Preview, the Mac app people forget about • Hacker News Board

Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about

#131

Post by dantondwa » Mon, May 09, 2022, 5:34 PM UTC

Preview is amazing and I miss it very dearly, now that I'm not running macOS anymore. There's simply nothing like it anywhere else. The amount of things it can do, and what a sleek UI.

I only suffered a bit during the El Capitan-Sierra era, as I think they rewrote the PDF engine and there were some regressions. Anyway, it's the best and I wish something like that existed elsewhere.

On Linux, GNOME's pdf viewer could be close to it, but it is lacking all the annotation features except for highlights. KDE's Okular is a bit better, but it's UI is bad. On Windows, there's just nothing like it. I use Sumatra, but I miss Preview all the time.

Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about

#132

Post by kitsunesoba » Mon, May 09, 2022, 5:36 PM UTC

alsetmusic wrote: post #75

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’m hoping that the post-Ive Apple - an Apple more comfortable with “pro” users and beauty in utility versus form - will try to fix that one… and bring back all the good Mission Control stuff from Snow Leopard (which IMO is the greatest OS ever released). I wouldn't hold my breath. They've been gradually hiding controls behind buttons and popovers. The proxy icon (folder or document icon in the title bar of a windo…

> There's a `defaults` command to make it visible at all times in Monterey, but hiding it is a foolish design choice on Apple's part.

It's also a setting under Accessibility > Display > Show window title icons, so there's little danger of it disappearing since it's not a hidden setting.

Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about

#133

Post by [deleted] » Mon, May 09, 2022, 5:36 PM UTC

minimaxir wrote: post #48

The best use of Preview/Markup is proper redaction of names for posting images to social media: 1. Set Shape Fill color 2. Set Shape Border color 3. Insert a Rectangle. The rectangle can then be moved/resized/copy/pasted to cover names precisely and won't inadvertently leak names like the spraypaint tool does.

[deleted]

Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about

#134

Post by realstacktrace » Mon, May 09, 2022, 5:37 PM UTC

dschuessler wrote: post #4

Preview is one of the single-best pieces of software I use in my daily life. It manages to be incredibly powerful without bloating the UI while still remaining usable. It is unfortunate the name suggests it being a simple preview application. It's far from it.

I agree it's poorly named. "Visual File Processing Tool" is the best I can come up with, which is even worse.

Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about

#135

Post by realstacktrace » Mon, May 09, 2022, 5:40 PM UTC

jkubicek wrote: post #99

Lack of any equivalent Preview app on the iPad is the main factor that's prevented me from switching to an iPad as my full-time computing device. Filling in form PDFs, signing documents, performing some light editing is so easy in macOS and so challenging on iPadOS.

This. Bring Preview to iPad!

Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about

#136

Post by kitsunesoba » Mon, May 09, 2022, 5:44 PM UTC

atonse wrote: post #111

Kon-Peki wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also sign a piece of paper and hold it up to the camera to create the signature it uses.

I tell people this is one of those features which is why people are fans of macOS. Stuff is just part of the system for years and years and we take it for granted when other systems don’t have these kinds of features.

This is sometimes true on a hardware level, too. For example, I was using a Bluetooth Plantronics headset for voice chat on my iMac G5 in 2005 because Macs had come standard with Bluetooth for a year or two at that point. It wouldn't be for another 5 years or so for midrange-and-above prebuilt laptops to start coming with BT and it wasn't until the past 5 or so years that enthusiast motherboards and desktops started reliably coming with it.

The latest feature like this is Thunderbolt, which is starting to become more common on generic laptops, but is still surprisingly hard to come by in prebuilt PC desktops and enthusiast motherboards.

Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about

#137

Post by princevegeta89 » Mon, May 09, 2022, 5:45 PM UTC

Such a terrible name for a software that does much more than just a "Preview".

Honestly all this time I was under the impression that it's only good for previewing and nothing else.

Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about

#138

Post by wlesieutre » Mon, May 09, 2022, 5:45 PM UTC

layer8 wrote: post #104

wlesieutre wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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:/…

You can use the Adobe Reader Classic Track, which is still on the feature level of 2020 and allows counterclockwise rotation: https://www.adobe.com/devnet-docs/acrobatetk/tools/ReleaseNo...

Unfortunately doesn't seem to be the case. All I have is "rotate clockwise" and it's just like Reader DC in that it rotates the view of the entire document rather than actually rotating a page.

It's missing the rotation arrow buttons that bug you to buy a subscription, so that's a bit nicer than the current Reader DC release. I assume this is just because it lags behind the main release and they'll be rolled in as a future update on the Classic track?

Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about

#139

Post by nerdjon » Mon, May 09, 2022, 5:49 PM UTC

Tarragon wrote: post #5

It's mentioned heavily in the article but I want to emphasize... Preview is the easiest way to slice up and merge PDF files.

Yes this!

I had to recently compile some documents for court, they were in several different PDF's and I did not necessarily want all of it. The ability to easily copy specific pages from one document into one large document. Made life so easy.

There are so many small features in Preview that just makes it such an underrated tool

Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about

#140

Post by jen20 » Mon, May 09, 2022, 5:51 PM UTC

kitsunesoba wrote: post #132

alsetmusic wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m hoping that the post-Ive Apple - an Apple more comfortable with “pro” users and beauty in utility versus form - will try to fix that one… and bring back all the good Mission Control stuff from Snow Leopard (which IMO is the greatest OS ever released). I wouldn't hold my breath. They've been gradually hiding controls behind buttons and popovers. The proxy icon (folder or document icon in the title bar of a windo…

> There's a `defaults` command to make it visible at all times in Monterey, but hiding it is a foolish design choice on Apple's part. It's also a setting under Accessibility > Display > Show window title icons, so there's little danger of it disappearing since it's not a hidden setting.

You can also hover over the title to get the proxy to appear.