Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Preview, the Mac app people forget about

fourth-wall.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 337 posts

Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about

#181

Post by ask_b123 »

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #171
emadabdulrahim wrote: post #56

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.

Speaking of the dictionary, it can be invoked by opening the search with CMD+space, which brings me to one of my favourite features, the capacity to calculate currency changes, just write X dollar to eur and it will automatically compute the exchange.

It also works for different units. e. g. type 4'5'' to m.

Additionally, the dictionary definitions can be invoked by tapping with three fingers (Trackpad settings).

Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about

#182

Post by wlesieutre »

layer8 wrote: post #159
wlesieutre wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well, Adobe Reader is a viewer, not an editor (that’s Adobe Acrobat). For light editing like rotating pages I’d recommend the free version of PDF-XChange Editor: https://www.tracker-software.com/product/pdf-xchange-editor (Persistent rotation is on the “Organize” tab.) It’s easy for Apple because they don’t sell a competing product. Adobe has to balance providing a useful free viewer against a paid editor (or payed e…

If someone hands me a stack of papers to read and half of the pages are upside down, I consider orienting the pages so they all have the text right-side-up to be part of reading it. I understand Adobe doesn't have hardware sales to prop up their software but I think it's pretty unreasonable to charge $15/month to rotate pages within a document.

They do let you fill in forms and comment in the free version, even though that's not strictly speaking under the definition of "reading".

I'm currently rotating pages by sending them to my iPad and using Documents by Readdle. Not sure if that's part of the free features or because I bought their PDF Expert and some of the PDF editing capability gets shared across apps.

Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about

#183

Post by junglistguy »

Tagbert wrote: post #160
junglistguy wrote: post #24

Still don't know how to preview all photos in for example "downloads" Osx UX is a messsssss

Have you tried switching that folder to "Gallery" view? It display a list of all images and then a large preview along with an info panel to the right. Seems like it should give you everything you need. You can then switch back to your normal view when done so it doesn't mess up how your folder is setup. https://media.idownloadblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/m...

I need list view, and proper preview... Gallery its not an option

Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about

#184

Post by wiredfool »

jeffbee wrote: post #34
josephg wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to scan a document and have an iphone handy, you can also right click in Finder and "Scan document... from iPhone". It opens a UI on your phone that I've never seen before, and "scans" (photographs) pages of a document. When you're done the results end up in a new PDF wherever you clicked.

Preview has other interactions with iOS and iPadOS, too. If you enter markup mode you can draw all over a PDF with your phone or tablet.

How do you trigger this? I'm not seeing it on Monterey + ios 15.4.

Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about

#185

Post by junglistguy »

dev_tty01 wrote: post #50
junglistguy wrote: post #24

Still don't know how to preview all photos in for example "downloads" Osx UX is a messsssss

Sort Downloads by Kind. Select the group of photos. Double click. They will all be opened in one Preview window and you can scroll through all the photos. Or, select the first, touch the space bar and you will see the Quick Look preview. Use the arrow keys to move between the different files. Not really seeing the messssss, but to each their own I guess.

Not an option, i have list, and by date. Tons of files. No proper viewer

Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about

#186

Post by hnlmorg »

saagarjha wrote: post #66
hnlmorg wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

What do you not like about the existing dialog?

Navigating is a pain. eg you cannot navigate to any "hidden" directories and cannot you type paths in the "address bar" nor the file name input selector.

There's a few other little annoyances but I can't recall them right now (currently awaiting delivery of a new MacBook Pro so I'm back to running Linux for the time being).

The dialogue annoys me enough that I've just gotten into the habit of opening everything from the command line instead. In fact Finder is pretty poor for those things too (I've lost count of the amount of times I've ran `open .` to launch Finder in the path I want rather than navigating there via the GUI). But at least Finder does 90+% of what I want, even if I do have to turn to the command line a lot. Whereas I find the open dialogue to be almost completely useless.

Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about

#187

Post by junglistguy »

jhasse wrote: post #79
egypturnash wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Finder can do this pretty easily. 1. Open the downloads folder 2. view>as icons 3. view>use groups, view>group by>kind 4. scroll down to the images section, hit the 'show all' at the top right of this section 5. drag the icon size slider at the lower right to make icons huge, scroll around Alternatively 1. open the downloads folder 2. view>as list/column 3. view>use groups, view>group by>kind 4. scroll down to th…

1. Install Windows 2. Double-click the first image

hahah yes. i came from windows... :) Inned just that.

All this finder-thing is damned

Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about

#189

Post by junglistguy »

egypturnash wrote: post #49
junglistguy wrote: post #24

Still don't know how to preview all photos in for example "downloads" Osx UX is a messsssss

The Finder can do this pretty easily. 1. Open the downloads folder 2. view>as icons 3. view>use groups, view>group by>kind 4. scroll down to the images section, hit the 'show all' at the top right of this section 5. drag the icon size slider at the lower right to make icons huge, scroll around Alternatively 1. open the downloads folder 2. view>as list/column 3. view>use groups, view>group by>kind 4. scroll down to th…

If you consider five points to be "very easy"...

I need a simple solution. Someone below said how to do it in windows - doublecqick first photo. DONE

Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about

#190

Post by macintux »

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.

I’ll freely admit I haven’t tried all of those tasks, but I’ve been happy with GoodReader.

(But I’ll definitely agree: Preview for iPad is a big gap in Apple’s offering.)

Post reply on HN