Difficulty running on Mojave and Catalina

[sballin]

I had this plugin working on my machine with Mojave but recently upgraded to Catalina, and it no longer works for .nc and .h5/.hdf5 files. I have another machine still on Mojave, and I couldn't get it working there either, for some reason. In both cases I had installed the netcdf package with homebrew and did qlmanage -r and restarted the Finder after installing QLNetcdf.

Also tried building with Xcode on Catalina and moving the qlgenerator file to the right location, but that didn't work either.

Thanks for this great project, let me know if I can be more helpful—I'm not sure how to debug quicklook plugins.

[tobeycarman]

Hi Sean -

I have not upgraded to Catalina yet, in fact I am still on 10.13 high sierra. So I am glad to know that the plugin works in other OSX versions! I actually have not touched this project in several years, but am very glad to hear that someone finds it useful, and it'd be great if we could get it working again.

My initial guess is that in recent homebrew installs of netcdf tools, the binary ends up somewhere different. I hard-coded the path to ncdump, so if your ncdump program is somewhere unexpected, it will fail. So maybe check to see that you have ncdump installed and verify that it is indeed installed in the expected location:

$ which ncdump
/usr/local/bin/ncdump

Beyond that, I guess if you have built the project in Xcode, then the next step would be to uncomment this line

QLNetcdf/QLnetcdf/GeneratePreviewForURL.m

Line 25 in 8eebff4

//NSLog(@"This will print to the system.log...");

, rebuild the project, and re-install the generator file and then see if you can find that message in the log file - and any other message indicating what the failure might me.