After using Leopard for a couple months now, Quick Look is probably my new BFF feature in Mac OS X. When I first heard about it, I had my doubts as to how useful it might actually be… I thought it sounded kinda gimmicky (after all, it’s basically a way to preview files). But then when I’m at work using my Windows XP computer, I find myself being a tiny bit frustrated that I can’t easily preview random files.

The thing I find that makes Quick Look useful is that it’s really really fast and unobtrusive. It pops in and out, and you don’t have to worry about opening / closing programs. Select a file, hit the space bar, and in less than a second, it’ll give you a preview of the selected file. Hit space bar again, and you’re back to whatever you were doing. If I get a email attachment, I can click the “Quick Look” button, and it’ll instantly pop open a preview window of the attachment. Very handy for Word or Excel documents that I get occasionally emailed. There are even plugins available that’ll let you sneak a peak inside archives (such as zips) and other random file types.

Of course, you’ll still need to fire up whatever application if you want to make edits to your documents, but if all you need is to read or preview something, Quick Look is the way to go. Sure it doesn’t take much to just fire up my word processor to read a document, but on my new Macbook Pro, it still takes a good minute or two for Open Office to start, where as Quick Look is near instantaneous.

Speaking of Apple, here’s 3 things that I think that would rock MacWorld Expo:

• “Real” iPhone/iPod Touch SDK. I’ll be interested to see if random developer guy like me can actually create and distribute iPhone apps, or if apps needs to go through a certification program, like for console games.
• MacBook (Pro?) MultiTouch/Tablet/Thin/Lite/Nano. Basically bring the iPhone touch interface technology to their laptops.
• AppleTV Update (or maybe some sort of media server?). The AppleTV as it stands right now is kinda… just ok. Apple needs to raise the bar here quite a bit.

(see also, MacWorld Bingo)