One thing which I find very useful when listening to a podcast,
audiobook or other sound files with any kind of speech is if you press
command tab to switch over to another window, quicklook will pause the
file until you switch back to the quicklook window again. This is
pretty useful if you have to read a message on MSN or if someone calls
you on Skype.
Best regards
Søren Jensen
Mail & MSN:
[email protected]
Website:
http://www.coolfortheblind.dk/
On 15/01/2009, at 20.56, Esther wrote:
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
