Use Quick Look to Preview Files and Folders in the Finder, Spotlight, and Open Dialogs

Use Quick Look to Preview Files and Folders in the Finder, Spotlight, and Open Dialogs

Finder icons sometimes hint at their file's contents, but if you find yourself opening file after file to look at the contents quickly, the Mac has a little-known feature just for you: Quick Look. To give it a spin, select a file in the Finder and press the Space bar or Command-Y. If Quick Look supports that type of file, it instantly displays a standalone window showing the contents of the file without opening it in its native app. Press the Space bar again to close the window.

If the document you’re previewing has multiple pages, you’ll see thumbnails along the right side that you can scroll through using your mouse or trackpad, or by pressing the Page Up/Page Down keys. But you aren’t limited to just viewing a file: click the Open With button to open the file in its default app, or click the Share  button in the upper right to send it to someone else via email, Messages, or another sharing service. PDFs and images will also show the Markup  button that lets you annotate the file directly, and images have a Rotate  button.

If you need to scan through a set of files in a folder, you can press the arrow keys while the Quick Look window remains open—how you move among the files depends on the Finder window’s view. In List view, for instance, using the Up and Down arrow keys can be a great way to browse through a collection of pictures. You can even interact with the Finder while using Quick Look, which means you can delete an unwanted photo by pressing Command-Delete while previewing it.

Quick Look works well for evaluating or comparing multiple files. Select a bunch of files and press the Space bar to open them all in Quick Look. The Left and Right arrow keys let you cycle through your selection; there are also Back and Forward arrow buttons at the top left of the Quick Look window. To the right, you’ll see a Thumbnail  button that displays the selected files in a grid—click any thumbnail to focus on just that item.

To remove the distraction of your desktop, click the Zoom  button in a Quick Look window. If you have multiple files selected, you can even start a simple slideshow from the zoomed Quick Look window—it’s a quick way to show off a folder of images. Another way to get to a zoomed Quick Look window is to select the files in the Finder and press Option-Space.

What file types does Quick Look work with? Not everything, but out of the box, Quick Look supports text files, RTF files, HTML files, images, audio, video, PDFs, iWork documents (Keynote, Numbers, and Pages), Microsoft Office files, fonts, and more. Third-party apps can extend Quick Look to support proprietary formats, and developers have released independent Quick Look extensions. Many people appreciate these three extensions:

●     Folder Preview (free) displays the contents of folders in Quick Look.

●     BetterZip (free for viewing) lets you look inside Zip archives and other compressed files.

●     Peek ($7.99) not only supports 530 file types but also lets you copy, search, navigate, and more directly within the Quick Look window.

Although it’s best known in the Finder, Quick Look is available elsewhere on the Mac, including the examples below, so it’s always worth selecting what you want to preview and pressing the Space bar to see if it works.

●     Spotlight: Preview search results to see if they’re what you want

●     Open dialogs: Preview files before you open them

●     Time Machine: Preview versions of files before restoring them

●     File transfer apps: Preview files on remote servers before downloading

●     Messages: Preview files added to conversations before opening them

●     Mail: Preview attachments to email messages

To manage your Quick Look extensions, open System Settings > General > Login Items & Extensions, scroll to the bottom, and click the ⓘ button next to Quick Look.

Finally, note that if your Mac has a trackpad, you can invoke Quick Look by force-touching a Finder icon (press deeply until you feel a click) instead of pressing the Space bar.

Quick Look takes just moments to learn, but it can save you hours of time poring through files on your Mac!

(Featured image by iStock.com/megaflopp)

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Social Media: With a press of your Mac’s Space bar, you can use Quick Look to preview the contents of nearly any selected file, saving you time looking for the right file, comparing files, evaluating photos, and more. Try it in apps other than the Finder, too!

Don’t Listen to Anyone Who Tells You to Drag a Text File into Terminal

Don’t Listen to Anyone Who Tells You to Drag a Text File into Terminal

In macOS 15 Sequoia, Apple made it more difficult to bypass Gatekeeper to run apps that aren’t notarized. (Notarization is one of the ways Apple ensures that apps distributed outside the Mac App Store are unmodified and free from malware.) Cybercriminals have responded to this increase in security with a new social engineering attack. They provide the victim with a disk image, ostensibly to install some desired piece of software, instructing the user to drag a text file into Terminal. Doing so executes a malicious script that installs an “infostealer” designed to exfiltrate a wide variety of data from your Mac. The simple advice here is to treat any guidance to drop a file into Terminal with extreme suspicion—no legitimate software or developer will ever ask you to do that.

(Featured image based on an original by iStock.com/Farion_O)

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Social Media: Thing #17 to never do: Follow instructions to drop a text file into Terminal. It’s a great way to install malware and let cybercriminals steal your passwords, financial information, and more.

The Importance of Properly Offboarding Employees

The Importance of Properly Offboarding Employees

Employers and their employees part ways for all sorts of reasons. People may move on because of a contract’s completion, to take a new job, or because they’re retiring. Employees may also leave due to being laid off or fired. Whatever the reason, offboarding—the process of managing an employee’s departure from an organization—is essential.

Without a systematic offboarding protocol, organizations face significant risks related to data security, device mismanagement, operational disruptions, and compliance violations. In a particularly troubling example, a fired employee allegedly hacked Disney World’s menu creation system, changing prices, adding profanity, and—most problematically—adjusting allergen information in ways that could have caused someone allergic to peanuts to order food that contained them.

Obviously, offboarding has various administrative aspects. We’ll focus on those associated with technical infrastructure, but it’s also important to consider how you’ll communicate internally about the departure and any human resources and legal matters.

Our overarching advice regarding offboarding is to establish a formal protocol so everyone knows what’s involved. That’s particularly important for departures that happen with little notice. When building your offboarding plan, consider these three parts of the process: revoking access, retrieving devices, and preserving the organization’s data.

Revoke Digital Access

When offboarding an employee, the most important thing to consider is how you’ll revoke their digital access to organizational resources such as email, a shared password manager, and core service accounts. For those who are retiring or staying to train their replacement, access revocation can proceed gradually on a schedule. This approach provides sufficient time to transition ongoing projects and communications.

However, in most cases, it’s safest to revoke access immediately, especially when an employee has been terminated involuntarily due to layoffs, performance problems, or misconduct, or when dealing with employees in high-security roles, such as IT administrators, members of the legal team, or high-ranking executives. Even if their departure isn’t contentious, the risk of data leakage is too high.

Revoking access is significantly easier if you’re using Apple Business Manager and an MDM platform. Because Apple Business Manager lets you use federated Apple Accounts, it’s simple to revoke access to iCloud and other Apple services. Plus, because Apple Business Manager makes it possible to separate personal Apple Accounts and their associated data, employees can move their personal data off an organization’s device more easily.

MDM—mobile device management—is even more important because it enables administrators to revoke access to organization-managed email accounts, VPNs, Wi-Fi networks, and cloud services. If a device isn’t returned, an MDM platform can remotely lock, wipe, or reset it. For BYOD scenarios (Bring Your Own Device, where employees use their own devices rather than organization-owned ones), a properly configured MDM allows the removal of organizational data and profiles without affecting personal data.

Using an identity provider like Google Workspace, Microsoft Entra ID, or Okta with a single sign-on system makes revoking access even more straightforward. These services tie access to an organization’s apps, resources, and devices to a single login, so deactivating a departing employee’s account in the identity provider instantly cuts off access to all connected systems. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself doing the dance of deactivating Google, then Adobe, then Slack, and so on. It’s tedious and potentially error-prone.

Finally, the combination of an MDM system with single sign-on can also help monitor employee behavior during the offboarding period for unusual activities. You’ll want to know if a terminated employee logs in to a confidential database that they have no reason to access immediately after receiving notice.

Retrieve Organization Devices

Another key aspect of your offboarding plan should revolve around retrieving organization-owned devices. Even if you can use MDM to revoke access, you need to get your devices back so they can be given to other employees or held in reserve as backups. Apple Business Manager helps here, too, since it tracks all registered devices owned by the organization and can reassign devices to new users.

The real win of Apple Business Manager in this regard is that it lets you turn off Activation Lock on all supervised devices, whether it was turned on using a federated Apple or personal Apple Account. Without Apple Business Manager, you may have to work with the employee to regain access to the device. If that’s not possible, Apple support may be able to help unlock the device if you can provide proof of purchase and ownership.

To ensure you don’t end up in such an awkward situation, follow these best practices when using Apple Business Manager:

●     Make sure to purchase Apple devices through Apple Business Manager-compatible channels.

●     Use Automated Device Enrollment to ensure that devices are supervised and managed by MDM out of the box.

●     Rely on federated Apple IDs to ensure the organization retains control over organizational content within Managed Apple Accounts.

Preserve Organization Data and Communications

Finally, think about what the departing employee was doing. You’ll want to transfer or archive everything they worked on, including their organizational email account. In most cases, someone else will have to take over their responsibilities and may need access to emails, files, contacts, and more.

An identity provider can help by transferring ownership of cloud-based files and other data stored in Google Workspace or Microsoft 365. Without one, you’ll have to review all their online files and reassign ownership manually.

Email requires additional thought. You’ll probably want to forward the departing employee’s email to whoever is taking over. If that’s not feasible, set up an auto-reply explaining that the employee is no longer available and providing alternative contacts. In that case, it’s also worth scanning the incoming email periodically to ensure essential communications aren’t being missed.

Next Steps

If you don’t have a formal offboarding policy, we recommend developing one soon to ensure that you aren’t at risk for data security, device mismanagement, or operational disruptions. It’s one of those tasks that are easy to put off until it’s too late, at which point you have to scramble. You can find offboarding policy templates and other resources online, and we’re happy to discuss the tech-specific aspects when you’re ready.

Of course, if you’re not already using Apple Business Manager and an MDM solution, getting started with them is even more important to implement right away. Contact us to discuss what’s involved.

(Featured image by iStock.com/yacobchuk)

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Social Media: Regardless of whether an employee is leaving voluntarily or being terminated, it’s essential to walk them through a systematic offboarding process to revoke their digital access, retrieve devices, and preserve organizational data. We have thoughts.