Introduction to Quick Look Programming Guide

Describes the purporse and architecture of Quick Look generators and explains how to create them.

Organization of This Document

The Quick Look Programming Guide has the following chapters:

Quick Look and the User Experience describes what the Quick Look technology does and points out the advantages for applications that make use of the technology. it also defines terms that have special meaning in Quick Look.
Quick Look Architecture describes the various components of Quick Look, including their roles and how they communicate with each other.
Creating and Configuring a Quick Look Project explains how to create a Quick Look generator project and how to specify the properties of a generator.
Overview of Generator Implementation summarizes the approaches for generating thumbnails and previews and identifies the best contexts for each approach.
Drawing Thumbnails and Previews In a Graphics Context shows how to draw thumbnails and previews in graphics context optimized for bitmap, single-page vector, and multipage vector graphics.
Dynamically Generating Previews discusses how you can dynamically generate text-based previews in a supported content type such as RTF or HTML; for HTML previews it also shows how you can include attachments such as images.
Saving Previews and Thumbnails in the Document describes the approach where the application saves the thumbnail or preview image in the document and the generator simply retrieves the image for Quick Look. It also describes the function to use when the image data returned to Quick Look is in a format supported by the Image I/O framework.
Assigning Core Graphics Images to Thumbnails shows how you can return an image (as a CGImage object) when that image is not in a format supported by the Image I/O framework.
Canceling Previews and Thumbnails explains how you can, when requested by Quick Look, cancel the generation of previews and thumbnails.
Debugging and Testing a Generator describes the tools and techniques you can use to debug and test a Quick Look generator.

Introduction to Quick Look Programming Guide

Organization of This Document

See Also