Agreed. In fact, I also use OSX a lot, and would love to have 'Paint' there too.
A handy tip is to include control in the Mac screenshot keyboard command (e.g. ⌘⇧⌃3) to have the output piped to the clipboard instead of a file. Then in Preview.app, File > New opens the contents of the clipboard in a new window.
While I'm at it, ⌘⇧4 (and ⌘⇧⌃4) lets you interactively select an arbitrary region.
Also ⌘⇧4–Space (and ⌘⇧⌃4–Space) let you grab a single window directly from the compositor. Which means you always get the full window, including its alpha channel. Even if the window is obstructed or partially off-screen, you still get the whole thing including its transparent drop-shadow.
EDIT: https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/free-pdf-reader.html
EDIT²: IrfanView can display many graphic formats and quite a few that are not strictly speaking graphics. Plus, it has some basic image editing capabilities (resize, rotate, ...).
SumatraPDF is fairly minimalistic, it is a single executable file that runs without installation. Foxit has far more features than SumatraPDF, it is more like the slim sibling of Acrobat (no insult intended!). (SumtraPDF.exe is something like 3.5 MB, Foxit's msi package is something like 70 MB, IIRC)
But Foxit never has given me any reason to complain. I have across a few tricky PDF files that took forever to open in Acrobat, and Foxit (and SumatraPDF) handled those without trouble. Plus, it installs a PDF printer, which is convenient on pre-Windows 10 machines.
Is there any particular reason why Microsoft hasn't included a built-in IrfanView/Preview.app at this point?
Other sins include no trivial click path to instantiating an empty file on the desktop. One must open an application and either issue a command (touch or similar) or save an empty file with the application used (TextEdit.app for example). This is inconsistent with the fact that you can create folders in the context menu, but not files.
OS X discourages thinking in terms of the file system in general, by dumbing down the interface with "shortcuts" like All My Files, and buries the root hard disk partition many layers deep, in the default interface, forcing users to surface the usual affordances through several settings in multiple preferences menus. This creates a natural bias against proper command of one's data, among novice users, and promotes sloppy, confused organizational skills and inefficient usage patterns that eat the fuck out of hard drive space, leading inexperienced users to purchase unnecessary upgrades, in order to solve behavioral problems in hardware.
OS X also pushes users away from non-binary file formats, defaulting most formats to favor non-plain-text and targets closed formats that leave the user unable to look at file contents in a common universal manner. This leaves non-technical and less-technical users in a world where only "apps" can inform you of mere parts of your data. Again, users are not thinking in terms of files on disk, or discrete packets of information. Data lives in indescribale places at locations they often can only describe by "way finding" through pointing and clicking or tapping. There is no path, or tree, or name, or directory, or disk to these people, and thus no file or disk space to think of. Text resides is fields, images in albums or galleries, on and on.
Have you met or spoken with younger non-technical people lately. They are lost and beyond clueless about a lot of important things. This is in many ways due to Android and iOS (which in turn influences OS X). Linux is hardly a presence in the desktop world. And now Windows is going the same way. Dark days ahead.
Isn't it always going to be faster to open whatever application you want to create your file in (bonus: win+r on Windows, cmd-space on Mac) and just save the new file there? Creating the file first and then invoking the program by opening it with the GUI seems like a pathological workflow.
The other workaround I use is to copy and paste the path from the explorer window
COPY NUL A
1 file(s) copied.
07/25/2017 12:12 AM 0 a
1 File(s) 0 bytesChecks... Yup: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20031022-00/?p=...
Edit: Actually, I had originally meant to write "At the DOS/CMD prompt", but left out the DOS part because who knows how many people even know what DOS is these days ... :)
They just have different ideas about what's important. Back in the early 1990's, I volunteered in the medical education office of a Houston area hospital. This is the office that ran the residency program responsible for training doctors. Important and life saving stuff.
Anyway, one of the admins there was a DOS Wordperfect user with something like 10,000 files in a single directory on her hard disk. It wasn't the most efficient way of organizing files, but it worked for her and let her focus on the business of getting doctors trained.
Personal anecdote: I put the date in yyyymmdd format in many of my file names for teaching documents so I can order by time easily. Gnome Shell when it first came out had an 'activity journal' feature (like Win XP I recollect) based on the zeitgeist functionality[1] which I found really handy. You could view your history, click a bar (like on wayback machine) and get the docs. A versioning system based on that would be wicked. Alas, this initiative seems to have died.
[1] https://saravananthirumuruganathan.wordpress.com/2010/10/10/...
Meanwhile, power users are not even momentarily impeded, with key locations (such as the file system root) readily accessible from the Go menu. Or keyboard shortcuts. Or the terminal. Or from the dock, the sidebar, the desktop, the toolbar or anywhere else you wish, just by dragging it there. You only have to set this shit up once and it's there forever.
Pixel editing graphic applications are free and plentiful on all major desktop operating systems. MacOS doesn't ship with one that suits your needs, but consider that Windows doesn't ship with one that suits my needs. Q.E.D.
Your complaint that many end-users don't use computers the way you use computers is pure get off my lawn. Those young whippersnappers don't understand the motion of electrons or the byte endianness of various processor architectures? Back in my day, we had to punch holes into cards...
a cloud transition
This is not pure "get off my lawn" garbage. Try communicating how to save and transfer a protected zip file with sensitive data to pretty much any non-developer. These are essential tasks, and if you only socialize with technical folks, sure, everybody will be on the same page, but that leaves 90% (or more) of the rest of the world nearly clueless and left out in the cold. Whoops!
EDIT: To elaborate, consider the palpable difference in technical confidence between Ed Snowden and Laura Poitras. Technical people often gasp at the things Snowden had to carefully explain. Realities that are painfully obvious to power users.
This sort of skill differential is extremely common, and the amount of babying and hand-holding ordinary users often require is painful to behold. My claim is that the obscurity of essential activities is the root of this sort of thing. Editing raw pixels with precision, taken as a simple example.
These kinds of features are not surfaced readily (existing many interactions deep, and not single gesture or action operations) or they are completely absent from the bundled operating system distribution, despite comprising essential utilities.
You're making the assumption that people, general users, even care about these features. What evidence do you have that this is the case?
Everything I've seen indicates most people have other things that are much more important to them than open text-based file formats or hierarchical directory structures for locally storing files.
Proving my point is the existence of URL shorteners (as analagous to file names and paths on a local machine) and plain text snippet sharing sites such as pastebin (as analogous to users passing plain text snippets on a shared standalone system).
So too with pixel editing. This is a fundamental aspect of an operating environment, and one that Preview.app performs inadequately at, and the likes of which OS X does not otherwise support natively.
Does my flimsy opinion hold water yet?
Windows doesn't have a bash shell, an NFS client, a PDF annotation tool, or instant file previews; I'd consider these far more serious omissions.
I didn't ask for context. I asked for evidence.
> Does my flimsy opinion hold water yet?
Personally, I agree or understand with a lot of what you're saying. Where I differ is your statement that there is or should be lots of interest in these things by the 'mass market'.
That makes about as much sense to me in 2017 as it would be to go back to 1983 and suggest people really need to toggle switch in a boot loader to understand how a personal computer works.
If MacOS doesn't ship with your obscure checklist of "essential utilities" then go cry in the corner quietly. Meanwhile Windows 10 doesn't even ship with a real bash shell, which I consider essential.
flat-out wrong, and borderline insulting
Go buy a new mac and unbox it fresh, and try out the experience which speaks for itself. I'm not talking out my ass. You sound pretty mad. Watch your emotional tenor, lest you slip into personal attacks, or has that already happened?
It's not the end of the world, but it's annoying. Like copying a transparent PNG in Windows only to paste something with a black background and no alpha.
OSX's lack of a Paint equivalent makes me think, "Windows does it better."
But for cropping images in general, zooming in, adding quick bits of emphasis, etc. - Paint is pretty useful. (It also has the benefit of working more or less the same way since pre-Windows 3.0, so the consistency is a nice thing.)
Preview.app can do all of that.