That’s up to the developer to choose whether to auto-quit after last window closes or not. It’s not specified by User Interface Guidelines, so if you dislike the behavior, let Apple or other developer know. Doing so helps in low memory situations, but slows down highly used apps that must be relaunched with each new file.
-Al-
I don’t see that. PageDown & PageUp work fine for me without clicking anything.
As for the app quitting when no windows are open, as ddmiller said earlier in this discussion, Preview does not quit when closing the window, it quits when it loses focus with no windows open. This behavior is not new to Mojave, and it is not unique to Preview. It dates back to at least Lion. Matt Neuburg wrote a couple of articles about it back then.
I’m pretty sure I have the page up/down issue.
But I don’t remember Preview closing on me when I close the last window. I have seen this with older programs though, usually third party.
Diane
In converting a set of png files to pdf, sometimes Preview will freeze. I noticed this especially when the names of the files were the same except for a few characters at the name ends. I would expect that an error message should appear if there is a problem rather than freezing. When this occurred, I had to force quit the application and start over. I am using the Mojave OS.
Preview is a handy yet underrated app of Apple. So it is disappointing to learn of yet another upgrade by Apple software engineers (maybe interns) degrading an Apple app by writing in bugs, reducing features and introducing half baked features. The quality of Apple application software is a worry and as I am working cross platforms, I find less issues with application upgrades on the Windows platform these days.
Despite Schiller’s recent comments, I dont think anyone at Apple reads bug reports. When I have to use the Genius bar, I find the Geniuses have never read anything in the Apple support discussion groups and get surprised when i show that I am not the only one the problem that I am raising.
My problem with these ‘upgrades’ and the bugs they introduce (or the features they remove), is that we don’t really have a choice.
I’m still on HS (what compelling reason is there to go to Mojave?), but when the successor to Mojave comes out, I’ll probably have to upgrade. You can try to remain behind on an older version of macOS, but either you won’t be getting any security updates or bug fixes, or before long you won’t be able to run new versions of apps because they require a certain OS to run. This has become more and more common and it’s certainly not helping that Apple feels it necessary to stick to an annual major release schedule even though they a) aren’t really that interested in (re-)developing macOS and b) they’re obviously overextended and unfocused with all the content/services (we want to replace Netflix) and self driving (we want to replace Tesla) and AR (we want to replace insert-other-hype-here) hoopla they have going on. They used to want to build the greatest computer, now they seem to want to dominate the digital world. Massively annoying shift.
We don’t really have a solid choice here. You can virtualize if you only need to run one or few old apps, but for everyday work we’re pretty much on the update carousel. If that’s the premise (macOS becoming more like iOS in terms of upgrading) I could learn to deal with it, but the updates need to be reliable, robust, and they shouldn’t keep removing good functionality for no reason. Apple either needs to slow down the updates or severely up their game. IMHO their QA/QC has been lacking and they really need some focus again.
I’ve seen this sporadically as well, although I mostly do this sort of conversion while testing for the book, so it’s not something I run across regularly (or enough that it struck me as a general problem). But no, you’re not alone.
YES, times a thousand. You just can’t keep on an older OS as your main OS version these days, as your newer apps, or more usually just upgraded apps, often force you up the OS chain to have them work. And running VM’s for these things is a no-go for most people, given the complications involved.
Sure, software bugs have always been with us, but really, what’s the point of filing Radars when they are mostly not enacted upon or even filed properly? Sure It’s easy for people to say if you don’t file you never get a fix. But given it’s too involved a process anyway, time consuming on ones own part (we’re busy people), and (for serious bugs) there’s no bug bounty on macOS yet unlike other companies. Really, I wouldn’t bother wasting your time! At the very least, until Apple meet bug reporters half-way and, ya know, actually FIX THE BUGS WE’RE BOTHERING TO REPORT ON OUR TIME!
It’s yet another thing that irks me these days about the way Apple’s corporate culture revolves around hype and BS. They say on public interviews they really take a note of the Radar system, then do absolutely nothing to prove this to users. It’s like the kid who falsely shouts wolf once too many times; the next time no one’s there to listen as they don’t believe him.
That’s pretty much how I take most things coming out of Apple spokespersons mouths these days. I just think they think we’re all gonna carry on buying whatever hardware crap they chuck out next at whatever price increases they can get away with, regardless of the actual quality of the software.
I don’t want to say ‘Apple’s doomed’ as that’s utterly pointless, but they sure are making themselves into the Goliath we all love to hate, and when that happens, the future isn’t looking good for either of us.
Informative and well-written article on Apple’s Preview. Thanks, Adam.
I find sometimes printing is more accurate from Preview than it is from Acrobat with PDFs.
One other thing I’ve noticed about Preview is that when thumbnails are visible while I’m viewing a PDF file, when I select a thumbnail the highlighting of that thumbnail is extremely subtle compared to previous versions of macOS.
Like others, I’m disappointed that Preview’s annotation of notes (sticky type) doesn’t function well, as I haven’t been able to figure out why I can’t see them in the Print menu (even after selecting “Show notes”. If you save your document to pdf you see only lines without any text from your notes attached to them.
I Have run into issues with preview on Mojave that killed my productivity. It would no longer let me pull any and all files into one group, it would no longer allow deletions from any group made and then opened.
I did extensive research on new machines and other updated I macs to find no difference. When speaking to Apple the toss it up to a rogue program or old software conflicts.
I ended up deleting the Mojave loaded app & installed the Older version back into mojave. It works perfectly, But I can’t update any past first Mojave run.
Does anyone else have a similar situation?
Yes, I’ve been quite disappointed in Preview in Mojave as well (and I’ve moved your post into the comment thread for my article on that topic). I’m hoping things improve in Catalina, but it could also be a Charlie Brown and the football situation.
It really is frustrating to me, Preview was one of the main reasons I switched to Apple.
I hope what I explained can help others regain the use of the old preview as I have. I am going to try it again when Catalina comes out.
How can I get a copy of Take Control of Preview 1.0. I still use Sierra and won’t upgrade until my computer dies or I do.
If you buy a copy of the 1.1 version and send me the receipt, I’ll send you the 1.0 version. When we were doing Take Control, we sometimes built such things into the Ebook Extras page, but there hasn’t been a lot of call for access to the older version with this book.
I finally found away to keep Sierra Preview app & continue with Mojave.
It involves unlocking the OS.
Uninstall Mojave version of preview after saving it to its own folder on to a stick.
Go to Anything still running Sierra or a time machine save & do the same with Preview
Put them both into applications as Preview 9 & 10
Use whichever one you want
#9 will win everytime for those of us that feel Mojave did in fact kill the best part and for me the main reason I switched from Msft. Cross functional Utility
Update to above
I use an Imac & installed the preview apps on to a card & plugged it in to the back. I selected auto load and It has no effect on the Mojave OS version that I can tell.
I am now looking for a way to up grade to Catalina at some point & work around the no 32 bit program function
Virtualization is the answer for keeping 32-bit apps in Catalina.
Here’s a problem that I came across yesterday. My workflow is authoring documents in Pages, exporting to PDF and distributing the PDFs to clients via a web host.
Clients then open the PDF in Preview and copy/paste snippets into Xcode as desired.
Sometimes, not always, selecting text in Preview misses chunks of the desired text, selecting unwanted text below the cursor.
A picture is worth a thousand words:
That is the result of selecting text starting from “import CoreBluetooth” and continuing down to the last “}” Preview has missed a chunk in the middle - the bit starting with “init(bleService…” and has selected parts that the cursor hasn’t even got to yet (The stuff starting with “Add a CBUUID…”)
The website that I use to distribute the PDFs won’t accept a Pages document so I’ve had to back off to using TextEdit and RTF format. Grrr!!!
ac
