I’ve been dealing with piles of two types of files that are somewhat awkward to work with on the Mac - ZIP files and EPS files. On the PC I can just double click on a ZIP file and peer into what’s inside without actually unzipping it, on the Mac, not so much. When it comes to EPS files, I’ll open then with preview and then get a lovely spinning beachball while it is “Converting Postscript to PDF…”. Now admittedly it’s faster on Leopard that it was on Tiger, but still, that sucks. Luckily these are exactly the kinds of problems Quicklook was made to handle.

If you haven’t played with Quicklook, you just select a file and hit the spacebar - you then get a preview of the contents of the file. By default it works with iWork formats, and all the usual MS Office formats. The best part though is that third parties can write their own plugins for Quicklook - and developers have already made some for ZIP and EPS! Now I just select either file type and smack the spacebar and BAM! almost immediately I can peer inside of ZIP files or preview EPS files.

It’s times like these I *really* love the Mac developer community (and Apple ain’t half bad either, though I’m still not fully digging Stacks!).

• ZIP Quicklook Plugin
• EPS Quicklook Plugin