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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

#331
post #297
post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why doesn’t Microsoft take the hint and make a decent pdf viewer / editor thingy? They seemed to get the hint on the terminal finally… Handle basic viewing, editing, signatures. Etc… While we are at it a GTK one would be great in Gnome too…

As Balmer put it: developers, developers, developers. In other words: the purpose of (consumer) Windows isn't to make money for Microsoft; the purpose of (consumer) Windows is to create a sales channel — "Windows users" — for Windows developers like Adobe to sell their Windows software products into. Microsoft then makes their money off those very same Windows developers, through corporate Windows licensing, Office s…

The opposite of “sherlocking”

Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about

#332
post #297
post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why doesn’t Microsoft take the hint and make a decent pdf viewer / editor thingy? They seemed to get the hint on the terminal finally… Handle basic viewing, editing, signatures. Etc… While we are at it a GTK one would be great in Gnome too…

As Balmer put it: developers, developers, developers. In other words: the purpose of (consumer) Windows isn't to make money for Microsoft; the purpose of (consumer) Windows is to create a sales channel — "Windows users" — for Windows developers like Adobe to sell their Windows software products into. Microsoft then makes their money off those very same Windows developers, through corporate Windows licensing, Office s…

This is the impression I have from Wordpress as well. Some of the most basic features you would expect a blogging platform or a brochure site creator to have out of the box are conspicuously missing, and I strongly suspect the reason for their absence is NOT for the sake of keeping the base WP install small, but rather because there are paid plugins in the Wordpress Plugin Directory which fulfill those basic functions, thereby providing a marketplace to incentivize WP development, regardless of how basic the functionality that you're looking for is. There is indeed a vibrant WP marketplace as a consequence of this, but should I really have to install a 3rd party library to get simple modal windows? Regardless of how much popups suck, they're something that every commercial client asks for at some point, and instead of having a single way of doing it which is official, well-maintained, and trustworthy, you have to shop around and try out every mystery devshop's kneecapped freemium version, many of which pelt you with banner ads and/or conflict with another shitty-ass plugin! It's very much a developer-centric way of doing things. Fine, that's a worthy cause, especially since Wordpress is free; but more often than not, the best solution is to invest in one of the plugin "suites" which do more than one thing without interfering with other things. As much as I like composition and "do one thing and do it well," if you try to go down that path with Wordpress plugins, you're asking for it.

Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about

#333
post #58

every time i open a document with preview, it insists on opening all the documents i had open before. i must be doing something wrong, and find a different workflow, maybe instead of closing the app, i need to manually close each document that i don't need anymore. i guess it's not an issue if you use preview often and keep it running all the time, but i rarely need it since most of what i do is either terminal or br…

Generally speaking, on macOS manually quitting an application is not part of the intended workflow. When you're done with a document, you close that document's window. The app can continue to be open in the background with zero windows, and will be closed by the OS automatically if it needs to reclaim the resources. Manually quitting the application is unnecessary micromanaging.

while i agree in principal, i am quite bothered by unused applications cluttering up the dock. i use the dock to tell me which apps i am currently focusing on, so inactive apps really get in the way.

Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about

#334
post #319
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you answered your own question - both of the Apple-allowed methods described require a human in the loop. Your approach could more easily be automated and thus forged. Why this is a big deal? Not sure but it seems the best bet. Would love to see this confirmed.

My issue is mostly that they don't at least have a non-cryptographically secure method of simply putting an image or a stamp on a pdf. It's such a useful thing. Instead, to import a stamp like a green check mark into Preview, you'd have to print one out and then hold it up to the camera, which is absurd.

Long before Preview supported signatures, I used PDFSigner.app [1].

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pdf-signer/id428271079?mt=12

Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about

#335
A small annoyance of Preview is that the PDFs it displays don't render JPEG2000 images correctly. I found this out due to the project we're on. Some of the PDFs were generated about 20 years ago with JPEG2000 images in them. Acrobat Reader does display them correctly. I can't stand Acrobat Reader, but in this one case it's a better PDF viewer than Mac Preview.

Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about

#336
post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem is that's not going to be an easy thing to remember. 'G' for "Go to folder". cmd-G is standardized as "Find Next" across apps, so you add "shift" to do an app-specific behavior. > I want to be able to view hidden files on demand. cmd-shift-'.' . The '.' matches the prefix for auto-hidden files.

> cmd-shift-'.' . The '.' matches the prefix for auto-hidden files. This is definitely not behavior I'm seeing in either file picking dialogs or Finder windows.

I tested it again locally and it's working for me. Just for you to double check, here's an article with pictures:

https://osxdaily.com/2018/02/12/show-hidden-files-mac-keyboa...

Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about

#337
Unfortunately although Preview is good for these tricks, such as editing a PDF or creating a PDF from multiple inputs, I often find that the official acrobat reader from Adobe will refuse to display the resulting file. That may be Adobe trying old Microsoft “you can’t keep up with my definition of a legal file format” tricks. Nevertheless what you produce cannot be viewed with a significant fraction of PDF readers.
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