The story behind inddPreview
Already in 2007, with Mac OS 10.5 Leopard, Apple introduced a pretty useful function called Quick Look. It allows for a bunch of file types to have a look into its content without the need to open the file with an application. Very helpful – not only when searching for something.
But various of the proprietary file formats are not supported: such as Adobe InDesign documents which show up in Finder with their file icon only, without revealing anything about the content. Waiting for Adobe to support Quick Look was in vain – and still is.
inddQLgenerator – my first piece of Mac software
At the end of 2008 I was tired of waiting. So I bought a book about Cocoa and Objective-C (I had already written programs in other languages, but never before for Mac), made myself knowledgeable about Quick Look and the file format of InDesign documents and wrote – finally – a plugin for Quick Look. And it made exactly what I needed: showing previews of InDesign documents in Finder.
This plugin named inddQLgenerator was my first piece of Mac software and for many years available for free. However, a lot of new versions of InDesign have been released in the meanwhile and with them new file formats that are not supported by my plugin, because I stopped developing on it.
A while ago I decided to work on a new version. The result is inddPreview which comes as an app with a new version of the plugin on board. Thereby the slightly cumbersome manual installation of the plugin is omitted.
With inddPreview installed, all preview images embedded in an Indesign document can be shown now. And of course inddPreview also supports the new file format of the CC versions of InDesign.