I want to create Quick Look plug-in for DDS! … And wait, I found one!

These several days, I've been tinkering around game dev library Ogre3D and obtained a huge collection of DirectDraw Surface (DDS) files (about 16,000 files, roughly 5GB in size).

I built GIMP plug-in "gimp-dds" for DDS viewing/editing capabilities. But this collection is just too huge: opening a DDS file, finding it not interesting, closing it, opening next… this is too cumbersome for browsing. There should be a convenient way to quickly search through DDS files.

Quick Look of JPEG image

And here slickness of Mac OS X's Quick Look should come in handy.

Quick Look is a preview functionality seamlessly integrated with Finder (a Mac counterpart of File Explorer in Windows), and can preview various kinds of document (plain text, rich text, HTML document, JPEG image, PNG image, PSD image, PDF document, AVI movie, Collada 3D data etc) very quickly.


Quick Look supports Collada (.dae) since Mac OS X 10.6, so the same for DDS will be nice. So I decided to create a DDS Quick Look plug-in.


Now I'm looking into NVIDIA Texture Tools for DDS file handling capability, and had some difficulty building the tool. It turned out "the latest" source archive on May 14, 2010 provided at the top page of the project home is fairly out of date and broken for Mac OS X 10.8 dev toolchain. CUDA compiler nvcc (which relies heavily on C/C++ compilers in the host dev environment) complains a lot in build process.

What I had critically missed is that development is still active at the SVN repository side of the project home. Checked out, and without any difficulty, I could build required libraries from source… Humph.


P.S. 2013/10/02

Quick Look of DDS file

My bad habit, just too quick to jump for creating a program before looking for existing ones. Quick Look plug-in for DDS already exists:


https://github.com/Marginal/QLdds


I chose NVIDIA Texture Tools for DDS file handling, but QLdds uses public domain library Simple OpenGL Image Library (SOIL) instead.

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