Preview is great. I miss it whenever I'm not on a Mac. Fast, light, useful, tasteful. I dread the day a design team remembers it exists and decides it's due for a "refresh".
Preview, the Mac app people forget about
141–150 of 337 posts
Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about
#142Preview 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…
Another great related feature is how easy it is to “print” to Preview and save as PDF. It makes it very easy to save copies of confirmations, payment receipts, etc when sites don’t provide a PDF link. If you haven't tried it, make sure you are printing using the system dialog, and select "Open in Preview" in the drop-down list in the lower-left corner.
I think that has been a standard feature since at least OS X 10.2.
Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about
#143For those who don't know, Quartz (the 2D graphics layer of macOS) is internally built off of PDF.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_(graphics_layer)#Use_of...
Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about
#144People 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 vers…
People probably forget that because the Preview UI is extremely minimalist, like it doesn't want to tell you about all its capabilities
Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another great related feature is how easy it is to “print” to Preview and save as PDF. It makes it very easy to save copies of confirmations, payment receipts, etc when sites don’t provide a PDF link. If you haven't tried it, make sure you are printing using the system dialog, and select "Open in Preview" in the drop-down list in the lower-left corner.
I think that has been a standard feature since at least OS X 10.2.
Yes, when Apple bought NeXT (I know, more like the other way around) they wanted the graphics model to follow something akin to NeXT's — which was based around Display Postscript. The modern equivalent was of course PDF.
If you could render into a PDF context with your graphics engine (CoreGraphics) you would have a near print-ready document. (You still need to pass along additional info regarding whether to print duplex, number of copies, etc.)
So anyway, Save to PDF, Open in Preview were basically free.
Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
View > Show/Hide > Toolbar Items > Show Page Display Tools > Counterclockwise
Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about
#147Preview 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…
I worked on the Preview app for a number of years during a time when the app more or less flew under the radar. It was easy then to simply add features that "we" wanted as users of the app.
At that time, the design team was less interested in Preview, more interested in Mail and Safari (of course). Design would come in and maybe tell us to put the thumbnail drawer on the right vs. the left.
Honestly, I think the design team found Preview useful as well and didn't stand in our way when we wanted to add "instant alpha" or simple annotations.....
Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about
#148I really enjoyed working with the Preview team before I retired from Apple. My small group created a private framework that added "document reconstruction" to PDF documents: basically an inferred DOM based on whatever information (mainly geometric) we could use in the PDF document. Our moment of fame game at WWDC 2009, when Bertrand Serlet talked about Snow Leopard during the Keynote. At around the 5:10 mark he talks…
Ha ha, I know you. (And I retired just this last year, FWIW.)
Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about
#149You 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.
Read it through archive.org and you don't get the popup:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220509170301/https://www.fourt...
Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
View > Show/Hide > Toolbar Items > Show Page Display Tools > Counterclockwise
Yes, that rotates your view of every page in the document. It can't rotate a page independently and even if you wanted to rotate every page you can't save the change back to the PDF file because it's functionally "rotate view" even though they hadn't renamed it that yet in 2020.
Appreciate the attempt to help, but Acrobat Reader is just shitty.
I know it's a deliberate choice to be useless in pursuit of selling more subscriptions, but it's hard to cut them a lot of slack for having a worse free PDF tool than what Apple was shipping for free on all their computers more than 20 years ago.