Leopard’s Quick Look Is Perfect. How To Fix It.

We’ve had a month to digest the good, bad, and ugly about Mac OS X Leopard. One of the good things is the Quick Look feature in the Finder.

Now there’s a way to make Quick Look look even better, work even smarter. Did I mention that it’s free? Oh, how’s your Japanese coming along?

Don’t get me wrong, Leopard has some wonderful features, a smoother, more unified look and feel, and some features that are, arguably, long over due.

One of them is Quick Look. If you haven’t tried Quick Look, do so. Go to the Finder in Leopard, click the Tool Bar for Cover Flow view (it works fine in other views, but the visual preference is Cover Flow) for any folder with more folders inside. Then click the Quick Look button or press the space bar.

See a problem? Quick Look is great for viewing the contents within a folder—files, photos, applications, utilities, movies, documents—but not so good at viewing what’s inside folder unless you click to go inside that specific folder.

In other words, Quick Look lets you look inside those documents, bring up those photos, play those movies, but for a folder full of folders all you get in Cover Flow is the huge icon of the folder icon. There’s nothing quick and nothing smart.

What you need is the Folder Quick Look Plugin from Japan. Did I mention it’s free? You gotta love little utilities that add just what you always wanted to see but were afraid to pay for.

Folder Quick Look Plugin is remarkably simple. Download. Unzip. Open the folder. Drag the Folder.glgenerator file into your Mac Leopard’s /Library/QuickLook/ folder. Now the fun begins.

Click on a folder in the Finder (make sure the folder has more folders and files inside). It doesn’t matter whether your Finder window is set for Cover Flow or not. Press the Space Bar or click the Quick Look button in the Finder’s Tool Bar.

What you get is a pop up window reminiscent of the grid view in the Dock’s Stacks. The windows displays what’s inside the folder in list view. That’s even better than the Finder and Quick Look do by themselves. And very handy as you don’t have to burrow down a level to view what’s inside a folder while you’re skimming through either Quick Look or Cover Flow.

Even better, there’s a couple of options at the bottom of the pop up window which lets you view hidden files and display the time on the date the file was created and/or modified. It’s not much, but did I mention that Folder Quick Look Plugin is free?

I thought that Quick Look was nearly perfect until I realized that it was necessary to burrow into a folder to see what was inside. Folder Quick Look Plugin makes that process easier than extra clicks in the Finder.

One of the great things about the Mac is the ability to customize various utilities and features so they function either better, or in a more useful way. Leopard goes a long way toward fixing all the issues we grumpy Mac users have about the Finder, but Folder Quick Look Plugin helps.

Your mileage may vary, of course, but the download and installation couldn’t be much simpler, and the usefulness will last a lifetime. OK, maybe not that long, but perhaps until the next OS X update from Apple. Got a nifty add-on utility for Leopard that makes your Mac life a little easier? Share with out readers.