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Preview, the Mac app people forget about

fourth-wall.co.uk

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Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about

#11

Post by kitsunesoba »

Etheryte wrote: post #3

I use many of these features often and it often blows my mind just how much better Preview is with PDFs than any other program. It's leaps ahead of anything Adobe's Acrobat spyware ever was and it comes with your OS right out of the box.

I remember in the early 2000s, right around the time that Acrobat Reader had started rapidly bloating and becoming worse, upgrading to the first release of OS X and feeling relieved after finding out that installing Reader wouldn’t be necessary. Even in the buggy slow mess that was OS X 10.0.4, Preview was still a great deal better than Reader at most of the things you’d use a PDF app for.

Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about

#12

Post by smcl »

You get an obnoxious modal popup asking you to sign up for something about 10 seconds after opening the page. I don't even know what I'm looking at yet, why would I hand over my name and email address? Instant ctrl-w, no thanks.

Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about

#13

Post by mattl »

nicoburns wrote: post #8
Etheryte wrote: post #3

I use many of these features often and it often blows my mind just how much better Preview is with PDFs than any other program. It's leaps ahead of anything Adobe's Acrobat spyware ever was and it comes with your OS right out of the box.

Apparently "Apple’s Core Graphics framework uses the PDF format for its internal vector graphics presentation." https://pspdfkit.com/blog/2020/apple-and-pdf-history/

Yeah, there was a switch to PDF from Display PostScript at the time of the NeXT merger.

Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about

#18

Post by kevinsundar »

People also forget that you can use Preview to scan documents from your scanner rather than using whatever shitty software came with yours.

Also, Preview > File > Import from iPhone > Scan Documents gives you a virtual scanner instead of having to install one of those "scanner" apps on your phone. Its built into your iPhone already!

I also use it frequently to change image file types.

You can also make a digital version of your signature from a picture of physical version.

There's just tons of small features that work well.

Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about

#19

Post by wlesieutre »

jitl wrote: post #7

Preview is one of those essential things that sets macOS apart from the other operating systems, and contributes to that “Mac has good UX” vibe. Last time I opened the Windows equivalent, it tried to sell me on Microsoft’s PDF-alike format… and asked me to connect Office365. Another tiny macOS feature I love is that you can drop a file icon on any Open or Save dialog to select the file in the dialog. On other OSs, th…

I can't stand when I have to deal with a PDF on Windows on my office computer where I have the free copy of Acrobat.

You can right click on a page and it's got "rotate" buttons up at the top. But when you click on one, it takes a second to think about it and then opens a popup to offer you a free 7-day trial of the Pro version. Rotating a page is too powerful a feature for Adobe to not try and sell it to you.

https://imgur.com/a/oAYOoqG

What you can do is "Rotate View Clockwise" three times, way down at the bottom of the menu. It applies to the entire document instead of a single page, and it doesn't persist next time you open the file. Works in a pinch but it's deliberately shitty.

Microsoft even had their own PDF viewing software with Windows 8, but instead of improving it to get their user experience one step closer to Apple's, they killed it off to make more people launch Edge by accident.

I can only assume there's a KPI somewhere in Microsoft HQ tracking how many times Edge is launched, and making that graph go up and to the right has become their number one corporate priority.

It would explain the taskbar's search screen, the "news and weather" bullshit, pressing F1 in Explorer opening a Bing search for "How to get help in Windows" instead of just giving you help, and most every other design choice they've made in the last couple of years.

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