Processing Quick Look Plugin

The plugin enables user to view the contents of Processing sketches (Processing Development Environment .pde) in Quick Look window. Plugin also enables thumbnail / icon creation, which allows to browse sketches in Cover Flow.

Requirements

Mac OS 10.5., 10.6. Universal Binary 32 & 64-bit

Installation

• Copy processing.qlgenerator into /Libary/QuickLook or ~/Libary/QuickLook.
• Reset all generators- in Terminal.app write qlmanage -r
• If You have already previous processing.qlgenerator installed
  - then simply overwrite the old one and issue qlmanage -r command to register the new plugin
  - if OS X says that current processing.qlgenerator is in use and thus cannot replace old plugin
  then issue qlmanage -r command, overwrite old plugin and once again call qlmanage -r
  to register the new plugin.
• Before uninstalling (deleting) processing.qlgenerator issue qlmanage -r for quick look server to release it.

Version history

• v.0.2beta
  06.05.2010.
  - Preview in Quick Look with custom display name containing:
  > sketch name
  > notifier if the currently viewed sketch is the main sketch for this sketchbook- i.e. MySketchName or ExtraCode - MySketchName
  - Thumbnails for Cover Flow and icons in Finder.app
  > image includes all the typical icon decor, such as shadows and a curled corner
  > there might be cases where icon thumbnail quality goes out of the window. Hence still beta.
  > changed the way thumbnail is drawn (Core Graphics).
  > again- haven't made no choices about text scaling in thumbnails.
  - Smart syntax coloring
  > notification that there might be a syntax error (unclosed multiline comments or strings) is removed.
  - Custom coloring
  > wrote and then again dropped implementation where user can set colors (for orange,blue, comments, background) by editing a plist file inside qlgenerator bundle. Generating prieview and thumbnail as quickly as possible is the aim. And custom coloring means extra reading from disk, extra runtime.
  
• v.0.1beta
  22.01.2009.
  Release candidate:
  - Preview in Quick Look with custom display name
  - Thumbnails for Cover Flow and icons in Finder.app
  > image includes all the typical icon decor, such as shadows and a curled corner
  > generated more than 3x faster as in alpha version
  - Smart syntax coloring
  > syntax error notification
  
  To do:
  - Basically, this is it. I'd happy about some response from users (if any).
  - The code that upon request could be changed is text size for thumbnails. When browsing sketches in Cover Flow one cannot exactly see the text because it's to small. Suggestion is to make it bigger and crop, so user clearly can see the beginning of the sketch, which helps to identify the contents.
• v.0.1alpha
  20.01.2009.
  First version for public testing:
  - Preview in Quick Look
  - Thumbnails for Cover Flow and icons in Finder.app
  - syntax coloring
  
  Known "to dos":
  - the syntax coloring applies also to incorrect positions (see Quick Look screenshot for example). this is alpha and I haven't implemented "smart" coloring yet.
  - // comments in some cases aren't coloured correctly. to be fixed.
  - thumbnail/icon creation in my opinion is slow. the goal is to make it ~3x faster.