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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

#191

Post by adrusi »

hnlmorg wrote: post #64
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…

> 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 macOS open/save dialog is almost identical to the Finder UI, what would you change about it? The reason it's helpful to be able to drag a file from somewhere else into the open/save dialog is that you often already have the file open somewhere. A common workflow: navigate to a document in finder, edit it in some app, save it, upload it to a web form. Similarly if you have a path to the file handy somewhere, you can hit ⌘⇧G and paste it.

And while I can see how reasonable people can disagree about the virtues of Mac/Windows/KDE open/save dialogs, Gnome definitely has the worst. Personally my KDE experience is limited, but of the other three I prefer macOS by a wide margin.

Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about

#192

Post by adrusi »

hnlmorg wrote: post #176
kergonath wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> It is not a browser, or a file manager. It is a file selector. 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…

Sometimes the application doesn't open files you drag onto its windows, and sometimes you want to select a file but not open it.

Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about

#193

Post by dlivingston »

ask_b123 wrote: post #163

Something else I found (by browsing the linked page) is that you can drag (while pressing cmd) and drop one of your apps to the top of the Finder. Removing the app by dragging it back results in a poof animation that I can only describe as adorable. It is so cartoony!

I love the little “Easter egg”-y details like this.

Others of note:

- A detected server on your network will, if it’s not a Mac, display as an ancient CRT monitor with the blue screen of death [0]

- TextEdit.app’s icon used to have the transcript of “Here’s to the crazy ones…” [1]

A few others, which may or may not still exist: [2]

Apple is slowly stripping these out - the little glimpses of the personalities of people who made them - and it makes me sad.

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/l5ft60/macos_easter_...

[1]: https://forums.macrumors.com/media/macrumors-png.232193/

[2]: https://www.businessinsider.com/mac-os-x-easter-eggs-2013-4

Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about

#195

Post by PrimeDirective »

ask_b123 wrote: post #98
PrimeDirective wrote: post #68

All this, and yet you can't move forwards or backwards, when there are other files in the folder. I would be gladly wrong if someone could point out how to do this in Preview

It seems like you can move to the next or previous file with tab + up/down arrow keys. I just found out by mashing all the buttons I could think of. :-)

This is not exactly it. What I meant was, something what IrfanView does: when you open an image (or any file the program can read), you can press a button to open the (alphabetically?) next or previous image in the same folder.

Looks like Preview only has this, when you select all files and open them (Cmd+O). Wish it was like IrfanView.

Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about

#196

Post by MBCook »

dschuessler wrote: post #180
MBCook wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I tried it with one of these image-based PDFs and didn't get it to work. Is this Apple-Silicon-only? Or is there any other step you need to do?

I’m not going to pretend it works 100% of the time. I don’t know if that’s the issue.

It works with anything that works with Monterey. So if you are running macOS Monterey you fit the requirements.

Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about

#197

Post by dev_tty01 »

jhasse wrote: post #89
dev_tty01 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Select the group of photos. Not that easy depending on the number of pictures and the folder content. > Use the arrow keys to move between the different files. Won't work correctly in grid view. Also: I don't want to mess with the way I set up Finder to display/sort the folder just to view the pictures.

Create Smart Folders and sort by date, type, location, etc... Whatever you want. Then open the folder. You can tell Finder to use View as Gallery in those folders.

You can also just continue to use Grid view and tell Finder to use large preview icons in that folder.

Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about

#198

Post by throwmeback »

kjksf wrote: post #179
Macha wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hey, I just updated the website https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org (for reference, the old one: https://sumatra-website-preview.onrender.com/free-pdf-reader ). Does it look better? Maybe early 2000?

Looks great!

Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about

#199

Post by Matl »

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…

> Preview is one of those essential things that sets macOS apart from the other operating systems

KDE's Okukar is pretty similar imo.

Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about

#200

Post by Maursault »

For such a simple application, Preview is very powerful. Generally I use pdftk to do things with pdfs. But Preview duplicates nearly all that functionality. Need to separate one page of a pdf into a new pdf document? Preview can do that. Need to join two pdfs? Preview can do that. Need to create a pdf that has some pages from another pdf, and some pages from yet another pdf, Preview can do that. Need to markup or sign a pdf? Preview excels at this.

Windows has only third party pdf support, and almost every available option is inferior to Preview.

The only software I know that is more advanced than Preview is Enfocus PitStop Pro. But that is for professional situations where you need low level control and editing of a pdf for whatever reason, such as correcting typos without the original document source format, or pdf processing and creation automation.

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