I’m pleased to announce the latest in my PreviewApps series: PreviewJson. It taps into macOS’ QuickLook feature to provide at-a-tap previews of JSON files and generates Finder icon thumbnails for them too. There are some updates out too.

If, like me, you work with JSON file a lot, it’s handy to be able to take a quick look at them without first opening them up in a text editor. Sometimes all you want to do is visually check the value of a single key. PreviewJson makes that straightforward.

I’ve kept things simple and focused on the data: PreviewJson renders JSON data very straightforwardly, to make it easy to quickly scan a file for the information you want. If you prefer to know whether items are objects or arrays, you can opt to show JSON’s standard delimiters for those elements: braces or square brackets.

Like the other PreviewApps — PreviewCode, PreviewMarkdown and PreviewYaml — the new family member lets you pick your own preview font, the colour of keys and (if they’re show) JSON marks, whether bad JSON is displayed even if it can’t be rendered, and whether you’d like to see your previews in paper-white style even when you’re running your Mac in Dark Mode.

PreviewJson is available now for a very modest outlay — less the the price of a chocolate bar, in point of fact, and which keeps the blog going — from the Mac App Store. The source code will be up on GitHub shortly.

Other Software Releases and Updates

What else is new? This little lot:

• OpenWeather-Python is an open source integration of the popular weather forecasting API. The code is focused on MicroPython and CircuitPython usage, but it’ll also stretch to regular Python apps too. Data-massaging is kept to a minimum: this code is about getting the raw forecast data you need, and leaving you to decide what elements you want. There’s full documentation on my docs site.
• SSD1306OLED-Python is a a driver for OLEDs based on the Solomon SSD1306 chip used in a variety of maker display boards from Adafruit and co. The driver was released quite a while back, but I’ve just given it an overhaul so MicroPython and CircuitPython are supported from a single file. Again, you can find the documentation on my docs site.