Apple plastered Leopard’s Preview app with a slew of new features and functionality, making it one of the biggest upgrades in the history of the app. Staying true to the essence of Snow Leopard, Apple has taken time to rethink the way those features interact with the user. And then some. Presenting, Snow Preview.
LittleAnnotator
The first big change is the annotate menu, which now takes the form of a little toolbar at the bottom of the window. A single button activates/deactivates it, and it’s a much better way to access those tools. It’s still no LittleSnapper however, as the annotations are fairly primitive in their looks. Still, if you don’t have Skitch or LittleSnapper installed, Preview’s annotation tools will get the job done.
Something related to annotations, Instant Alpha first made its appearance in Keynote ‘08, and then moved right into Preview in Leopard. Snow Preview gets another tool “Smart Lasso”, which intelligently detects borders as you drag a thick red line around the borders of an image. It’s helpful if you’re not very steady with the plain Lasso tool, and Instant Alpha is too confused to produce accurate results. Also, the rectangular selection tool now has a tooltip displaying the pixel size of the box you’re dragging out. Really helpful for creating graphics for the web. Another big change in behaviour is the ability to drag that selection box around. Previously clicking within the selection would initiate a new selection. And lastly, the Image Dimensions dialog box now gets a “Fit Into” presets like 640*480, or 1080p HD and such. However there’s no way to add your own presets, so it’s a useless change for me.
Snow Sidebar too!
Next, is the sidebar. It’s now got four different views. The list view stays the same, and is useful if your PDF is enhanced with chapters and sections, so it’s much easier to browse a large document. There’s also an ‘Edit Annotations’ view, which allows you to select your annotations and move em about; I’m not sure if this is new to Snow Preview. The thumbnail grid or “Contact Sheet” view is a great way to browse through a large PDF, or even rearrange the pages. You can move the slider to zoom into the thumbnails to get a better look. Incidentally you can move pages between different windows, which is a great help for me who deals with a lot of PDF. I could never get this kind of fluid movement across PDFs even in Acrobat. If you have images open in the thumbnail grid view, you can right-click and sort them by size, date, location, and such, and the beauty is Preview will display that particular meta information under the thumbnail, making it easy to identify what you’re looking for.
The most important view that I use the most however, is the straight vertical thumbnail grid. This has got a major enhancement especially when viewing a PDF document. First of all, you can get it to display four columns instead of just one, effectively mimicking the functionality of the ‘contact sheet’ view while having a full window open at the side. Now on to the brilliant feature. The sidebar spits out thumbnails for the pages, but they are all enveloped under the ‘main page’ which can now be collapsed onto itself. What’s so great about this you might ask. The joy is, you can load up multiple PDFs—all issues of a magazine perhaps—and the slide in and out of each PDF while having access to all your issues in the sidebar. Great! The only problem is, you can’t ‘save’ this view so you can open all your magazines the next time. It’s a manual process of opening all those respective PDFs at once, or dragging them into the sidebar.
Automator does come to the rescue here. Create a new action to “Get Specified Finder Items” and select the folder containing your magazines. Next, add the “Open Finder Items” action, and save it as an application. Now every time you launch that application, it will open all the PDFs contained within your magazines folder, and you can slide in and out of each one as if you were at a library. I can see this useful for magazines, educational books, or even your comic book collection perhaps.
And while we’re on PDFs, the most popular feature as announced by Apple is its ability to understand columns so selecting text is much easier in multi-column PDFs. In case you’re still using Leopard, you can sort-of mimic this functionality by Cmd+Option+dragging, which allows you to select blocks of text instead of in a straight line.
Randomness deserves a mention
Here’s one feature that will interest many, especially recent Windows switchers. In Preview’s preferences, you can now enable “Open in Same Window”, so that any images you open, will get tucked into the sidebar of the currently open window. Previously you had to select your images first, and then double click to have them open in the same window. This mode will even open PDFs within the same window. Thankfully it does this with its pages contracted under a single thumbnail so it’s not a mess. I’ve grown comfortable with the old behaviour, but there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have it on. If you want two windows open, just right-click the image in the sidebar and make it open in a new window. Note that if you just want to view images—just like you did with Windows Picture and Fax viewer—you can use Quick Look which is a most efficient way of going through a lot of images and triggering slideshows.
I’ve been using Preview more and more for screenshots and post processing lately. If I need a quick screenshot I know I won’t use later, I’ll just grab the image using Preview, crop it, and export. There’s no residual file left over in my screenshots folder, nor do I need to worry about sorting through screenshots later. Although to be honest I don’t really use the screenshot menu in Preview. Instead I add the Ctrl key to my the screenshot shortcut, e.g., Ctrl+Cmd+Shift+4, which copies the image data to clipboard rather than making a new file. Then in Preview hitting Cmd+N loads it up within the window. Fairly easy.
Preview also incorporates some of Image Capture’s new functionality. You can now import pictures from your camera, iPhone, or Scanner. Preview will immediately load the images up ready for annotating, saving, or sending via email. No longer do I have to open iPhoto to import those few screenshots of Tweetie 3 beta some random app, as I can just rely on Preview, the lightest app on my Mac.
If only Preview could get better looking annotations, and someone could write a script to upload an image from Preview to an online image host, it’d be a complete image manipulation app on the Mac. Hopefully Apple doesn’t ruin Preview by tucking in more and more features—a la iTunes—such that it becomes some kind of Photoshop, if only in memory footprint. Preview is the slickest, lightest, and friendliest app on the Mac, and I hope it stays that way through 10.7 Lion, 10.8 House Cat, or even 11.0 Cocaine—yes, I’ve heard they’re going back to the drugs.
[A shout out to @dtravis7 for confirming that some of these features are in fact new; I didn’t have access to a Leopard machine]
More about Preview: Preview - Not just an image editor.
