After a week with Windows
This past week my work situation required that I use a Windows 7 PC. The circumstances were such that I was not able to use my Mac at all.
Windows 7 is not all that bad, but by the end of the week I found myself missing one Mac feature in particular, Quick Look. Quick Look was first introduced as part of Leopard(Mac OSX 10.5). It allows you to view the contents of a file without opening an application; it is a way to instantly see what a file is. Most popular file formats are supported and Apple has an API that allows developers of proprietary formats to include Quick Look functionality in their files as well.
On the mac there are a few ways to access Quick Look. The is an icon resembling an eye in the finder. Click the eye and whatever file you have selected will spring forward into Quick Look preview mode. You can right click or Control+click on a file and you will see the Quick Look option.
Alternatively, and this is my favorite, you can hit the spacebar and whatever file you have selected will pop forward. It is highly useful when you are hunting for something specific but you don’t want to launch Pages, Keynote, Excel, etc. I found myself hitting the spacebar time and time again in Windows 7.
Although Quick Look is a small thing, I really feel like the small amounts of extra productivity it gives me really add up.