It really should be in Mac OS X

Reviews of utilities frequently say something like “this should be part of Mac OS.” I almost never agree, even if I myself use it. That’s because I’m a power user, and so is the reviewer. The utility does something, um, useful, but it also adds to the complexity of the user experience, and so probably doesn’t belong on everyone’s Mac.

Mac OS X 10.5 introduced Quick Look, where you can almost instantly get a preview of a file’s contents. Apple provided viewers for a number of typical formats, as well as some more specialized ones like property lists. But there was no way to see what was inside the .zip archives that Mac OS X itself creates. This seemed like an obvious omission, that wouldn’t add any complexity. And I kept meaning to file a bug report.

But xdd and Taiyo created a ZIP preview.

And now Robert Rezabek has gone several steps beyond: BetterZip Quick Look Generator. It supports ZIP, TAR, GZip, BZip2, ARJ, LZH, ISO, CHM, CAB, CPIO, RAR, 7-Zip, DEB, RPM, StuffIt (.sit), DiskDoubler, BinHex, and MacBinary. I like the indented format better, and it supports a lot more formats. This is going to make it much easier to clean out my Download folder (which is full of various archives).

I’ll probably still file that bug report, but now the only missing format is Apple’s disk image (.dmg).