Every day I'm amazed at how huge the step backward was in Snow Leopard.
In Leopard, Preview.app was the world's best PDF viewer:
- I could double-click on Spotlight results in Finder, and the PDF would open with the search term already filled in and searched.
- Searching in Preview.app used Spotlight's index to make the search nearly instantaneous
- Search results in Preview.app could be reviewed in the sidebar with context.
In Snow Leopard:
- Double-clicking on Spotlight results in Finder just opens the PDF, no prefilling of the search term, let alone starting the search.
- Searching in Preview.app is no longer indexed. Searching a 100-page PDF now takes ~30 seconds!
- Results can only be viewed in per-page view, where you have to review each page in order to find the search results you were looking for. No textual context in the sidebar.
It has been my hope against hope that Lion would fix this disaster.
The love for gray themes at Apple is nothing new. They've had a "graphite" theme on Macs since the OS 8.6 days. The explanation given at the time was that the color gray is a neutral gray that allows graphic artists to compose their work without UI elements affecting their eye's preception of the colors they are using in their creative works.
The graphite theme has been available on all Macs since at least the 8.6 era, including Mac OS X.
In regards to Preview, I look forward to these new features. I'll assume the new Office compatability is simply a way for Windows switchers to not freak out when trying to launch their non-Word Office files without having Office for Mac installed. This makes for a much better experience versus activating the Office "Test Drive" bloatware.
Every day I'm amazed at how huge the step backward was in Snow Leopard.
In Leopard, Preview.app was the world's best PDF viewer:
- I could double-click on Spotlight results in Finder, and the PDF would open with the search term already filled in and searched.
- Searching in Preview.app used Spotlight's index to make the search nearly instantaneous
- Search results in Preview.app could be reviewed in the sidebar with context.
In Snow Leopard:
- Double-clicking on Spotlight results in Finder just opens the PDF, no prefilling of the search term, let alone starting the search.
- Searching in Preview.app is no longer indexed. Searching a 100-page PDF now takes ~30 seconds!
- Results can only be viewed in per-page view, where you have to review each page in order to find the search results you were looking for. No textual context in the sidebar.
It has been my hope against hope that Lion would fix this disaster.
Any luck?
Dude, you just have messed up your system...
I'm on Snow Leopard. Searching in Preview app and opening a PDF from the Spotlight results works the same. I.e you get query prefilling, search results can be viewed in the sidebar, searching is indexed and instantaneous etc.
Did you just close the sidebar view and don't know how to reopen it? Though it sounds more like you disabled Spotlight for that volume or you have a corrupted spotlight index.
I wonder what their potential explanation might be this time, though I hope we don't get to the point where this is finally implemented without an option to turn it off. thanks btw for the history lesson I wasn't aware of what you said, and it's always good to know a bit of tech history of how things used to be.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Povilas
One is trolling macrumors about how Apple screwed PPC people and now there is one just like it on appleinsider whining about damn colours. Grow up.
I d tell you what to go do with yourself, regardless of infractions, but these are holly days for christians and we like to refrain from such actions, however deserved they might be. Seeing you visit macrumors best stick to it so you ll be with your ilk since there people are habituated to refrain from arguments and go directly to personal attacks and you are a poster child for this. A couple more things, since we are talking about interface design, yes we are going to talk about damn colours cause that's a large part of what colours are about...but I guess that's too hard for you to understand. As for ppc, wtf has that got to do with anything here?
For example, Preview is now a Full Screen app, and it also drops its nonstandard "bubble" toolbar icons reminiscent of Mail.app to adopt the new squared-off, monochromatic iPad-like buttons of other Lion apps (including the new Mail).
The bubble buttons we see in Preview and Mail today are nowhere near nonstandard. The bubble style (it's actually called Capsule) is one of the many Apple-supplied styles available for NSSegmentedControl in Apple's own Interface Builder - any Mac developer could use it.
Apple needs to work on the new style they're distributing throughout the OS. The selected state of such a button looks just horrible (inverted gradient) and I'd be amazed if they let that slip into the final release.
The ability to view an MS document, read-only, in a separate app window, is very smart.
Lots of people need to read, but not everyone needs to edit with full MS Office.
I wonder if cut&paste from the doc will work, that would be useful too.
I'd like it if I could have MS documents and spreadsheets open in Preview first for reading, with a clean interface, hopefully nice and quickly ( and safely! ), then click an EDIT button to go into edit mode using whatever is available.
I wonder if cut&paste from the doc will work, that would be useful too.
I'd like it if I could have MS documents and spreadsheets open in Preview first for reading, with a clean interface, hopefully nice and quickly ( and safely! ), then click an EDIT button to go into edit mode using whatever is available.
PDFs open in Preview as read only with the ability to copy so I'd think so.
I'm sure as you know that is not Apple's style. They want a uniform look across OS X.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ThePixelDoc
However... considering that Apple has made huge strides and is catering to the "everyday user and consumer", I do think they should "finally" allow a few more choices other than "Aqua or Silver".
You don't like the monochrome UI and that's fine. You are free to your opinion.
The problem is that you work so hard to position your sense of aesthetic functionality as "fact". Seeing that every OS is designed very differently there obviously is no consensus on a right way to do it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by myapplelove
This isn't my impression (or the impression of other users such as myself) it's reality.
Photographers, graphic designers, film/video editors appreciate the gray UI. Various colors in the UI contaminate the color of the work you are looking at.
Agree. Perhaps if your life revolves around working with office memos, Word docs and the only thing you see all day is black text on a white background, you might complain that more color is needed. However, if like me, you work with full color documents, video, photo editing, and web design, etc, then a gray or neutral UI is much better. I have so much art on the walls, scenic views of lush landscaping and color everywhere in the office, I do not need color in the OS to brighten up my day. If you are stuck working in a boring corporate cubicle, It is not Apple's fault. You need to get a life.
The bubble buttons we see in Preview and Mail today are nowhere near nonstandard. The bubble style (it's actually called Capsule) is one of the many Apple-supplied styles available for NSSegmentedControl in Apple's own Interface Builder - any Mac developer could use it.
Apple needs to work on the new style they're distributing throughout the OS. The selected state of such a button looks just horrible (inverted gradient) and I'd be amazed if they let that slip into the final release.
Thank God I'm not the only one who thinks the inverted gradient used for the slider buttons in Lion are just plain wrong.
I stand corrected on the query prefilling. (Although, I just saw it not prefill on one of 3 files that I opened.)
Thanks for the link -- yes, I have the sidebar open, but in Snow Leopard only gives you the option to view results grouped by page (either ordered by rank or page). (Your screenshot shows the page that hit ordered by rank.)
In Leopard you could see each individual result in the sidebar, as text, with surrounding context. That was crucial for finding the right hit in a long PDF where a keyword might show up multiple times. You could just scroll through the list looking for the right phrase, instead of having to "flip" through dozens or hundreds of pages, looking for the context around each yellow block (additionally harder on a small laptop screen). In Leopard, viewing search results by page was an option. In Snow Leopard, it's the only thing available.
Quote:
Though it sounds more like you disabled Spotlight for that volume or you have a corrupted spotlight index.
Maybe...Spotlight is able to find the matching files quickly, though. Is there a way the index could be corrupted such that the files are found quickly but Preview's performance is terrible?
It just took 15 seconds to search an 8-page 450KB PDF. But then subsequent searches were nearly instantaneous -- so maybe it was indexing during the first search and that's why it was so slow? Is there some way to convince Spotlight to do this additional indexing in the background?
Hey, if you manage to solve 2 of my 3 complaints about Snow Leopard's preview, you'll have made my day.
(But I still miss the text view in the sidebar -- heck, even iBooks provides textual search results! Why is it gone from Preview?)
Photographers, graphic designers, film/video editors appreciate the gray UI. Various colors in the UI contaminate the color of the work you are looking at.
One of the subtleties of NeXTStep was with such a UI one never got distracted from their work. The distinctions between applications menus [active menus were a darker gradient overlay] and the content of the actual Drawing/Spreadsheet/Document work space was so subtle you never got distracted from being productive.
The more you worked in the environment and it's efficient and liberal use of Services the more you realized 3rd party developers worked in tandem to provide those Services to make you even more productive. Efficiency at work actually happened.
Working at NeXT had me extremely efficient, whether in Engineering or Professional Services. Working became fun, not a weight slowing me down.
You feel less burned out on the eyes when the focus of your work is center and not the window views distracting you with color themes.
Sorry guys I don't object to the toning done of the GUI in Lion. The evolution of has been a gradual refining in my opinion and not a sudden jolt towards a more minimalist look. Having colorful easy to spot scroll bars are really not that important today with all the gestures built into Mac OS X and of course iOS. How many times do you mouse to the scroll bars to scroll a webpage or other file? Comparing what was good for users 20 years ago in a GUI is ridiculous as well. There are situations in everyday life when we interact with a non Mac OS interface, such as a bank ATM, your TV's remote or making a credit card purchase. We are all more interface savvy today than when Apple was defining what a consumer computer looked like and how we interacted with it.
The ability to view an MS document, read-only, in a separate app window, is very smart.
I think it's a really BAD idea. It will promote the continued use of proprietary MS formats for document interchange, instead of PDF. Why do people assume that everyone has a copy of Word or Powerpoint or Excel? When I get documents in these formats I inform the sender in no uncertain terms that these are not appropriate distribution formats, and request the document as PDF.
Actually both .doc and .docx are open file extensions that anyone is free to use. MS developed them but they are not proprietary to Office. PDF does not fully replace what Office XML can do.
Quote:
Originally Posted by The-Steve
I think it's a really BAD idea. It will promote the continued use of proprietary MS formats for document interchange, instead of PDF. Why do people assume that everyone has a copy of Word or Powerpoint or Excel? When I get documents in these formats I inform the sender in no uncertain terms that these are not appropriate distribution formats, and request the document as PDF.
gotta love a man with a good argument, who's also a gentleman in his responses.
.
I think Apple knows what they are doing, I would hold off your personal opinions until the final version of Lion is on your computer. These are beta's for a reason.
Comments
In Leopard, Preview.app was the world's best PDF viewer:
- I could double-click on Spotlight results in Finder, and the PDF would open with the search term already filled in and searched.
- Searching in Preview.app used Spotlight's index to make the search nearly instantaneous
- Search results in Preview.app could be reviewed in the sidebar with context.
In Snow Leopard:
- Double-clicking on Spotlight results in Finder just opens the PDF, no prefilling of the search term, let alone starting the search.
- Searching in Preview.app is no longer indexed. Searching a 100-page PDF now takes ~30 seconds!
- Results can only be viewed in per-page view, where you have to review each page in order to find the search results you were looking for. No textual context in the sidebar.
It has been my hope against hope that Lion would fix this disaster.
Any luck?
The graphite theme has been available on all Macs since at least the 8.6 era, including Mac OS X.
In regards to Preview, I look forward to these new features. I'll assume the new Office compatability is simply a way for Windows switchers to not freak out when trying to launch their non-Word Office files without having Office for Mac installed. This makes for a much better experience versus activating the Office "Test Drive" bloatware.
Every day I'm amazed at how huge the step backward was in Snow Leopard.
In Leopard, Preview.app was the world's best PDF viewer:
- I could double-click on Spotlight results in Finder, and the PDF would open with the search term already filled in and searched.
- Searching in Preview.app used Spotlight's index to make the search nearly instantaneous
- Search results in Preview.app could be reviewed in the sidebar with context.
In Snow Leopard:
- Double-clicking on Spotlight results in Finder just opens the PDF, no prefilling of the search term, let alone starting the search.
- Searching in Preview.app is no longer indexed. Searching a 100-page PDF now takes ~30 seconds!
- Results can only be viewed in per-page view, where you have to review each page in order to find the search results you were looking for. No textual context in the sidebar.
It has been my hope against hope that Lion would fix this disaster.
Any luck?
Dude, you just have messed up your system...
I'm on Snow Leopard. Searching in Preview app and opening a PDF from the Spotlight results works the same. I.e you get query prefilling, search results can be viewed in the sidebar, searching is indexed and instantaneous etc.
Did you just close the sidebar view and don't know how to reopen it? Though it sounds more like you disabled Spotlight for that volume or you have a corrupted spotlight index.
Check: https://skitch.com/stest/r52yj/orson...page-20-of-249
I wonder what their potential explanation might be this time, though I hope we don't get to the point where this is finally implemented without an option to turn it off. thanks btw for the history lesson I wasn't aware of what you said, and it's always good to know a bit of tech history of how things used to be.
One is trolling macrumors about how Apple screwed PPC people and now there is one just like it on appleinsider whining about damn colours. Grow up.
I d tell you what to go do with yourself, regardless of infractions, but these are holly days for christians and we like to refrain from such actions, however deserved they might be. Seeing you visit macrumors best stick to it so you ll be with your ilk since there people are habituated to refrain from arguments and go directly to personal attacks and you are a poster child for this. A couple more things, since we are talking about interface design, yes we are going to talk about damn colours cause that's a large part of what colours are about...but I guess that's too hard for you to understand. As for ppc, wtf has that got to do with anything here?
For example, Preview is now a Full Screen app, and it also drops its nonstandard "bubble" toolbar icons reminiscent of Mail.app to adopt the new squared-off, monochromatic iPad-like buttons of other Lion apps (including the new Mail).
The bubble buttons we see in Preview and Mail today are nowhere near nonstandard. The bubble style (it's actually called Capsule) is one of the many Apple-supplied styles available for NSSegmentedControl in Apple's own Interface Builder - any Mac developer could use it.
Apple needs to work on the new style they're distributing throughout the OS. The selected state of such a button looks just horrible (inverted gradient) and I'd be amazed if they let that slip into the final release.
Lots of people need to read, but not everyone needs to edit with full MS Office.
I wonder if cut&paste from the doc will work, that would be useful too.
I'd like it if I could have MS documents and spreadsheets open in Preview first for reading, with a clean interface, hopefully nice and quickly ( and safely! ), then click an EDIT button to go into edit mode using whatever is available.
I wonder if cut&paste from the doc will work, that would be useful too.
I'd like it if I could have MS documents and spreadsheets open in Preview first for reading, with a clean interface, hopefully nice and quickly ( and safely! ), then click an EDIT button to go into edit mode using whatever is available.
PDFs open in Preview as read only with the ability to copy so I'd think so.
However... considering that Apple has made huge strides and is catering to the "everyday user and consumer", I do think they should "finally" allow a few more choices other than "Aqua or Silver".
The problem is that you work so hard to position your sense of aesthetic functionality as "fact". Seeing that every OS is designed very differently there obviously is no consensus on a right way to do it.
This isn't my impression (or the impression of other users such as myself) it's reality.
PDFs open in Preview as read only with the ability to copy so I'd think so.
Photographers, graphic designers, film/video editors appreciate the gray UI. Various colors in the UI contaminate the color of the work you are looking at.
Agree. Perhaps if your life revolves around working with office memos, Word docs and the only thing you see all day is black text on a white background, you might complain that more color is needed. However, if like me, you work with full color documents, video, photo editing, and web design, etc, then a gray or neutral UI is much better. I have so much art on the walls, scenic views of lush landscaping and color everywhere in the office, I do not need color in the OS to brighten up my day. If you are stuck working in a boring corporate cubicle, It is not Apple's fault. You need to get a life.
The bubble buttons we see in Preview and Mail today are nowhere near nonstandard. The bubble style (it's actually called Capsule) is one of the many Apple-supplied styles available for NSSegmentedControl in Apple's own Interface Builder - any Mac developer could use it.
Apple needs to work on the new style they're distributing throughout the OS. The selected state of such a button looks just horrible (inverted gradient) and I'd be amazed if they let that slip into the final release.
Thank God I'm not the only one who thinks the inverted gradient used for the slider buttons in Lion are just plain wrong.
search results can be viewed in the sidebar...Did you just close the sidebar view and don't know how to reopen it?...Check: https://skitch.com/stest/r52yj/orson...page-20-of-249
I stand corrected on the query prefilling. (Although, I just saw it not prefill on one of 3 files that I opened.)
Thanks for the link -- yes, I have the sidebar open, but in Snow Leopard only gives you the option to view results grouped by page (either ordered by rank or page). (Your screenshot shows the page that hit ordered by rank.)
In Leopard you could see each individual result in the sidebar, as text, with surrounding context. That was crucial for finding the right hit in a long PDF where a keyword might show up multiple times. You could just scroll through the list looking for the right phrase, instead of having to "flip" through dozens or hundreds of pages, looking for the context around each yellow block (additionally harder on a small laptop screen). In Leopard, viewing search results by page was an option. In Snow Leopard, it's the only thing available.
Though it sounds more like you disabled Spotlight for that volume or you have a corrupted spotlight index.
Maybe...Spotlight is able to find the matching files quickly, though. Is there a way the index could be corrupted such that the files are found quickly but Preview's performance is terrible?
It just took 15 seconds to search an 8-page 450KB PDF. But then subsequent searches were nearly instantaneous -- so maybe it was indexing during the first search and that's why it was so slow? Is there some way to convince Spotlight to do this additional indexing in the background?
Hey, if you manage to solve 2 of my 3 complaints about Snow Leopard's preview, you'll have made my day.
(But I still miss the text view in the sidebar -- heck, even iBooks provides textual search results! Why is it gone from Preview?)
Photographers, graphic designers, film/video editors appreciate the gray UI. Various colors in the UI contaminate the color of the work you are looking at.
One of the subtleties of NeXTStep was with such a UI one never got distracted from their work. The distinctions between applications menus [active menus were a darker gradient overlay] and the content of the actual Drawing/Spreadsheet/Document work space was so subtle you never got distracted from being productive.
The more you worked in the environment and it's efficient and liberal use of Services the more you realized 3rd party developers worked in tandem to provide those Services to make you even more productive. Efficiency at work actually happened.
Working at NeXT had me extremely efficient, whether in Engineering or Professional Services. Working became fun, not a weight slowing me down.
You feel less burned out on the eyes when the focus of your work is center and not the window views distracting you with color themes.
The ability to view an MS document, read-only, in a separate app window, is very smart.
I think it's a really BAD idea. It will promote the continued use of proprietary MS formats for document interchange, instead of PDF. Why do people assume that everyone has a copy of Word or Powerpoint or Excel? When I get documents in these formats I inform the sender in no uncertain terms that these are not appropriate distribution formats, and request the document as PDF.
I think it's a really BAD idea. It will promote the continued use of proprietary MS formats for document interchange, instead of PDF. Why do people assume that everyone has a copy of Word or Powerpoint or Excel? When I get documents in these formats I inform the sender in no uncertain terms that these are not appropriate distribution formats, and request the document as PDF.
gotta love a man with a good argument, who's also a gentleman in his responses.
.
I think Apple knows what they are doing, I would hold off your personal opinions until the final version of Lion is on your computer. These are beta's for a reason.