Xcode 3 Tutorial Part 3: Writing a QuickLook plug-in
So I finally got around to uploading a new Xcode howto video. This time it is an example of how to write a custom QuickLook plug-in using Seapine’s SoloBug application.
You’ll also notice that this time I’m using Viddler instead of YouTube. Through my fighting with encoding/uploading I’ve found that Viddler has a much higher quality level when it comes to being able to actually read the text on a screencast. It also doesn’t have the “Your video must 10 minutes or shorter because if it is longer than that you simply must be uploading copyrighted content” restriction like YouTube.
That last bit is important when you go all the way through making a video only to notice that it runs around fifteen minutes. D’oh.
Categories: Programming, Xcode
Yea, my wife “fell down the stairs” too.
Thanks for the tutorial!
Hi – seems that I’m not expierienced enough since I’m a regular web design guy who actually has opened xCode for the first time.
I tried to make a quickgenertor file for viewing animated gif via Quicklook. I follow your tutorial till you inserted your own code in Part II… … that’s where I had to drop out. So I basically stopped at the “GeneratePreviewForURL.m”-Point.
I modified the Plist of the free image viewer Xee and even talked to a guy from xee who appreciated the possibilty of such a plugin.
It feels like there is only one step missing. Could you point a no-knowledge person like me to the last steps that are necessary to watch animated gif in quicklook with xee?
Thanks in advance. I appreciate that you put the time and effort into making a video tutorial like that.
-Patte
I’m afraid that I am not familiar with xee so I’m not much help there. It is an interesting idea though. I tried real quick to add an animated gif to a plugin that returns HTML in the hopes that whatever the rendering engine that QuickLook uses would show it.
Naturally, that didn’t work.
Outside of that the only other thought I had would be to somehow convert the animated gif into a QuickTime movie on the fly and then display that.
Sorry I couldn’t be more helpful.
Thanks for the quick response – I guessed that it won’t be that easy. But worse come to worse:
Now I can’t even see a icon preview nor a quick look preview on any of my gif’s. I deleted the modified xee, deleted all files in the Quick Look folder, etc. nothing, did a PRAM reset, repaired my rights, … and now I’m clueless.
QL only shows GIF (Graphic Interchange Format) – pure text, no image.
It must have happened yesterday while I was trying to write that plug-in. My guess is that when telling the OS that there is a new file extension it has overwriten the usual settings… something like that. I have no idea.
Any of yours?
Otherwise I have to install Leopard again, hoping that this will be enough. As a webdesigner I can’t work without a being able to take a quick glance at all the images/ symbol previews in a folder.
I swear I never use that developing tool again – i just thought, patte, if you follow the on screen instructions and keep with the project files nothing bad could happen.
Well…. Is there any hope? Kind of a reset for quick look or a easy way to reassign gif files to preview? That one time I edited the Quicktime info.Plist to make it read MKV-Files per quick look, but this one here is a whole different scenario.
Sorry for asking this kind of things, because I know it’s my own fault to mess with things I’m not capable to understand but maybe you know what steps it takes to revert the drama.
EDIT:
The good thing is – it is not system wide. I’ve made another user account and there everything behaves as it ought to be. This narrows down the subject, maybe I’ll finde the right file to reset/ replace..
EDIT 2:
Sorry for triple trouble posting you pro blog… but I’ve managed it.
No Problem here.
Cheers,
Patte
Hello,
thank you for your screencast tutorial. Im a newbee in xcode 3 and objective-c. How can i create a quicklook plugin for a pdf preview of guitarpro files. I have installed guitar pro on my mac. Can you help me? Thanks from germany
There’s a quicklook plugin for gif images, along with full source code available on Sourceforge.
Just do a search in google for ‘animated gif quicklook plugin’