In the quest to shave off  precious fractions of a second from my work flow I have discovered the power of a tool inside Mac OS X Leopard that I don’t hear brought up too often. Quick Look plug-ins. For those who don’t know what Quick Look is (not being smart here, I didn’t find out until a month after I had my MacBook Pro), if you have Mac OS X Leopard or higher, click and select a file (media or image gives the best show) and hit the space bar.

Quick Look baby.

Quick Look lets you view a file without having to launch an application. Mac OS X Leopard comes with many files you can Quick Look but if it doesn’t support the file, you just get a bigger thumbnail, which does nothing but annoy you. With a simple plug-in though, you can add extra and useful functionality to this feature. This turns Quick Look from the guy-who-just-repeats-stuff-already-said-in-the-design-brief into the guy-who-drops-that-great-idea-that-makes-you-karate-chop-the-table-in-agreement.

Designer: "That's a GREAT idea!"

Okay, maybe this isn’t something that will make you flying K-kick the meeting table in half with excitement, but I’m sure (like me) you will find yourself asking “How have I gone this long without being able to do this?”

Here are some Quick Look plug-ins that have made my work flow ever so slightly faster, yet exponentially more enjoyable:

Adobe Illustrator Quick Look Plug-in

Allows you to (finally) view a .ai file that has been saved with PDF preview enabled.

Adobe Photoshop Brush Library Plug-in

The holy grail. Lets you view the contents of a .abr file and see the brush presets with pixel dimensions.

Here is a quick movie (unedited) of how I use this plug-in in my daily work flow. I normally have my Photoshop brush folder docked but for this movie I undocked it and started from scratch. This plug-in saves a lot of time when you have a ton of brushes. Say you want to just browse them real quick or are looking for that one brush preset but forget which library it’s in. Quick Look to the rescue!

EPS File Quick Look Plug-in

Self explanatory, lets you view an eps file like any other image, just like the .ai one.

BetterZIP Quick Look Plug-in

This one is cool. Lets you Quick Look an archived file (many formats), and it also has a usable navigation so you can dig into the archive and have a look see around.

By now you’re probably screaming at the screen”YES! YES! YES!”. You may need to take a break if this is the case. I’ll wait.

Okay, here’s is how to install them:

1. Download and open the zip file to get the Quick Look plug-in file (it should look like a white Lego piece)
2. Navigate to Macintosh HD > Library > QuickLook folder.
3. Drag and drop the plug-in into the QuickLook folder and you are good to go. you may have relaunch Finder if they don’t work right away.

Do you know of any cool Quick Look plug-ins, or any other nifty little tools that makes the designer life that much easier? Share the love below.