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Comment by sjwright | Hacker News Reader

It's not paint but Preview.app can crop, edit and annotate screenshots.

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.

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Preview.app fucking sucks. There are a handful of truly obnoxious sins that OS X commits, and not providing a graphics editing application with full access to the pixel raster is one of them.

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.

What you describe as the "dumbing down" of the file system is the inherent consequence of multi-user operating systems, i.e. a bias towards the user's home folders; clearly done to help users better organise their documents.

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...

Power users not being impeded is precisely my point, and you've made it for me. That these features are considered "advanced" and thus buried is my argument.

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.

> That these features are considered "advanced" and thus buried is my argument.

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.

Okay a very simple way to add context to my claims, to prove that these are intrisic features of any operating environment that must function without network access, as a standalone system, is to look at how internet-based entities replicate similar bahaviors to enable web based collaboration.

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?

> a very simple way to add context to my claims

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.

Asserting that pixel editing is "fundamental aspect of an operating environment" is not just flimsy, it's highly subjective at best and entirely without substance.

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.

Asserting that full access to the file system is 'buried' in MacOS is flat-out wrong, and borderline insulting. It's all there in the Go menu which is visible on screen.

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

NO U

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?

Also abstracting away the local storage device makes a cloud transition a lot easier.

  a cloud transition

I disagree that this is a "good" thing. Cloud being parlance for someone else's computer.

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.

> Have you met or spoken with younger non-technical people lately. They are lost and beyond clueless about a lot of important things.

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.

Research on the 'ecology' of end user computing would be quite interesting and might inform future products.

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/...

What do you need empty files for?

At the CMD prompt, creating an empty file is as easy as:

COPY NUL A

        1 file(s) copied.

DIR A

07/25/2017 12:12 AM 0 a

               1 File(s)              0 bytes

I'm pretty sure that date could be 1982 and your example would work equally well. :-)

Checks... Yup: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20031022-00/?p=...

Ha ha, good one. Yes, it wasn't meant to show anything new, just put it because I've seen many people don't know this sort of stuff - basic command line usage.

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 ... :)

Because Windows doesn't have drag and drop save, so you can't just drag an icon from your program to a folder you already have open.

The other workaround I use is to copy and paste the path from the explorer window

I think he said they save you from having to surface the usual affordances through several settings in multiple preferences menus. Or something.

I don't quite understand why you'd ever want to create a new file in this way, and I remember being baffled by it as a child when Win95 came out.

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.

I think it's to not have to relocate a folder in a Save As dialog. Sometimes I already have a folder open, and just want to create a new file then drag it into my editor because I know the Save As dialog is pointed elsewhere.

Aha. That makes a bit more sense. For what it's worth, you can just drag the folder into the location bar and get roughly the same effect. If the window's already open, the small folder icon on the top works as well.

Windows has had a mechanism for creating empty documents via the shell since Windows 95. I don't think I've ever found it useful. (Much like the ability to drag and drop text from WordPad to the desktop to make a clipping file.)

Coming from Windows all my life to OS X was a bit bumpy. I will say not being able to create a quick text document is so very mildly annoying. But I've learned to use Notes.app in place of my usual purposes for *.txt files unless I'm wanting to move some chunk of text data somewhere quickly outside of the walled garden of my Apple ecosystem.

Is there a Preview.app equivalent for Windows these days? It was one of my favorite new tools when I switched to Mac back in the day, because for windows I had to download special 'see all types of files + basic editing' programs.

For simply displaying PDF (and a few other formats), I like SumatraPDF. It is pretty lightweight (compared to the crawling horror that is Adobe Reader), and when you re-open a PDF, opens it at the position you were last time(!!!). The latter feature makes it perfect for viewing reference manuals etc.

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, ...).

Interesting, have you tried Foxit PDF Reader, and if so, how does it compare to SumatraPDF? I haven't used the latter but have used the former.

I know Foxit Reader.

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.

Thanks for the inputs. My experience with Foxit is mostly good, like yours has been. Will still check out SumatraPDF too.

Ah yes, IrfanView was what I always used!

Is there any particular reason why Microsoft hasn't included a built-in IrfanView/Preview.app at this point?

Not really, no, but Chrome supports some files: pdf, txt, images... View mode only, obviously.

Thanks.... all this is great stuff. (Particularly the bit about going straight to the clipboard.)

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