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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.....
> 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
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 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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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).
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://imgur.com/a/oAYOoqG
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.
https://www.adobe.com/acrobat/pricing.html
Here I printed your manuscript, but in order to read it, you need to pay me for these special glasses to see the ink.
Oh you want a change? Pay me for these special gloves so you may handle the pages and reorganize them as you like.
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.
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.
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.
It's an OS-wide feature. Any application can print to PDF without specific support from that app.
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I tried various things without luck, then in a rage, I copied my ‘light’ eye and stuck it over my shaded eye.
I thought the passport photo submission tool would let me review before accepting an upload. Nope, off it went.
The passport has worked in several countries, USA, UK and others.
Thanks Preview.
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.
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
Hell, no! Let me double that: hell fucking no.
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 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.
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.....
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 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.
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`
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
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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
https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/free-pdf-reader
KDE's Okukar is pretty similar imo.
That’s about it though.
Apps on Linux (Gnome?) do it too.
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.
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!
As others said in this thread… Preview is the best macOS built in app.
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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.
When you're done the results end up in a new PDF wherever you clicked.
You can also select "black & white" mode for text documents which saves a ton of space
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.
https://pspdfkit.com/blog/2020/apple-and-pdf-history/
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.
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.
Does it look better? Maybe early 2000?
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.
https://www.macworld.com/article/351669/macos-monterey-how-t...
Having it built into the OS is so handy.
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!
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.
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
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.
as in, there's no hype or news about preview.app - it just gets used quietly in the background amidst the news cycle of the next great apps.