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, this moves the file to the directory shown in the dialog, or does nothing. On Windows, I install Listary to get the same features https://www.listary.com/
There are so many other little macOS things that make it easier to work in the GUI - but on HN they’re all overshadowed by the big “wow window management on Mac is 90s unless you install an app” issue, which makes me sad. 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 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.
What you can do is "Rotate View Clockwise" three times, way down at the bottom of the menu. It applies to the entire document instead of a single page, and it doesn't persist next time you open the file. Works in a pinch but it's deliberately shitty.
Microsoft even had their own PDF viewing software with Windows 8, but instead of improving it to get their user experience one step closer to Apple's, they killed it off to make more people launch Edge by accident.
I can only assume there's a KPI somewhere in Microsoft HQ tracking how many times Edge is launched, and making that graph go up and to the right has become their number one corporate priority.
It would explain the taskbar's search screen, the "news and weather" bullshit, pressing F1 in Explorer opening a Bing search for "How to get help in Windows" instead of just giving you help, and most every other design choice they've made in the last couple of years.
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.
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.
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.
Unfortunately doesn't seem to be the case. All I have is "rotate clockwise" and it's just like Reader DC in that it rotates the view of the entire document rather than actually rotating a page.
It's missing the rotation arrow buttons that bug you to buy a subscription, so that's a bit nicer than the current Reader DC release. I assume this is just because it lags behind the main release and they'll be rolled in as a future update on the Classic track?
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 subscriptions, but it's hard to cut them a lot of slack for having a worse free PDF tool than what Apple was shipping for free on all their computers more than 20 years ago.
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 extra functions). There’s certainly a lot I’d like to see improved/included in Adobe Reader, but I also recognize that they are in a different market position than Apple.
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.
Yeah, I'm not going to argue about that particular feature -- I mean Adobe Reader does allow you to rotate the page display for viewing purposes, just not in the way you'd prefer -- but the broader perspective is that Adobe roughly differentiates between authoring a document and using a document -- authoring is what costs money. Form fill-in is not authoring, and under the hood it's actually more similar to commenting/highlighting (adding stuff "on top" of the normal page content), which are also reader/viewer functions.
So my real problem here is the disconnect between Adobe's "rotate view clockwise" being a document-wide operation, and the fact that actual PDF documents don't have consistent page orientation throughout.
It's usually that all of the pages are consistently oriented as portrait, but some of them actually have landscape content.
The incorrect portrait page orientation was probably done on purpose to keep printers from screwing it up, and rotating a piece of paper to look at it barely requires a thought. No big deal if you're printing it.
But the ease of looking at a single page sideways and then going back to the original rotation doesn't map to reading it on a computer screen with document-wide rotate commands, and they really should've sucked it up and let me fix individual pages. Even if it's a temporary "view" change and not something I can save back to the file.
Agreed, on a Mac I feel like a PDF document is a stack of paper that I can rearrange, copy, rotate, and otherwise handle however I want to.
On Windows it's more like a hardcover bound book that I can download and attach to an email to share with someone, but god forbid I want to change anything.
They can make me use Windows in the office, but next time something dies in my home PC I'm just going to sell the rest of it for parts and replace it with a Steam Deck.
I sometimes wonder if Preview being so much easier than Acrobat isn't an intentional poke at Adobe for all the times Adobe strayed from the one true path of Apple. That whole skipping a version of software release because Adobe didn't pay attention to words from up on high to quite using deprecated language surely didn't sit well.
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.
Another great related feature is how easy it is to “print” to Preview and save as PDF. It makes it very easy to save copies of confirmations, payment receipts, etc when sites don’t provide a PDF link.
If you haven't tried it, make sure you are printing using the system dialog, and select "Open in Preview" in the drop-down list in the lower-left corner.
Another great related feature is how easy it is to “print” to Preview
BTW, if you are trying to save a protected PDF from Adobe reader that won't let you save it in an unprotected format that's compatible with Preview, there is "print" document trick you can try since Adobe Reader blocks the system print dialog: pause the queue for your printer (if you don't have a printer, just "install" a network postscript printer), and print the document. The document is then saved to a non-secured temp PDF file in /var/spool/cups, to a filename starting with "d" (ls -l -t to find the most recent file). That file is normally deleted after being sent to the printer, but my pausing the print queue, the file is there long enough to copy somewhere. Rename the document, and you're good to go.
This is a trick from the Mac OS X Hints days, and still works, as of at least Catalina.
According to the article, Adobe helped Apple? But threatened to sue Microsoft? I wonder what the details are.
>However, Adobe has freely offered the specifications on PDF to other companies. Apple’s Mac OS X operating system has built in support for reading and saving of PDF files.
Yes, when Apple bought NeXT (I know, more like the other way around) they wanted the graphics model to follow something akin to NeXT's — which was based around Display Postscript. The modern equivalent was of course PDF.
If you could render into a PDF context with your graphics engine (CoreGraphics) you would have a near print-ready document. (You still need to pass along additional info regarding whether to print duplex, number of copies, etc.)
So anyway, Save to PDF, Open in Preview were basically free.
Ancient companies requiring I print out a form, sign it physically, scan it, send it back... I just open it in Preview, use the text annotation tool and some random cursive font, "sign it", re-export, done. I haven't owned a printer or scanner in 10 years.
> 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 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 file into the first dialogue (ie dialogue that should have been used to find the file to begin with) is more damning than anything.
If there were two things I wish Apple would add in macOS, it is:
1. draggable hotspots (like in Windows and KDE)
2. a completely redesigned open and save dialogue that works a little more like Windows and KDE
I can live (and even like some of) macOS's idiosyncrasies. But those two irritate the hell out of me on an almost daily basis.
> 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 file into the first dialogue (ie dialogue that should have been used to find the file to begin with) is more damning than anything.
It is not a browser, or a file manager. It is a file selector. So it allows you to select files, not do some file management. It is not rocket science. 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, and instead of the sensible behaviour it gets just moved to whatever the app thought the default directory should be for its open file dialogs.
> a completely redesigned open and save dialogue that works a little more like Windows and KDE
> 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 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.
> 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".
Sometimes. Others the dialog is how you set things like the format of the file or some import options. Or you need a multiple selection and dropping a bunch of files just opens them separately. Sometimes you can input a regex and you just need to quickly go to the right directory. Sometimes you need to select a file to import it into another document and not open it. It is also damn convenient to just drop the folder where you want a new file to be in a “save as” dialog without having to navigate from dog knows where. There are plenty of use cases.
What is redundant is a file manager in an import dialog. There is a full blown file manager that’s always going to be better just a click away.
> If you drag the file into the text area it will work as you wish.
In theory, yes. In practice it’s hit and miss as developers don’t seem to care about using native widgets (that, and the fact that native widgets have vastly different capabilities on Windows thanks to years of cruft they cannot remove).
[edit] sorry if it sounded harsh; I have nothing against you. It’s just that the file selection dialogs are a particular pain point on Windows and Linux.
None of that prevents Apple from building a more featureful dialogue
> In theory, yes. In practice it’s hit and miss as developers don’t seem to care about using native widgets (that, and the fact that native widgets have vastly different capabilities on Windows thanks to years of cruft they cannot remove).
I agree it sucks when developers roll their own but that’s not really relevant because we are comparing two very specific dialogues and not the wider OS ecosystem. (I’d use macOS over Windows any day of the week. But that doesn’t mean I have to love everything about macOS).
> sorry if it sounded harsh
You didn’t and we are good :)
It’s been really interesting hearing another viewpoint.
> It’s just that the file selection dialogs are a particular pain point on Windows and Linux.
For you. :) Personally I think KDE got it just about perfect.
I guess this just goes to show how completely different two peoples preferences can be.
It’s a shortcut that comes in handy when you operate in deep file hierarchies and can’t be bothered to memorize the path.
That said there’s even easier ways to get there:
Just navigate, the sidebar will reflect what’s in your Finder sidebar so you can use that as a shelf if you’re going into one specific directory a lot for your work. It’s a dynamic environment, you don’t have to treat it like it’s static.
Or: hit Command-Shift-G. This will allow you to type the path with tab completion.
Dragging the folder in is for when you’re operating in the Finder and another application and rather than navigating you want to just drag the proxy in to go right there. It’s a shortcut, but depending on the task it’s not necessarily the most efficient way to do it.
> Dragging the folder in is for when you’re operating in the Finder and another application
Not only Finder! You can hover over the filename on the top bar of any application and drag the icon from there as well. It works for any application where you have a file opened.
Is there a pattern to it? I find it an amazing feature, but also find that it doesn't always works. Do I have to do something before I can drag the icon?
In recent versions you might have to hover for the icon to appear, which is infuriating.
Except for that, all proxy icons should be dragable without problem if they are from the native widgets (so no guarantee for misguided developers who reimplemented it to look like the native one without actually implementing its behaviour). There might be a small delay between the moment you click on it and the moment you can drag it, to avoid mistakes (I think that was the case at some point, not really sure now).
I gotta say, for all of my (many, many) criticisms of macOS the save dialog seems fine to me. I almost always have the destination folder already open in Finder, if anything the improvement would be to put a list of Finder's open folders into the save dialog. Dragging it over works ok though.
Not quite that, but macOS' new tabs-in-windows is close. I personally don't love keeping them all in tabs in a single window, but I can always select the Window > Merge All Windows option to gather all my disparate Finder windows together for this purpose.
(ETA: This wouldn't work in the save dialog though, I missed that detail)
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.
I almost never have Finder open. I usually think "I want to create a spreadsheet" so I'll open Excel and then look for the document. Or I'll be doing some dev work so I'll navigate there in the terminal and then open code via `code .`
I think some of that habit might have stemmed from the fact that I don't like Finder much. I don't like the hotkeys (eg [ENTER] to rename), I don't like it's layout. As much as I disliked Microsoft's "lets turn explorer.exe into Internet Explorer", the editable address bar is actually really nice (you can see precisely where you are and quickly change it to where you want to be).
I'd say Dolphin (KDE) is probably the perfect file manager for me. It's got a terminal baked in (which automatically changes directories when you navigate in the GUI) so you can mix and match GUI and CLI operations. You can add tabs so your file manager can be used as a session (eg if you're working in multiple directories for a specific task or project, you can have one file manager instance open for that task but different tabs per directory). There's so much I love about it. But it's also the polar opposite of Finder, which might explain why I don't like Finder much.
I do completely agree with you about Gnome though.
This is an interesting chicken-and-egg problem. It could be said that other OSs had to add lots of file management features to their file selector dialog because relying on drag-and-drop from another application was unfeasible.
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.
The problem is that's not going to be an easy thing to remember. It's not an obvious hotkey and nor is it even memorable that the hotkey even exists. There's no UI hints that it does. And when you use hundreds of different pieces of software every day, from CLI tools to complicated desktop applications, there's no way anyone can remember every single hotkey and flag for them. This is why tools like fzf and sophisticated shell auto-completion exist. They've at least recognised that this stuff needs to be discoverable somehow.
In fact that is my biggest annoyance with Apple's UIs. There's so much hidden functionality that is almost impossible to discover (and a lot of it is incredibly easy to forget again too). For example I was using an iPhone for years before I discovered you could move the caret by long pressing on the space bar. Before then I was cursing how much easier it was to edit text in Android because I just assumed there wasn't a precise way to move the caret in iOS. I felt like such an idiot that it took an internet meme to teach me to use my phone...but then I remember that it shouldn't have taken a meme to make people aware that feature existed.
> "Show hidden files” is a preference you can change.
I don't want to change a preference. I want to be able to view hidden files on demand. Most of the time hidden files are better off hidden. That's actually an example of sensible defaults. However it's also useful to be able to toggle them on from the open dialogue when needed.
> Once you’re comfortable with the CLI and know the paths you care about for a task, in what cases do you prefer a GUI open dialog on other systems?
It's the other way around, I grew up on text only systems and had to learn to adapt to GUIs. I still struggle with them even now (which is why I hate it when you're expected to stumble upon functionality by chance).
As for when I prefer to use the GUI open dialogue? It's when I'm already using the GUI for something. Like emails, spreadsheets, word processing. Boring stuff we all wish we didn't have to do but cannot escape completely. I'd rather not have to context switch away from the GUI and back into iTerm just to open a file.
> The problem is that's not going to be an easy thing to remember. It's not an obvious hotkey and nor is it even memorable that the hotkey even exists. There's no UI hints that it does.
While I think Apple's UIs do have annoyingly hidden functionality, this particular one is something you can learn by using Finder -- it's the keyboard shortcut for "Go to Folder…" in the "Go" menu. A lot of the "View" and "Go" keyboard shortcuts there work in file picker boxes, but it's true you're not going to be able to do actual file management there.
A lot of "hidden" keyboard shortcuts in macOS really aren't hidden, though; they're either right there in the menus or in the Help menu. If you're in Finder, the first item in that menu is "macOS Help," which opens a user guide…and that User Guide talks about a lot of things. And, it also links to the fairly extensive "Mac keyboard shortcuts" support article. This may be the technical writer in me, but I kinda wish people would read manuals a little more than they do. :)
I hate Windows! Just because I happen to think specific UI elements are better than macOS it doesn't mean I prefer Windows as a platform. In fact I consider such opinions as being more objective than the "apple can do no wrong" fanboyism that often gets posted.
> 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 window) was hidden by default in I believe Big Sur. There's a `defaults` command to make it visible at all times in Monterey, but hiding it is a foolish design choice on Apple's part.
Look at the debacle with Safari last year. The software is form over function for the last few years.
I can't remember the name of the guy everyone blames for this, but he talks about minimalism and reducing app UI in favor of putting content forward during OS feature reveals. The approach is completely backwards, imo.
BTW: thanks for the tip about Listary. I'll check it out.
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 design team found Preview useful as well and didn't stand in our way when we wanted to add "instant alpha" or simple annotations.....
At first Preview landed in my lap exclusively. Someone had shimmed in some code to open Quicktime image types that NSImage (NeXTStep, AppKit) did not recognize — "BMP" just as an example.
I was told, "Hey, we have a rich PDF API/SPI in CoreGraphics (Quartz2D) maybe you can beef up our PDF support in Preview."
PDF at that time was quickly rasterized (by AppKit) and really treated no differently than, say, a multi-page TIFF file in Preview.
As I started to switch over to rendering PDF's using CoreGraphics rather than NSImage, another engineer (Werner) took over the image side of Preview.
For a while then it was a team of two — me and Werner. Werner did the image side (but also owned and had responsibility for ImageIO) and I did the PDF side (I eventually wrote PDFKit but also had things like the Displays Prefs pane, some Color Sync stuff as my other responsibilities as well).
Werner is smarter than me though so where there were shared resources in Preview (like the toolbar, for example) often Werner handled that.
What I gave above is more or less the direction we were given — so there was a good deal of autonomy. I think everyone sort of had their hands full just trying to get a new graphics system up and running and to move functionality over from System 9 to OS X such that Werner and I were free to just add the stuff we wanted.
Initially I think we tried to keep some commonality — if images could be rotated, I would try to also rotate PDFs. Image zoom in/out? PDF zoom in/out.
But when I added text handling (text selection, search) we kind of acknowledged that the two really were separate beasts. I was surprised later though when the same annotations I had added to support PDF also were added as mark-up tools to images (I was no longer on the team then as I recall).
Preview eventually went to its own team though and the engineers working on it did not have other duties/distractions like Werner and I. This is when signatures, instant-alpha, and other niceties were added.
I definitely enjoyed the years Werner and I were on it and we could just add "cool stuff" we wanted. I remember someone asking for the "blank page" feature — where you can insert a blank page into a PDF – it allows you to play with even/oddness (front/backedness) of pages when printing 2-up. It was cool so we added it.
I like to point out that "we" were the users of the app as much (or more so) than some manager up the chain. To that end, I always felt we more or less knew what users wanted.
I think eventually the designers came to use Preview quite a bit and so had their own suggestions but they certainly weren't standing in our way early on.
> There's a `defaults` command to make it visible at all times in Monterey, but hiding it is a foolish design choice on Apple's part.
It's also a setting under Accessibility > Display > Show window title icons, so there's little danger of it disappearing since it's not a hidden setting.
> I can't remember the name of the guy everyone blames for this, but he talks about minimalism and reducing app UI in favor of putting content forward during OS feature reveals
I believe you might be referring to Jony Ive (who is named in the portion you quoted). He left Apple a few years ago, which is what the comment you quote is talking about.
> 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.
As I read this I thought of another such feature - how pressing Space with a file selected (in either Finder or any 'choose a file' dialog window) presents a quick preview of the contents of the file. Extremely low friction way to quickly check out the contents of a file, almost like the GUI version of `head`
Preview is great. Among the many other features, it's also what I use to sign PDFs. You can enter and save a signature using the trackpad or camera and then paste it into any PDF. It looks like you printed, signed, and scanned the PDF back in.
Absolutely. I recently tried switching to Linux, and realized how amazing Preview is. Tasks like "swap 2 pages in a PDF" or "crop this image" are much less intuitive and often require you to install a single-purpose command line utility, or fire up something like GIMP which has a steeper learning curve and feels like overkill
If Mac OS spent two OS update cycles just fixing the usability kinks that plague window management, context switching across apps, mouse support, multi desktop support, and finder, then it would be the most pleasurable OS to work with out of the 3. As it is, these flaws make up most of the interactions I have with an OS moment to moment, and as a result Mac OS frustrates me in ways Windows and Linux (using Pop OS with Gnome) don't.
I adore the fact that I can sign PDFs so easily from the system-default viewer (and save my signature for next time)
Also love that I can do all the image-editing basics from the same app (enough to make memes anyway...)
Though it does concern me a bit that most of the best UX features in Apple software are older; usually the newer an Apple UI is, the worse it is. Control Center and such are pretty nice I guess, but Apple Music on macOS is terrible
I never thought about it, but I do use it a lot, some of the things in there I didn't even realise were difficult.
I use it for resizing images all the time for sure, it's quick and easy
The markup tools are nice as well to quickly annotate things for sharing in the team, although for some reason it always takes me a little bit figure out how to unlock the toolbar.
I had no idea simple edits to PDF were such a pain for other people
Been a while since I've used Windows as a daily driver but I used to use SumatraPDF for basic PDF operations. Small, lightweight, open-source. Looks like it'd still be useful today?
1. Support for h265 video previews (not sure about technical or any other licensing hurdles)
2. Basic playback controls (via keyboard) when viewing video previews - just play, pause, skip would do. I review a ton of videos and I'd often like to pause to take a screenshot or skip to quickly see what's happening in the video.
3. Option to zoom on text files like json, csv etc. Not a big deal but would be a great addition especially on hi-res external displays.
Edit: Looks like I mixed quicklook with preview. My bad.
I really enjoyed working with the Preview team before I retired from Apple. My small group created a private framework that added "document reconstruction" to PDF documents: basically an inferred DOM based on whatever information (mainly geometric) we could use in the PDF document.
Our moment of fame game at WWDC 2009, when Bertrand Serlet talked about Snow Leopard during the Keynote. At around the 5:10 mark he talks about performance improvements to Preview. He then goes on to say "There are also lots of little touches. The one I like is about text selection in PDF files. .... In Snow Leopard, we have used a little bit of AI to infer the structure of the document...." (He then demonstrates intelligent selection across columns) [Applause from the audience]. (https://youtu.be/FTfChHwGFf0?t=306)
My colleague and I presented the proposal to add this "little bit of AI" to a small group from the Graphics and Imaging department. Bertrand was in attendance, and it was thanks to him that we joined G&I. They were a fantastic team to work with!
Thank you very much for this feature, which I have used regularly for quite some years! That was one of the thousands of details that make Preview vastly better than most PDF viewers I have used.
Preview is one of the reasons I stick with Mac OS. I'm surprised how far behind other operating systems remain when it comes to viewing PDFs. Thank you!
People also forget that you can use Preview to scan documents from your scanner rather than using whatever shitty software came with yours.
Also, Preview > File > Import from iPhone > Scan Documents gives you a virtual scanner instead of having to install one of those "scanner" apps on your phone. Its built into your iPhone already!
I also use it frequently to change image file types.
You can also make a digital version of your signature from a picture of physical version.
There's just tons of small features that work well.
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.
That iOS scan feature is "hidden" in the Files app. Open it on your phone and press the three dots in the top right corner and it should have "scan documents" option.
You can also select "black & white" mode for text documents which saves a ton of space
I only knew about it through notes and thought it was neat but a little clunky... This "Scan from iPhone" feature is great, wish they made it easier to find as I've used MacOS for years and never knew about it.
True, however it seems that you cannot export the scan as-is from the Notes app; the resulting file is padded weirdly for whatever stupid reason. No such ”feature” is forced on the scans via the Files app scan.
There is also the built in Image Capture app that works with most flatbed scanners or printer/scanner combos. It has its own quirks, but works better than any manufacturer software I’ve ever tried.
Holy hell, I'm glad I clicked on this story. Had no idea this feature existed, I've been using much clunkier solutions to get a photo or document over from my phone. Thanks!
> ...rather than using whatever shitty software came with yours.
I just helped a friend setup a Brother all-in-one for use with their newish Lenova Windows 11. Two hours. No way they could have figured this out on their own. So many hoops, glitches. Everything was ... so ... slow.
With Mac & iPhone, printing and scanning Just Work.
Having not used Windows for ages, I can't believe how bad that stack, ecosystem, tech culture remains. Just turrible.
For scanning there's also Image Capture.app which also comes with the OS. I haven't tried using it with the phone though, just a normal printer/scanner.
I've always used the built-in Image Capture app to do tjr scanning, mainly because the app seems to open automatically when I plug in my USB flatbed scanner.
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.
Speaking as an iOS developer, we use PDF files to represent our vector icon assets in the app.
I thought it was a bit odd of a choice on the platform vs SVG which seems more popular (and which the Android devs on our team use), but CoreGraphics using it internally ties the whole picture together.
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.
I was never one to be bothered by it personally, just responding to reactions others have had when I pointed to it previously (in particular I've often defended HN and Old Reddit design vs newer trends).
That said, I think the updates will reduce the number of people that react that way.
I remember in the early 2000s, right around the time that Acrobat Reader had started rapidly bloating and becoming worse, upgrading to the first release of OS X and feeling relieved after finding out that installing Reader wouldn’t be necessary. Even in the buggy slow mess that was OS X 10.0.4, Preview was still a great deal better than Reader at most of the things you’d use a PDF app for.
I don't understand. Preview is by far the slowest PDF viewer I've ever used. Scrolling through 100+page documents brings it to its knees.
Gthumb in my experience is far more performant. Scrolls like butter, regardless of PDF size. But unfortunately I don't think there's a macOS native UI port.
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.
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.
It is possible that it is AS only. It may use the machine learning components of AS.
Edit:
As of July of 2021, Live Text was available in beta on Intel Macs so by the time Monterey shipped it worked on both Intel and AS.
Whether it works on a given document may depend on how that app displays the image. I can see where it would be complicated in a PDF where you may have combinations of text, images, and OCR’d text behind images.
I have it mapped to ctrl-alt-command-C. As more and more apps and webpages make text unselectable, it’s become invaluable. My favorite trick is to copy the URL when someone is screen sharing their browser in a virtual meeting!
Thanks for sharing, I didn't know about TRex! I've been using TextSniper (https://textsniper.app) for this functionality -- not sure how these two compare, feature-wise.
And I didn't know about TextSniper. FWIW, TRex has only failed me less than 1 out of a hundred times, and only in edge cases like getting a crazy complicated URL from a tiny fuzzy web call. I also like that it's open source.
Anybody know how to override this feature when you’re just trying to draw a selection rectangle over the image? The App keeps recognising the portion under my pointer as text and changing the pointer to a text selection caret instead.
iOS also recognizes text, and you can search your photo library from MacOS or iOS for text - a menu item or road sign you remember taking a picture of, for example.
When applying for mortgages I needed a lot of paperwork and it was so nice being able to point Automator to a folder of pdfs and documents and quickly set up a little workflow that collated everything, then it opened the documents in Preview, I fixed a few minor tweaks, signed the forms, and sent them off. It felt like I had superpowers.
I have done exactly this - Automator is the other secret weapon in MacOSX's arsenal.
Downloading a bunch of PDFs from my bank/broker into folder and then running an Automator script to combine them into a single PDF is the only satisfying part of collecting information for my tax return.
I had to recently compile some documents for court, they were in several different PDF's and I did not necessarily want all of it. The ability to easily copy specific pages from one document into one large document. Made life so easy.
There are so many small features in Preview that just makes it such an underrated tool
This feature is one of the few things I miss dearly since moving to Linux as my daily-driver OS. There are command-line tools but nothing compares to Preview from what I've found.
I never realized how much I used it and relied on it until I moved to Windows over the winter break so I could game with friends. One of the many reasons my next computer is going to be another MacBook most likely. I really miss that thing.
IMO it’s not as good as preview and idk if it supports annotations or does them as well. But it’s a great lightweight pdf and image viewer and “traditional” Desktop app.
The fact that people don't know about this sucks when the feature breaks. Around 2016 it was broken for a year and then after a year, just like that it was fixed.
Preview is one of the single-best pieces of software I use in my daily life. It manages to be incredibly powerful without bloating the UI while still remaining usable. It is unfortunate the name suggests it being a simple preview application. It's far from it.
I have no idea why the author says this is an "app people forget about." I use it constantly. Hundreds if not thousands of times a month. It is always open. It is my faithful companion. It flows through my bloodstream. I breathe and dream and gain my nutrients and sunlight via screenshots and edits in Preview.
Yeah, Preview is awesome. I remember when I learned about adding signatures to docs, I was blown away at how awesome the import procedure was - sign on a piece of paper (sharpie works well), hold it up to your webcam, voila! Natural looking signature on hundreds of docs since.
Preview is one of the biggest things I’ve missed every time I’ve tried to finally make Linux my daily driver.
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 the site, it's reputation, quality etc. All a pop up does is annoy a new visitor. I highly doubt people will take the time or even trust to give away their email with no obvious benefit.
2. A repeat user, someone who's familiar with the site. What's wrong with placing a simple signup form at the end of the article. It's unobtrusive & if people really like your stuff, they will sign up.
Or is it the case that people like us are not the target audience - they couldn't give two shit*s whether we stay on the page or not. Fortunately I haven't had to deal with SEO and shoving stuff on users to sell my stuff, so perhaps I'm naive.
Many many years ago, when this trend first appeared, I made the Tumblr Tab Closed; Didn't Read [0] - it got retweeted by some web luminaries like Eric Meyer and Tim Berners Lee and, while the vast majority of the replies I got were in huge agreement, there were a bunch of "growth hackers" absolutely furious that I'd made it and now everyone hates them. So I wrote this [1].
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.
One more thing: if you select an area of a pdf, you can copy/paste, retaining vector graphics info. Never seen that in any other app. Works in several other macos apps, too.
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.
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 be close to it, but it is lacking all the annotation features except for highlights. KDE's Okular is a bit better, but it's UI is bad. On Windows, there's just nothing like it. I use Sumatra, but I miss Preview all the time.
It can do a lot of impressive stuff, but makes you fight with it to do it for the dumbest reasons. Like the fact that entering text into a form field requires a popup window, which I still can't figure out how to complete interacting with solely via the keyboard. Ye gads.
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).
Signatures stamps are great, but the signature-creation method is absurd.
Ok, there is something cryptographically special about a signature image, which means we can't just import a file, it has to be created while in the program, and it gets stored on the keychain. Fine. But then why not also give us the ability to add an arbitrary stamp from an image? Why have the only method for adding a stamp to a PDF be through the signatures?
I have a fine signature as an image, which didn't survive the switch to a new Mac because it's not a plain image and you have to jump through hoops to bring it across keychains. I also have a stamp that I use. I can't import either of these into Preview, and my only option for the former is a terrible scrawl on the touchpad, or holding up an image in front of the camera and hoping it's not too distorted. Why?
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.
I only just now put two and two together to realize it's stored on the keychain. I wondered why I haven't had to update it in years, across multiple MacBook upgrades.
Because fundamentally Apple computers do not put you at the center of your computer, they put Apple there.
For example, on the new M1 computers, iOS apps stop functioning if SIP is disabled. Why? This is entirely artificial, because the iOS app model depends on you not being able to do whatever you want with the device you own. Contrast this with open source where this sort of restriction would just be patched away.
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.
Preview is great. I miss it whenever I'm not on a Mac. Fast, light, useful, tasteful. I dread the day a design team remembers it exists and decides it's due for a "refresh".
Pretty crazy if you think about it. Windows users are relegated to third-party apps, and even they don't come close to that in functionality. Merging and rearranging is such a pain, I've even resorted to using web apps on questionable sites sometimes.
Maybe that balances out against the fact that Mac OS has rudimentary window management and users need third party apps to fill that gap while Windows has decent window management built in.
:-)
I haven't forgotten. I use it everyday. One issue is that it has gone for sizable lengths of time with frustrating unfixed bugs. For example, there was a period during which if I wanted to quickly peek at Nikon raw file with it, I'd have to wait a minute or more for it to load the file. A few years ago, it was pretty crashy viewing PDFs, one of its primary uses. It's better now, and I hope Apple continues to refocus on their classic levels of reliability. Preview for me really is an "Everyday Thing".
I recently discovered that the signing feature can use an associated iPhone or iPad (with stylus!) as the signing device where you write your signature.
This is sometimes true on a hardware level, too. For example, I was using a Bluetooth Plantronics headset for voice chat on my iMac G5 in 2005 because Macs had come standard with Bluetooth for a year or two at that point. It wouldn't be for another 5 years or so for midrange-and-above prebuilt laptops to start coming with BT and it wasn't until the past 5 or so years that enthusiast motherboards and desktops started reliably coming with it.
The latest feature like this is Thunderbolt, which is starting to become more common on generic laptops, but is still surprisingly hard to come by in prebuilt PC desktops and enthusiast motherboards.
I've been using Thunderbolt since TB 1, was it 2011? It was mind blowing at the time. With the original Apple TB Display it was so great to be able to just connect to the display and also get ethernet and my laptop charged.
I want Apple to have healthy competition to keep them on their feet but they often just run a different race.
(I have LOTS of complaints about Apple stuff, I am not a fanboy, but as a technologist, I like that they push the envelope and raise the bar in many areas).
I'm especially glad that we seem to be out of the Jony Ive era where every design decision was a head-scratcher.
When you buy a Logitech bluetooth mouse or keyboard, it comes with a proprietary 2.4Ghz dongle as well. Unless it's the mac version, that doesn't come with an extra dongle. Presumably because bluetooth is almost guaranteed to be available and work on a mac. It will even work when you reboot into recovery mode.
AirPods plus a mac work well too. It's usually not a fun experience when using bluetooth headphones on a PC and the microphone gets activated.
Regarding thunderbolt, it's disappointing it's not on every system. I use it all the time to transfer files between macs using static IP addresses.
I have to say, the bluetooth experience is one of the worst pain points for me on macs these days. I'm always connected to the wrong source. Or it's connected to two sources, but playing sound from the wrong one. Or I skip an ad on youtube on my macbook and my headphones switch source to my phone in that instant. Or it just doesn't want to connect at all, and I end up turning BT off and on. Or one bud connects and the other doesn't. Or I walk out of range of my computer and my headphones connected to my phone tell me I've disconnected every ten seconds forever. Or I try to hit the pause button on my headphones and they think I want to skip forward 6 podcasts. Or my phone rings and my headphones are connected to my computer, and I can't switch them fast enough, so I just have to take them off and answer without them. Always something.
It has some even more fundamental bugs with PDF. Concatenating transformation matrices with negative scaling (i.e to flip the coordinate system you're drawing in) is completely broken in Preview and Safari. It's completely conformant according to the PDF standard.
Obviously prints fine and chrome/firefox or Windows don't have any issues with it. Obviously Adobe has no issue with it.
But here it is staying broken for years, because you can't explain to mac users that Apple is the one that made the mistake if they preview things your tool generates and they look broken. So devs just "fix" their PDFs to be bug compatible with Apples version.
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.
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
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 ?
To scan the files in your folder like that you can use quicklook. Just press space to open the first one and use the arrows to navigate. Another super power of macOS.
I agree that Preview is a great tool and still use it for images, but I grew out of it when I needed to edit PDF content and outlines.
I use PDF Expert instead which is available at a reasonable price (I got mine for $20, look around for a deal) and it's made by Ukrainians to boot. That was 4 years ago and they've yet to have a paid upgrade.
It especially has effective search and replace. Everything else I tried would choke when trying to delete several hundreds bits of text from a PDF.
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.
Be careful with that workflow. If you ever share the modified PDF that rectangle likely hasn't redacted anything.
On a digital PDF the underlying text is still accessible, and even if the PDF was a scan, the original image likely hasn't been modified, instead a new shape layer was added.
I usually end up printing out the dead-tree version with the black rectangles, and scanning it back in, just to be sure the data under the black rectangles can't be retrieved.
Preview is the one thing I miss from macOS (i.e. excluding hardware) using Linux. Unless I'm not allowed to include it's integration into Finder (or 'the file browser') as 'one thing', in which case that too.
I love preview and this post covers a number of cool features but I can't help but be extremely frustrated by not only getting a (presumably) newsletter signup without any interaction but also the sheer gall to pop this [0] without a single bit of information as to what you are signing up for. Not title, no description, just "Give us your name and email". I hate these popups to begin with but this takes the cake.
Another underrated feature: add Quartz Filters to a PDF file by Choosing File > Export, click the Quartz Filter pop-up menu, then choose a filter. You can create custom Quartz Filters in ColorSync Utility.app (Note: these are not the same as Quartz Composition Filters, which live in Automator workflows and Photo Booth.app).
Yes - agreed. This is one of the best ways to shrink the file size of a PDF: and if it’s not shrinking it enough create your own quartz filter with lower res/quality JPG or DPI settings.
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.
Preview is very much part of my daily tools: signing/splitting/editing PDFs and images (even animated GIFs!) etc.
The only thing that bothers me slightly is the weird “File” menu: along with some other macOS apps (Textedit for example) they renounced the old “Save as” in favour of “Duplicate”, “Move”, etc. I never exactly know what happens with those commands.
Duplicate is basically the same as save as, but they've swapped the order of operations. Save as would have you pick a destination, then start editing. Duplicate lets you edit and then choose where to save. I'm guessing part of the reason for the change was also that save as sounds like "rename" when it is in fact "duplicate under a new name"
One feature I miss from Preview was being able to define bookmarks so I could make the TOC of a PDF clickable.
Still, being able to reorder pages, insert new ones or delete obsolete ones is pretty useful for scrapbooking an instruction manual for my whole kitchen so I can hand guests one document instead of a ZIP file with a dozen different docs in it.
I love Preview but since the Monterey upgrade and this M1 Max, mine constantly loses the ability to actually preview something with spacebar. It will only show me a thumbnail. I'll have to kill and relaunch the Finder a few times a day to regain the normal functionality.
Question: Preview used to have automatic detection for "lines" and stuff so you could click on one and it'd create a text box for you to start typing, correctly sized and everything. For some reason this seems to no longer work for me. Has anyone else had success with this in the recent past?
I think form detection has to do with how the source PDF is saved, such as if the PDF is flattened. Also, this feature doesn't work with some other formats, like JPEGs. If it's not working, there is a text box tool in the markup toolbar.
I love preview -- I've done every one of these things in it. I also use it to crop images all the time. Not only can you select a rectangle, but it also has a magic wand selector where you can draw an outline of what you want to select and it will find the borders for you.
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.
The parent folder is listed as Enclosing Folder in the Go menu, you can press Command-UpArrow.
But there's a secret mouse trick, if you Command-Click any Finder window's or e.g. a Preview document's title bar, it will open a menu showing its full path.
For search, I wish it would differentiate between documents and code. I've never used ChromeOS, is its search better?
Preview is one of my most loved pdf viewers, next to skim for latex writing.
I often have pdfs from my scanner which I want to join into a single document or remove back sides which accidentally got picked up by the duplex scan. It's so easy with preview; if only it could do ocr...
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 browser based or uses a dedicated application.
but when i open a document i expect that document to be opened, and nothing else.
this would work a lot better if preview would put all documents in tabs so that only the document i asked for is visible while the rest are hidden in the other tabs.
The Mac is document-centric, not app centric. The intended working model is you just open documents in Preview and close them when you're done. You don't concern yourself with whether Preview is running or not.
If you Command-Q to quit Preview you are observing State Restoration - the intent there being that if the system is low on memory and the app is not visible or being used the system could quit the app then re-launch it later. Or you can reboot and upon login everything goes back to how it was. Some of this is not as transparent on macOS as it is on iOS because it was added to the Mac much much later, but even many third party apps implement it (probably because NSDocument/NSApplication provide good built-in support).
Any documents open in a state-aware app that quits get re-opened when it launches again. Hold down Option to skip state restoration. This works for any app by the way: Hold Option to skip re-opening projects in Xcode or documents in Pages.
actually, the observed behavior makes macOS app centric. for a truly document centric system, opening a document should do exactly that and nothing more. what instead happens is that the preview app is started, and it remembers its previous state opening all the other documents it had open before. from an app-centric perspective that makes total sense. and i also approve of the concept of an app keeping its state.
to make the preview app and other apps document centric, the app itself needs to become less visible. for example the function to close the app could be replaced with one to close all documents. this would offer a document centric intent behind the close action. and for those cases where i don't actually want to close those documents, but just need to move them out of the way, different mechanisms are needed. functions like hide or suspend for starters that allow the OS to actually remove the apps and documents from memory but without changing their state to being closed. work spaces are also a possible concept.
another approach that preview could easily implement is to hide the documents that i didn't ask to be open at this moment. so the documents are still there, and their state is preserved, i just don't see it until i switch to that document. this would be similar to how at least firefox handles tabs. the tabs are there, but they are not loaded until i open each one of them. in the same way preview could remember all the recent documents, until i explicitly close a document just like i would close a tab.
a truly document centric system needs at least proper interface design and language, but parts may also need a redesign of core concepts. for example, when opening a document, i should be able to specify what kind of activity i want to do with it. depending on the chosen activity the right app that offers that activity will be started. currently i get to choose which app i open a document in, and there is one default app, and if i want another, i either open the app first, and then tell it to open the document, or i specifically choose the app that this document should be opened with. again this looks very app centric.
in a document centric system i expect that i open a document, and then all the possible actions on that document are available to me. but different actions can be provided by different applications which requires that apps interface with each other in a completely different way.
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.
I love Preview. It was one of the reasons I switched to Mac back in 2010.
Another fun feature since we’re all sharing. This works across many native apps. Hold Option and drag to select a block of text. Handy for pulling numbers from a table.
Love Preview, but the markup features are seriously confusing. It isn’t clear how the shapes and the colours relate to one another, so even after 12 years drawing a filled box is much harder than it needs to be.
I used to use Preview.app extensively for work until it was rewritten & hobbled post-Mavericks. While it's still useful it lost a lot of functionality i.e. "smart" text insertion.
I love using Preview to make icon backgrounds transparent and to invert black/white icons. The transparency tool for Preview is significantly better than the Instant Alpha in Keynote, IMO.
Only thing Preview is weak at is filling out PDFs. I often have to place my own text boxes by hand and when text boxes are recognized the entered text is often oddly formatted.
It’s a neat software and has tons of hidden features like for example, you can redact parts of a document. You can also combine different documents into a single pdf file.
I really like the concept of Preview on mac, but every time I try to do something simple in it for more than 10 seconds, I just sigh and install Krita.
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.
Yes! I was wondering which app it is asking me to preview. These are the times when I wish HackerNews allowed OPs to edit post titles after submission.
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.
You can group files in Finder by kind, all image files will then appear together. In list or column view clicking on one will preview it directly in finder in a side panel. You make this preview panel bigger. Tapping Space will open a preview window and you can use the arrow keys to navigate the files behind in Finder. Or select them all and tap space and use the arrows to browse them.
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.
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 the images section
5. select an image, hit space to bring up Quick Look, use up/down arrows to move through the images
You can use Quick Look from the icon view too but it's a bit confusing to try and navigate through a 2d grid that's hidden behind the Quick Look.
You could also use either of these methods to isolate all the images quickly, then select them and open them with Preview if you explicitly wanted them in that app, but big icons/Quick Look is usually gonna be a lot faster for uses like "finding that one image in a messy directory".
In fairness you’re being really obtuse and not explaining what you want clearly. You refuse to change the way Finder shows pictures. Double clicking (or CMD o) will show the photos in Preview just like Windows. Tapping Space will show them in Quick Look.
How can I find the image I'm looking for in a folder of 100+? On Mac it's just Spacebar + down arrow until you find it. If you're aware of a way to do this on Windows without installing anything you'll be a lifesaver.
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.
Use Quick Look. Simply press Space to instantly preview almost any file you’ve highlighted in Finder. You can use the arrow keys to move to the next file in the finder window below. For multiple files selected you get a film strip in Quick Look.
Lots of extra options are surfaced in MacOS when Option is held. Press option while any menu is open and you’ll see new options. The context menu will show that quick look becomes full screen preview in this case. Lo and behold simply pressing Option Space will do the same thing.
How I would do it is go to Downloads in Finder (Command shift g), filter file type to images, select the first one (down arrow), and press spacebar to open in Quick Look, and just use arrow keys to move around - no need to open an app at all for quick viewing. If I did want to use Preview to view all the files, select them (eg shift down arrow) and drop on the Preview icon.
On Mac, if you want to find something it's Command-F. In Finder this opens up a dropdown, set Kind: Image, now you see all images in the folder, and nothing which is not an image. Command-A for select all, drag or right click to preview.
I explain it the way I do because I had never had occasion to try "let's find all the images in a folder of mixed file types" on Mac, so I started with "Find" and yeah. Quite simple indeed.
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. On Windows, I install Listary to get the same features https://www.listary.com/
There are so many other little macOS things that make it easier to work in the GUI - but on HN they’re all overshadowed by the big “wow window management on Mac is 90s unless you install an app” issue, which makes me sad. 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).