News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

August 28, 2007

updates

Skim updated to 0.7

Posted Aug. 28, ’07, 6:31 AM PT by Derik DeLong
Category | Software » Updates

Skim Starting with college, I’ve had a number of PDF documents that I’ve needed to read. Acrobat Reader (now known as Adobe Reader) and later Preview did a fair job in that they both worked. Both have improved over time. Neither measure up to Skim. I first remarked that it was my new favorite back when it was at a young 0.2. It’s reached 0.7 and has really started to show some maturity.

Skim has all the trimmings you’d expect out of a good Mac app including good, strong use of Cocoa and the now ultra popular Sparkle software update component. You can mark up your PDFs with notes for future study. The place it really shines though is the search facilities. Like Apple’s Preview, it presents a live updating search result list. Double clicking a result switches to the page, highlights the text and also circles it with a red oval, making it extremely clear where the text is. That’s a huge help.

The new version has a slew of new features. My favorites are search result tool tips that show the full context of the search result without forcing the user to actually move to that location in the file as well as an option to save PDFs directly to a disk image that encloses your PDF along with the notes you’ve made all over the document. This update is especially relevant now as students return to the schools of their choice. This software is for you.


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