Hi All,
Leopard has very useful feature called "Quick Look" that lets you
preview files without opening them in an application. Have you ever
wanted to quickly check a file just to identify its contents? Maybe
you have mp3 files that you copied from another folder that are named
Track01.mp3, Track02.mp3, etc. or you have multiple drafts of a
letter, and need to find your preferred version. In a recent post,
someone commented:
It's irritating that iTunes adds everything one open into the library.
Using Quick Look, you can preview a music track without opening it or
adding it to iTunes. Select an mp3 file in finder and press space bar
to start listening. Press space bar again when you want to stop.
Quick Look displays a wide variety of file types: PDF files, text and
document files, music, movie, and video files, AppleScript program
files, and some system files that are stored in binary format, like
preference files. Quick Look will not display DRM-protected files from
third parties -- if you can't read a protected PDF file, don't expect
Quick Look to give you more than a summary of the file properties.
Quick Look will also not provide a way around inaccessible formats --
an Excel spreadsheet that is Quick Looked gets displayed as an image
(but apparently sighted Mac users don't need to buy Office to have
this feature work).
Quick Look can also be used to examine items moved to your Trash --
since you would otherwise have to move or copy these items out of the
Trash to open them.
You can also Quick Look multiple selections, too; however, mixing
media types can get confusing, since you need to access a "play"
button. If you select a series of text files or PDF files and started
your Quick Look by pressing space bar, you can just use your right or
left arrow keys to navigate through the sequence, then press space bar
to end your Quick Look session. However, if you select a group of
audio files, and start your Quick Look by pressing space bar, you
should VO-right to the set of buttons for: "Show previous item",
"Play", and "Show next item". Your multi-selection files will not
automatically start playing with Quick Look until you press the "Play"
button with VO-space and you pause by using VO-space to press the
button again. Similarly, you would VO-right or VO-left to and press
to select the previous or next buttons with VO-space, then press space
bar again to end your Quick Look session. In the case of mp3 files,
you'll hear tag information for the song, if this is present. Using
only the arrow keys to navigate through the selections just tells you
the tag information. To play the files you need to VO-right to the
player controls, and then you can use the buttons there to navigate
through your selections. Ignore the two buttons beyond "Show next
item". These are selection display mode options for "Show Index
Sheet" and "Full Screen Mode". Pressing these changes the display
appearance of your selected items, but doesn't appear to provide
additional functionality with VoiceOver, and if you press either of
these buttons you will need to press escape to exit those display
modes and recover the ability to use the navigation and play buttons.
Hope this helps.
Cheers,
Esther
