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.
That right there is a peak-2022 quote, alright!
They seemed to get the hint on the terminal finally…
Handle basic viewing, editing, signatures. Etc…
While we are at it a GTK one would be great in Gnome too…
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The graphics primitives still apply to macOS.
Essentially, Adobe === BAD in your opinion, is that it?
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
(ETA: This wouldn't work in the save dialog though, I missed that detail)
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 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.
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.
- “Show hidden files” is a preference you can change.
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?
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.
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. :)
'G' for "Go to folder". cmd-G is standardized as "Find Next" across apps, so you add "shift" to do an app-specific behavior.
> I want to be able to view hidden files on demand.
cmd-shift-'.' . The '.' matches the prefix for auto-hidden files.
This is definitely not behavior I'm seeing in either file picking dialogs or Finder windows.
https://osxdaily.com/2018/02/12/show-hidden-files-mac-keyboa...
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.....
Out of curiosity, was there a team exclusively dedicated to the Preview app? How autonomous were you in deciding how to improve the application?
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.
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
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
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.
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).