their website.
Also, I just want to note that I’m recommending this plugin solely because it has solved a problem for me. We don’t get any kind of renumeration for mentioning it!