About a decade agho when I was working with GIS files, such as shapefiles, there was a nice QuickLook plugin for Macs called 1. GISLook that would show you the corresponding map as an icon.
macOS keeps evolving, as a result apps become obsolete unless they are continually updated. For small, solo developer projects, this often means the app no longer works. If the code is open source, at it is in this case, then potentially somebody can come a long and revive the project. But, realistically this can be a daunting prospect. I last wrote native macOS code about two decades ago, a lot has changed.
Indeed, a lot has changed. With tools such as Claude Code, it is possible to point an AI at an old repository and, in effect, say, “build this, but for today’s Macs”.
In this case, I cloned the original repo, asked Claude to take a look, and then created a new repo rdmpage/gis-quicklook and Claude got to work. Of the original code, only the core file reading functions survive, the interface code has all gone. But after about a day’s messing about, I have a new app that has even more functionality because it supports the GeoJSON format as well.
You can get the app from the GitHub repo. Note that because it isn’t the App Store you will need to run a onetime command in terminal to get it to work:
xattr -cr GISLookApp.app
Here are four GIS files and their preview icons.
I should thank the original author, Bernie Jenny at Monash University in Melbourne. If you are at all interested in maps, globes, and cartography, you should look at his web page, it has some very cool stuff. I coundln’t have done this project without his open source (GPL 3.0) code.
Nor could I have done it without Claude Code. The level of debugging involved in this project was insane, there were log files flying past, Finder cache rebuilds, numerous dead ends and subtle “gotchas”, never mind the obstacle of learning how to support custom Finder icons and previews on a modern Mac.
This is the larger point, AI makes it possible, at least in principle, to look at an old, abandoned project, perhaps targeting an out of date API, and have a realistic chance of reviving it. That is a real game changer, made possible by a combination of open source and state of the art AI.
Written with StackEdit.
