Download DropLook: Release 1.0.3. Universal Binary for Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and 10.6 (Snow Leopard)
DropLook lives in your dock, eagerly waiting for you to drop a file onto it.
Apple included a wonderful piece of technology in Mac OS X Leopard: Quick Look. Quick Look is able to preview dozens of different kinds of document, and it does it very well. Unfortunately, Quick Look is a little bit shy and lonesome: if you’re viewing a Quick Look preview and switch to another application, the preview goes into hiding, and you can only ever have one Quick Look preview open at a time.
Unlike Quick Look, DropLook windows stay open when you switch to another application, and you can open multiple preview windows at a time.
Because Mac OS X ships with Quick Look preview generators for iWork and Microsoft Office documents, you can view Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents without having the applications which created them installed.
The best part? DropLook is a free download. If you’re a Cocoa developer, you might be interested to learn that DropLook is open source, too.
There is one snag, however: Quick Look lives inside a “private” framework on shipping versions of Mac OS X. This means that one day, DropLook will probably stop working. You are, of course, entitled to a complete refund when this happens.