Blocking SpringyPreviewer

Hi Riley,

First, let me explain the purpose of SpringyPreviewer helper tool. As you’ve probably noticed, Springy can dynamically generate file preview for file icons while browsing an archive, similar like Finder started doing in Leopard. So, instead of standard file icon for a particular file type, you see a reduced preview of the file. Springy supports this feature for wide range of file types: images, sounds, movies, text-based files (including web pages, HTML files and Safari web archives), etc. Now, in order for this to work smoothly and not to affect browsing and archive processing, preview generation should run in the separate execution thread of the program. This is not a problem for most of the file types mentioned above. Unfortunately, HTML files and Safari web archives require usage of WebKit for preview generation, and WebKit is NOT happy being initialised outside of the main thread of execution (this could’ve probably been implemented differently, but I didn’t want to develop my own tiny HTML engine just in order to generate file icon preview for archiving utility). This is the reason for SpringyPreviewer existence. It’s the tool started by Springy application whenever generation of file icon preview of some text-based file is needed. Springy starts the tool from within its separate execution thread, then SpringyPreviewer generates a preview in its main execution thread (thus keeping WebKit happy) and returns it back to Springy, which in turn displays it (this is just short explanation what’s going on, there is some more interprocess communication involved). Once SpringyPreviewer finishes its task, it’s terminated by Springy application.

Now, the question is why SpringyPreviewer wants to connect to Internet (which you’ve noticed using Little Snitch). I realise this can look rather scary and like some kind of spyware. I didn’t think of that at all and in future releases I’ll configure WebKit not to try to connect to remote locations. What happens is SpringyPreview is trying to generate a preview for some HTML file in an archive. That HTML file probably contains something like < img src="http://www.somesite.com/someimage.png" alt="Some image" />. So, SpringyPreview (actually, WebKit) tries to connect to http://www.somesite.com to fetch someimage.png and put it into the preview of the HTML file.

You realise by now you can safely block SpringyPreviewer from connecting the Internet. The only consequence will be that it wouldn’t be able to generate full HTML file previews with all (remotely located) embedded objects (like images etc) in it.

You can also prevent SpringyPreview from starting entirely. You just need to disable file icon preview generation and show normal file type icons instead, and here’s how to do it: with window open (in any view type), just choose View > Show View Options from the main menu, or just press cmnd+j. This will show view preferences. Then, uncheck Show icon preview checkbox and from then on only standard file type icons will be shown.

Please note that the Show icon preview is settable per view type, so in order to completely disable icon preview, you’ll need to do it for each view type. So, with view preferences window already open, just change view type and the preferences window will change its contents automatically, showing options for the current view type. Uncheck Show icon preview for that particular view type.

Also note that view preferences settings for “column view” are global, so they are immediately stored in your preferences file. With “icon view”, “list view”, “flat list view” and “search view”, these settings are valid only for that particular open window. If you want to store them in the preferences (so the icon previews are not shown when you open another window in that same view), click Use As Defaults button in the preferences window.

With all these settings, I tried to mimic Finder behaviour.

I hope this helps, let me know whether it works okay for you.