Preview, the Mac app people forget about • Hacker News Board

Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about

#291

Post by asiachick » Tue, May 10, 2022, 4:05 AM UTC

wlesieutre wrote: post #19

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…

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:/…

I think preview on MacOS is great but when I'm on windows (and 95% of the time I'm on Mac) I open PDFs in Chrome (Firefox would probably work as well). Both have a built in sandboxed reader.

In fact pretty much the only time I open a PDF in preview is to merge 1 or more PDFs (show the thumbnails, copy and paste them from one to the other).

Otherwise I never use Preview for PDFs and I reference tons of PDF based specs.

On the other hand I use Preview to quickly crop or markup screenshots all the time.

Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about

#292

Post by thrusong » Tue, May 10, 2022, 4:13 AM UTC

Preview has been seriously broken on my M1 MacBook Air running macOS Monterey since I bought it.

I can't use the space bar to preview a file most of the time— I have to actually Force Quit Finder to get it to work again, which it does for a short while.

It then goes back to showing me a simple info window which shows a thumbnail, a date, and file size.

I've been hoping an update would fix it soon, but so far, no dice. I really don't want to do a clean install.

Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about

#293

Post by mchusma » Tue, May 10, 2022, 4:35 AM UTC

Preview is pretty good but anyone know why Finder on Mac is so bad? I mean, the search is bad. But even doing something like trying to go up to the parent folder is almost impossible. I only ever want to do two things, and both are hard.

ChromeOS gets these things so right comparitively.

Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about

#294

Post by MiddleEndian » Tue, May 10, 2022, 4:41 AM UTC

smcl wrote: post #236

criddell wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read it through archive.org and you don't get the popup: https://web.archive.org/web/20220509170301/https://www.fourt...

Good shout, it’s just stupid and annoying to get nagged for shit like this. Not to mention counterproductive. I dunno, maybe I’m just overreacting.

Not an overreaction at all. If people collectively refused to read or share content on sites that did this, the web would be a better place.

Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about

#295

Post by MiddleEndian » Tue, May 10, 2022, 4:42 AM UTC

dantondwa wrote: post #131

Preview is amazing and I miss it very dearly, now that I'm not running macOS anymore. There's simply nothing like it anywhere else. The amount of things it can do, and what a sleek UI. I only suffered a bit during the El Capitan-Sierra era, as I think they rewrote the PDF engine and there were some regressions. Anyway, it's the best and I wish something like that existed elsewhere. On Linux, GNOME's pdf viewer could…

I honestly didn't get why people hated PDFs so much until I stopped using Mac OS as well. I've never seen anything on Windows or Linux that was as pleasant for reading PDFs as Preview (at least up to OS X 10.6, no insight past that).

Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about

#296

Post by EvgeniyZh » Tue, May 10, 2022, 5:02 AM UTC

Matl wrote: post #199

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.

But supports more formats

Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about

#297

Post by derefr » Tue, May 10, 2022, 5:25 AM UTC

tbrock wrote: post #280

GraphenePants wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct, you get what you pay for. Acrobat Pro supports advanced rotations for only $14.99 per month. https://www.adobe.com/acrobat/pricing.html

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 subscriptions, Azure, etc.

As such, Microsoft tries as much as possible to avoid "bringing in" any features that are currently being sold as products by companies in their developer ecosystem (which would deprive those developers of revenue, and thus deprive them of revenue.) Acrobat charges to rotate images? Better not offer native image rotation.

Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about

#298

Post by PrimeDirective » Tue, May 10, 2022, 5:35 AM UTC

Jcowell wrote: post #251

PrimeDirective wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m confused here , so like if you’re in a folder with a file selected and hit the space bar , does pressing the arrow keys not preview the next file for you ?

It does not

Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about

#299

Post by behnamoh » Tue, May 10, 2022, 5:35 AM UTC

tbrock wrote: post #280

GraphenePants wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct, you get what you pay for. Acrobat Pro supports advanced rotations for only $14.99 per month. https://www.adobe.com/acrobat/pricing.html

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…

my guess is that Terminal, powerToys, and WSL were approved by MS management because they wold contribute to more sales to advanced users who would otherwise choose Linux. the same cannot be said about PDF viewers.

I also find it strange that MS keeps pushing people to use Edge as a PDF reader. only goes to show how valuable user data is, or rather, how desperate MS is for such data.

> As such, Microsoft tries as much as possible to avoid "bringing in" any features that are currently being sold as products by companies in their developer ecosystem (which would deprive those developers of revenue, and thus deprive them of revenue.) Acrobat charges to rotate images? Better not offer native image rotation.

to be fair, Apple does the same. lots of functionalities that you would expect from macOS are left for third party apps to provide. for example, changing external monitor volume, a proper window management that snaps windows to edges/corners, remembering the position of apps in different desktops, enabling font smoothing, enabling HiDPI on external displays, limiting apps’ CPU usage, etc.

Each of them costs like $15 which adds up to hundreds. But even if money wasn’t a problem, it’d still be concerning to use hacky methods that are sometimes closed source too.

Re: Preview, the Mac app people forget about

#300

Post by teleforce » Tue, May 10, 2022, 6:15 AM UTC

Little known fact that LibreOffice Draw can edit PDF document [1].

We badly need an open source equivalent of Preview for easy PDF documents management that works accross OSes.

Just wondering is there any software that can perform integrated processing for bitmap and vector graphics including PDF documents?

[1]Yes, You Can Use LibreOffice as a PDF Editor – Here’s How

https://www.makeuseof.com/libreoffice-pdf-editor/