This post is part of a technology series called “What?! You’re not using…?” where I’m sharing ten technology sites/apps that I find to be very helpful – and you might too!
This last one is specifically for Mac users – but it’s only been recently that I found out how awesome the Preview app is. Preview is the default app for the Mac that opens up images and PDFs. Before I never really used it very much, but there are a lot of very cool ways you can use Preview.
Simple Image Editing: When I’m just working on some quick images for a blog post, it’s much easier for me to just open it up in Preview (versus Photoshop) and do whatever cropping I need to do, as well as simply changing the image size.
Annotating PDFs or Screenshots: If you choose Tools -> Annotate, you can add circles, arrows and text to your images or PDFs. This is helpful if you’re reading PDFs for school and would rather just make some notes on the document without having to print it out, or if you want to take a screenshot of something, and highlight some areas for someone to look at.
Editing PDFs: Something I’ve been using Preview for most recently is creating multiple page PDFs by combining individual PDF documents. If you are viewing a PDF, you can click the Sidebar option so you can see the pages of the PDF. Then if you want to add a different PDF document to another one, simply drag it from your desktop or Finder window and place it directly on top of a page of the other PDF, shown in the Sidebar window. Really handy. And it works the other way too. Have a 30 page PDF but you just want to save 1-2 pages? View the PDF with the Sidebar, and then just click and drag the page you want out onto your desktop.
Preview is really an amazingly powerful program that comes with your Mac Operating System – it’s just that a lot of people don’t realize all of what it can do!
Well – that’s it. 10 apps and technology tools that I find to be pretty helpful to me – and some that maybe are new to you. If you’re lucky – maybe I’ll give you a bonus one!
