171–180 of 337 posts
macOS has so many essential utilities and tools I can not live without. System wide dictionary and looking up a translation is something I use every single day. Screenshot and screen recording is utility I use every week.
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> Another great related feature is how easy it is to “print” to Preview and save as PDF. It's an OS-wide feature. Any application can print to PDF without specific support from that app.
Well, you need specific support if you have custom views or views that draw bitmap images, otherwise it won't look great.
One massive I'd add to this list that got added recently - being able to copy and paste text out of images. I'm so often sent a screenshot with a url in the url bar, I can now copy and paste that screenshot of a url. It's been massively the past month since I noticed it. Not sure how long it's been there, I assume not long, maybe last OS update.
That is called Live Text and was introduced in Mac OS 12 Monterey. It is available for any app that uses the standard libraries to display images so you will see it in other apps, too, like Safari. https://www.macworld.com/article/351669/macos-monterey-how-t...
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:/…
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> 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 desi…
Out of curiosity, was there a team exclusively dedicated to the Preview app? How autonomous were you in deciding how to improve the application?
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> 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, this moves the file to the directory shown in the dialog, or does nothing. The reason other OS's don't support that macOS feature is because their open and save dialogue is usable on its own. In my opinion the open and save dialogue is one of the worst designed interfaces on…
> The reason other OS's don't support that macOS feature is because their open and save dialogue is usable on its own. In my opinion the open and save dialogue is one of the worst designed interfaces on macOS (and easily the worst open and save dialogue across all of the popular desktop environments). The fact that it's "killer feature" is having to use another file navigator to find the target and then drag that fil…
But you're selecting the file in a file manager and then dragging it into your "file selector". That whole dialogue then becomes completely redundant because you might as well just drag that file into the application window without having to click "open".
> I get bitten at least a couple of times a week on Windows when I stupidly drag and drop the file I want to open
If you drag the file into the text area it will work as you wish. Or you could just drag the file into the application -- a lot of applications will support that and open the file without displaying the file open dialogue.
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What do you not like about the existing dialog?
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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.
As an engineer and from a common sense perspective, these modals bother me a lot. However, in the interest of curiosity, I'd like to hear from PMs and the likes as to how successful these annoyances are in reality. Broadly, I see two types of visitors to these kinda sites: 1. Someone new, who's most likely just following a link (like us) - they haven't even had a chance to read the article yet & knows nothing about t…
The key takeaway is that "growth hackers" only care about conversions. They don't care if it pissed people off, or if someone only signed up because they couldn't see the close button etc. Just some numbers that help them justify their pay packet.
[0] https://tabcloseddidntread.com
[1] https://andybeaumont.com/post/the-value-of-content/
Disclaimer: Back in 2013 when I wrote [1] Medium wasn't the growth hacker clown car that it is today. And actually, nor was Tumblr.
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.
SumatraPDF is what you want as a windows user (yes, ignore the website looks like it's from the 90s). No upsells like acrobat/foxit, better compatibility than pdf.js like your browser. Linux I mostly use evince (included if you use a Gnome based distro), but it's clearly the weakest of Preview/SumatraPDF/evince, as someone who uses all 3 regularly. Still better than Acrobat Reader though.
Does it look better? Maybe early 2000?
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That is called Live Text and was introduced in Mac OS 12 Monterey. It is available for any app that uses the standard libraries to display images so you will see it in other apps, too, like Safari. https://www.macworld.com/article/351669/macos-monterey-how-t...
It’s one of those transformative little features. But it’s especially great in PDFs where it’s not a “real” PDF but just a collection of page sized images so you couldn’t normally select the text before without OCR software of some sort. Having it built into the OS is so handy.