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One of the best features that has come to Leopard 10.5 is Quicklook. If you don’t no about it, Quicklook enables you to open a file with out actually opening the program. Its great and you can quickly look inside files without opening programs, especially if you have a massive Photoshop file. Quicklook is accessed by pressing the space bar when any file is selected. This post is going to be about two cool tricks that you can use.

Quicklook Multiple Items

Quicklooking multiple items is very easy. What happens is the quicklook pane becomes a mini slide show. Enabling you to access some options such as slideshow play, next, previous, index sheet full size and add to iPhoto. These are represented by the bar at the bottom of the image. This is different to the normal quicklook view.

Quicklook In Finder

You can also enable Quicklook within Finder from a conveniently placed button. If you right click on the toolbar and select Customize Toolbar, you can drag the Quicklook button onto the toolbar. This enables you to open a file in Quicklook from the toolbar. This also has access to another option.

Fullscreen Quicklook

By enabling the toolbar button, you can now Quicklook files in full screen. If you select a file and then press option the button will change. This is known as slideshow mode. But its in full screen. If you select a whole range of files you can use the multiple item Quicklook mode but in full screen. Great of flipping through holiday snaps.

Short Cuts

Quicklook would be nothing without short cuts. They enable you to quickly access some of the features from you keyboard. Some shortcuts are:

Space > Quicklook a file
Command + Y > Quicklook a file if your space bar breaks.
Command + Option + Y > Quicklook a File in fullscreen (slideshow)

Plugins

Some clever folk using the Quicklook API have come up with some plugins to extend range of Quicklook the beyond the current features. If you check out this website it has a whole range of Quicklook plugins such as folder and zip viewer.

Other Uses

Finally there are a couple of other uses for Quicklook. You can use it in the trash folder to examine a file. Normally you would have to drag the folder out of the trash to be able to view the file. You can also use Quicklook in Time Machine, since Time Machine is very similar to a normal finder opertation.