Many of the core applications in Mac OS X have been significantly upgraded in Leopard. I’ve already taken a look at Mail and iCal in my review. Here I’ll concentrate on Preview, Apple’s PDF and image viewer.

As the built-in apps go, Preview is a bit of an unsung hero. It pops up when you view a PDF, then you close it when you’re done – you don’t tend to think about it much. However, it’s a supremely useful and well-written application, and with the release of Leopard, it’s now even better.

Annotation

Preview in Leopard has vastly improved annotation features. You can highlight text, and add sticky notes, ovals, rectangles, and URL links. (I was disappointed that you can’t constrain ovals to circles and rectangles to squares, but hey, you can’t have everything I suppose.) You can add your name to annotations too (enabled by default in Preferences > General). All annotations are retained when you save the PDF.

Here I highlighted some text in a PDF (which, by the way, is from the excellent book Future Files, by my good friend Richard Watson), and also added a note:

PDF editing

You can move or delete pages within a PDF, and combine PDFs using drag and drop. Although you can’t create PDFs from scratch or edit the actual text of a PDF, these basic editing features are still useful for those times when you want to make a quick change.

Here I’m moving a page by dragging its thumbnail:

Image editing

Leopard’s Preview sports lots of cool image editing tools, including decent colour adjustment and sharpening a la iPhoto (with an Auto Levels button), crop and resize functions, and Instant Alpha Background Removal – a quick way to select and remove the background of a photo, much like using Photoshop’s Quick Selection tool:

Other cool stuff – and the odd quirk

There are other small niceties too, such as the smooth, continuous scrolling between pages, smooth zooming, and more control over printing – for example, if you open multiple images at once, you can then select a bunch of images and print them all on one page. You can also now rank search results by relevancy by checking the “Group by section/page” checkbox in the search results. (I love the way searching in general has improved in Leopard – Apple have obviously realised how important search is these days.)

I do occasionally get the odd corrupted UI elements in Preview. No idea why, but my finger is pointing at the Tiger-to-Leopard upgrade process:

Summary

Overall, I love the new Preview. From the simple image/PDF viewer that we saw in Tiger, Apple have produced a useful PDF editing tool that gives Acrobat a run for its money, and that is also useful for simple image manipulation, too.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 8th, 2008 at 7:56 pm and is filed under Mac OS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.