10 August 2015

Use Quick Look on Mac to Preview Live Websites


Mac OS X has a handy preview feature known as Quick Look that helps you view the content of any file without having to launch the associated application. Select a file inside Finder (or on the desktop), press Space Bar and Quick Look would be activated. You can preview files of most common formats including images, videos, zip archives, Office documents, PDFs and more.

Place a web shortcut on your desktop

Place a web shortcut on your desktop

Quick Look however isn’t just an option for previewing local files, it can also display live websites without you having to open the web browser. All you have to do is create a shortcut for any website on your desktop from the browser and then preview that shortcut in Quick Preview.

This can be useful in several ways. For instance, if you routinely check your favorite news website for the top headlines, you can place a shortcut to that website on the desktop and use Quick Look to instantly check the site for any new content. Or you can create a shortcut to a YouTube playlist and watch the videos inside Quick Look outside the browser.

While you are inside Safari or Chrome or any other browser on the Mac, drag the website link to the desktop (see how-to). It will create a .webloc file. You can select the file and press the space bar to preview the source website inside Quick Look.

Quick Look - web pages

Quick Looks previews the webpage inside a fresh browser session and uses none of the existing cookies or cache so the website will treat you as a new visitor. Also, it disables scripts on the page but loads all the CSS and images.

What’s inside a .WEBLOC file

When you place a shortcut to a web pages on the desktop, it create a .webloc file which is actually a simple text (XML) file. You can replace the string value to make that shortcut to point to any other webpage. For instance, here’s the a sample .webloc file pointing to this website.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
   <key>URL</key>
   <string>http://ift.tt/1N3w0MU;
</dict>
</plist>

Also see: Essential Mac Apps & Utilities


The story, Use Quick Look on Mac to Preview Live Websites, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 10/08/2015 under Apple Mac, Software.

Google Indexes Images From PDF Files


I'm not sure if this is a new feature, but I noticed that Google indexes images from PDF files. Google adds "[PDF]" next to the title of the page and offers a single option: "view PDF", since it can't link to an image from a PDF file.


Back in 2008, Google started to use OCR to index the full text of scanned PDF files. Now Google extracts images from PDF files and makes them searchable.

Here's an example of query that returns many images from PDFs: [google pdf site:static.googleusercontent.com].