BetterZip Quick Look Generator
These two buttons on the right (->) refer to my flagship product BetterZip. (Just in case you wonder.) The BetterZip Quick Look Generator on the other hand is free and can be downloaded here.
Don't you wish Leopard's Quick Look would let you inspect the contents of compressed archives? Well, I do, so I took a little code from BetterZip, a template from Apple's Xcode, added a little code here and there, and after simmering this soup for three days the BetterZip Quick Look Generator is ready for a public tasting. Hot!
The currently supported archive formats are: ZIP, TAR, GZip, BZip2, ARJ, LZH, ISO, CHM, CAB, CPIO, RAR, 7-Zip, DEB, RPM, StuffIt's SIT, DiskDoubler, BinHex, and MacBinary.
Download it here, unpack, and after carefully studying the License Agreement for the next two weeks, copy the BetterZipQL.qlgenerator bundle to your /Library/QuickLook folder (if you want to install it for all users on your Mac) or to the ~/Library/QuickLook folder, this is the Library/QuickLook folder inside your user folder. You may need to create the QuickLook folder inside ~/Library first.
The Quick Look framework will need a little time before it realizes that a new generator has been added. If you are impatient and not afraid of using the terminal, you can execute this command to make the Quick Look framework reset immediately: qlmanage -r
Last and best of it all: It's free!
(4.9)
(4.6)
Comments
WOW! This is terrific. Thanks so much for not only making this, but for releasing it for FREE when it could have easily been a (very attractive) new feature for BetterZip itself.
yap. 20bucks.. sorry dude...
Nice work!!! Already in continuous use.
Excellent! Thanks so much for putting this out there.
Quick tip - you can get QuickLook to immediately update the list of generators with this command (in Terminal):
qlmanage -r
Thanks for the QuickLook generator, it looks great!
Todd
This is nice, I was using an other one. But this one add folders hierarchy.
The down side is the __MACOSX folder... Is it normal ?
Last and best of it all: It's free!
So, is it free or $20?
Embro: The Quick Look generator is free. BetterZip, my main product is 20$.
marlwin: The __MACOSX folder is really in your zip files. It contains Finder settings and resource forks. I will add a setting in a future version to hide these special folders and files.
DarylF2, Walter, Marc, Todd: Thanks, have fun!
Todd: Yeah right, I have added the command in my post. Thanks!
i´m a daily better zip user and i´m very impressed of the better zip quick look plugin - one of leopard´s most wanted features!
Very cool, seems to work well. My only suggestions would be support for column sorting and resizing. Archives with many nested folders get a very wide left column, causing the date field to break into multiple lines.
Awesome. My only suggestion is that the header bar not move when scrolling.
Thanks for the feedback, guys!
Josh: I will surely add these features in a future version.
Graham: I didn't keep the header static, so that you can see as many rows on the screen as possible, if you need. The header doesn't contain much information that you could need when you scroll down anyway.
I have a suggestion for this already great plugin. I'd love a setting where you can choose not to look inside packages. In the finder you also don't do this by default, and I think it would make the view of the contents of the archive much more clear. Now you get an enormous tree with files that I don't need to see. Regards, Jan
Nice stuff, thanks!
Personally i like to have
#data table {width:100%}in my index.html, otherwise it'd look a bit unfinished.
You've got some nerve putting a license agreement on code you admit is trivially derived from Apple's tutorials site.
And it's not really "free", is it, when it's plastered with ads for your commercial product. More like "advertising supported" in my opinion.
So I don't think I'll be installing your spam-infested tutorial-ware, thanks.
This is amazing, well done!
Jan, Cody, Android: Thanks for your feedback! All suggestions have been noted and you will probably find them in a future version.
hk: Don't miss the part about BetterZip being inside the QL generator. Which is 18 months work on my side.
Pretty useful! Thanks.
Nice very nice.
Another way to get the Quick Look generator loaded is to restart the Finder. You can option-Right-Click the Finder icon in the Dock and select relaunch "Re-launch"
Cheers!
Hi,
looks great, except for tar.bz2, either being created directly with tar cj, or by bzip2 archive.tar .
the result then is randomly either an empty QL window, or the default one, just showing file basic information.
I saw in your info.plist that the bzip2 is indeed supposed to be supported. So ? Configuration issue on my 10.5.0 box ? Bug ?
Great work, Robert. Thank you muchly.
Cheers,
Rick
Alex: Works fine for me. Can you extract the files in question using the commandline tools? Does it open a BetterZipQL window or a plain QL window for unknown types? The former should at least have the table heading and everything above that.
You can run this command in the terminal to get some diagnostic output (replace the last bit with the absolute path to your file):
qlmanage -p /Users/robert/Desktop/testfile.tar.bz2What does it say in the last few lines?
Hi,
When the QL is empty, it's a totally empty black window, with just the close button, title, and fullscreen icon. But this seems to be a Leopard bug: if I resize this window, the content is redrawn (with the default No-generator info).
With qlmanage -p, I get what I suspected: the document type seems totally wrong:
Previewing ...../quotes.tar.bz2. Content type UTI: dyn.ah62d4rv4ge80e8vw. Generator used: None
The archive is OK, I can extract it with tar jxvf.
After a look on Apple doc, bzip2 seems not to be declared as a system-UTI. Only gzip and tar gzip are known.
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Carbon/Conceptual/understanding_utis/utilist/chapter_4_section_1.html
Would these UTI be added by BetterZip ?
Is there an other way to add them to the system?
The dyn. prefix means that the system does not know what bz2 is, so it creates a dynamic UTI. The bz2 UTI is defined by Apple, so it's probably really a problem with your system. Try cleaning the LaunchServices database with this command:
/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain userPlease understand that after this Mac OS X will ask you again for all file types whether you really want to open them with whatever application you have installed to open the type (e.g., Word for doc, ...)
Well, the lsregister -kill... did not help.
My OS seems to know that a bz2 or a tbz file is, as it names it as "archive compressed in tar format", but no UTI seems to be defined. The default opener is Archive Utility.
I just upgraded to 10.5.1, but this didn't help either.
Do you think Apple's UTI doc is out of date?
(do you want us to investigate this by mail to avoid polluting your blog?)
Yes, let's switch to mail. We can post the results back here at the end. Head over to the contacts page for the mail address. Thanks!
Nice work! I've seen a couple of other QuickLook plug-ins for zip files recently, but neither was quite what I was hoping for. This one is awesome. My only complaint is that I'd rather not see the hidden files... or perhaps you could better show their visibility by having them transparent or dimmed out?
VERY COOL! Thanks so much.
Great plugin. Just what I'm looking for and totally bookmarked. I know a few people who may want this, I'm spreading the word.
Very nice. Quick suggestion: double-clicking a file/folder in the list should extract only that file/folder, not the whole content. If multiple selection is possible, then extraction of multiple files/folders should be possible.
Did you say that you ran 10.5.0? Try updating to 10.5.1, that might possibly fix it if it's a system bug.
Hi,
Does it work on PPC ? Beacause it does seems to work for me :'(
I am on 10.5.1.
Thx
Thank you all for your feedback!
Mike: I'll definitely do something about this in the next version.
Android: Yes, it's universal: PPC and Intel.
FREE !
perfect advertising for your product !
keep up the good work !
Servus Robert!
vielen Dank für das QL-Plugin. Ich kannte Deine Website und Deine Software vorher gar nicht und ohne Dein QL-Plugin wäre ich nie hier gelandet.
Gute Werbung und mehr Bekanntheit für Dich also ;-)
Really nice. This shows how nice QuickLook is.
Two suggestions:
Please keep the header static.
Give us an option to optionally hide the contents of packages (including app).
Keep up the good work with this and BetterZip.
best regards
Berend
Android, Oliver: Yeah, I hope it's a win/win situation. A useful freebie for the Mac community and a little promotion for BetterZip.
Berend: I am already working on options to show/hide hidden files and package contents. The static header is something I personally don't like, on the other hand you are not the first to ask for it. I'll think up a solution that satisfies both parties. Stay tuned!
Hey this is very nice!
I'll second a lot of the suggestions here and also say that the Packed column could be removed as it really isn't useful in this context and will save space (and doesn't apply to some archive types anyway). Possibly Attributes too.
For the header I'd say just make it a bit smaller (the icon is certainly making the whole thing bigger than it needs to be) and then it won't be such a problem if it's static.
Oh, and the Date column should be clear that it's the modified date.
As everyone else has said, this is awesome, and it will be even more useful if/when it does not expand bundles into a full list.
But another thing that would help me out would be if I could teach quicklook (or your plugin) that this plugin should handle some files with other file name extensions. The issue is that my mail provider (as so many do) tries to protect me from opening zip files that come to me in email due to a Windows virus problem a while ago. So all the zipped files I get in email are re-named to *".zip-UWunsafe". I would like to be able to peek into those with quicklook before deciding if it is worth the trouble of saving and expanding the attachment.
If anyone knows of a way to teach Mail.app (probably the OS itself) that a ".zip-UWunsafe" is the same a a ".zip" that would be great. I have dug around, but it is not clear where the right place to start messing around is.
Thanks,
DAC
Gannet: Thanks for your feedback. We need a configuration application! :-) Or maybe, I'll just make the HTML templates more customizable, so that power users can easily change the columns that get displayed.
David: I am already experimenting with the file types story. File types and file extensions are defined in the Info.plist files inside application bundles. So, if you put BetterZip on your hard disk, the system will learn that cbz-files are actually zip files, because it is defined in BetterZip's Info.plist. What I am testing is, whether you can also define file types in QL generator bundles. Since Info.plist files are XML files, you could then add whatever extensions you want.
Heh, yeah. I had this idea of a QuickLook Manager prefpane where you can install and remove generators and set various preferences that each one can define. Ah well, I doubt that'll ever happen. A more customisable template should suffice though :-)
Maybe if the quick look window worked like a widget - flip it around to find all the settings...
Gannet, I think I have an idea for a solution. Stay tuned.
Thanks for a great utility
I always ask myself what is this Archive.zip I have lying around ;-)
I'm trying out various Quicklook plugins, and yours is one of the best. Just a suggestion: this other plugin http://dancingtortoise.com/apps/QuickComic.qlgenerator.zip , from Dancing tortoise allows one to preview the first 20 image files in a .zip archive, but, since only one plugin for each filetype could be active at a time... hard decision! Please, consider adding this or a similar feature to your great little app.
Thank you, for now I'm choosing yours!!!
Thanx for this!
.rar files are not working here. Are they really supported?
Yeah. The only thing that is not supported with rar or 7-zip archives are encrypted listings. Maybe you have a file where you have to enter the password before its contents can be displayed?