I'm after a couple of beta testers for an Apple QuickLook plugin if anyone is interested. i've called it "AcornQuickLook" as I intend for it to support DFS and ADFS but at the moment it only supports DFS.

For those that haven't a clue what I'm on about (maybe you use PC's?) QuickLook is an Apple framework that allows you to get quick previews of content on disk. In this case, if you have a bunch of disk images you can quick view their contents, rendered on the fly in real time.

It came about because I found double clicking to bring up BeebEm and CAT'ing them to be a bit cumbersome if I'd just forgotten what was on one of my disks, or indeed wanted to know what was on some cryptically named disk image. When looking for something totally unrelated I found a C64 one and basically thought, "I could do that". So I did.

To make it perfectly clear I've made a quick screencast of it in action:
http://screencast.com/t/MWU4NWVhZT

It's a little rough around the edges yet, I intend to tidy up the output as well as add a nice image and background etc. but it's generally there.

One nice feature is that I've implemented the back end as a Cocoa Framework. Clearly at the moment it only supports DFS and read only at that as that's all it needs to do in order to provide the required functionality for the QuickLook plugin but as time goes by I fully intend to add write support and ADFS. Then I intend to explore other Mac projects supporting the Beeb and related kit.

Feedback is welcome. I expect to be able to distribute some test version this weekend. I'm not aware of any memory leaks but all the same I guess it's very much beta at the moment.

Once I'm happy with it, the framework (API in the Windows world) will be released as open source so hopefully someone will be able to make use of it.

Hopefully it will be taken as more than just a gimmic and the chaps at RetroSoftware may even be able to find a home for it?

Martin.
PS: Be vaguely gentle in any criticism, this is my first Mac based release that's actually come to fruition and also my first BBC effort too

Looks quite nifty - are you just parsing the SSD and constructing a 'BBC like' bitmap of its contents or something else?

No that's pretty much it. Nothing too fancy, just parsing the ssd / dsd and constructing HTML that then get's processed by Apple's webkit engine and the QuickLook daemon.

I'm going to have a nose a Fuse at some point to see how possible it is to construct a DFS / ADFS user space file system but that's an entirely different goal!

Martin.