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by Schlaefer 1779 days ago
Maybe QuickLook outlived itself. It was a technology tailored to the HDD era of hardware, when complex apps required dozens of seconds to start. In a world were even LibreOffice cold-starts in under three seconds on middle of the road hardware QuickLook is just a familiar workflow instead of a necessity?

Initially I missed QuickLook a lot after switching away from macOS, but now I haven't thought about it in years.
2 comments
Wowfunhappy 1779 days ago
I can't imagine not having access to QuickLook. It's not really about how quickly apps open so much as the UI—in a large folder of images or documents, I can use QuickLook to see what's inside each one, whereas without it I'd have to open a window for every document.
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kitsunesoba 1779 days ago
Yes, for me the killer aspect of Quicklook is being able to flip through dozens of documents in barely more time than it takes for my arrow keys to actuate. It’s wonderful for skimming through dozens of files quickly. Icons that accurately represent content on more than just images are great too.

Aside from that, QuickLook remains one of the few examples of a generic extensible document reader in modern operating systems. The way it gains the ability to read new types of files just by virtue of the owning app’s bundle being present on the system (no installation necessary, and it goes away when you delete the app) makes so much sense, and it’s a shame that there’s no equivalent on Windows and Linux.

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Wowfunhappy 1778 days ago
> QuickLook remains one of the few examples of a generic extensible document reader in modern operating systems.

...were there other ones in classic operating systems? QuickTime <= 10.2 did let you install third-party components (I wrote one recently), but what else was there?

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mixmastamyk 1778 days ago
The Amiga pioneered this with datatypes.
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kitsunesoba 1778 days ago
There was OpenDoc on classic Mac OS, and I think maybe COM on the Microsoft side of the fence? Not as well versed on Windows stuff though so that may be a misread on my part.
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peterburkimsher 1778 days ago
The QuickLook backend is really convenient for having a parser to turn everything into HTML (and therefore text).

I wrote an AppleScript to convert DOCX or PPTX to TXT using qlmanage -p | textutil

Using QuickLook to turn anything to HTML:

http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2010071209045151...

Using textutil to convert HTML to TXT:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/32621215

AppleScript source code: https://pastebin.com/JRbXTv8d

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