[bdowling]

The built-in MacOS support for PDF is great. Any app that can print to a printer can print to a PDF file. And the Preview app, despite its name, can edit PDFs to add annotations (text, graphics), add or remove pages, etc. There's also a feature by which you sign your name on a piece of paper, hold it up to the camera, and it will capture it and insert it into a the document. It's convenient that these are built in and don't require paying for something bloated like Acrobat Pro.

[msarnoff]

I worked on Preview at Apple from 2008-2011 and created the signature capture feature. It's always cool to hear people talk about it!

[jaredhansen]

Thank you! It was a tremendous addition to the product and I still benefit from it many times every week. It's such a great detail - very nicely done.

[rdslw]

Man, this signature thing, PLUS ability to delete selected pages from big PDF is a killer on Preview.

I cry every day I'm on windows and need to do those simple things which Preview made so easy while being light.

Thank you for this!

[granda]

I've demonstrated and gotten literally hundreds of users to fall in love with it. Thanks for that!

[msarnoff]

That's so amazing to hear! It pretty much flew under the company radar--most people didn't find out about it until the first reviews of the Lion beta came out.

I don't think it was very common at Apple for an individual engineer to conceive, implement, and ship a feature like this. There was a general sentiment on the team of "let's do something with signatures," but we knew that very few people had scanners. We thought about touchpad input, but decided against it at the time. (That came much later, in either 10.11 or 10.12)

I was thinking, "well, almost no one has a scanner, but practically everyone using this application has a camera in their Mac." I built the initial prototype in OpenCV and then ported it to Apple's vDSP/Accelerate frameworks.

My favorite detail, which doesn't seem to be present in 10.12, is that you could just click on a horizontal line in a PDF; since I recorded the signature's offset relative to the baseline superimposed on the camera image, it would place the signature exactly on the line, with descenders nicely descending.

I've since moved on from macOS/iOS development, but I had a really positive experience at Apple. Met so many amazingly talented people there.

[TheCoreh]

Thanks! It's one of my favorite features in Preview.

I used to hate PDFs before getting a Mac, but the first-class support in Preview, with features like that (along with the ability to tear out, reorder and attach pages) made me change my mind.

[martinald]

It's such an awesome feature. I don't use macOS as much as I used to but I will always switch to my Mac when I get a doc to sign, which is a lot.

It must have saved many many millions of sheets of paper.

[CMay]

To be fair, on a Microsoft Surface you would just use your pen to sign directly on the screen which is much more natural. It doesn't make any sense to me that Steve Jobs was so anti-pen, while also pushing for intuitive interaction.

[itazula]

Perhaps if someone added electromagnetic traction so that the screen provided some push-back to the pen tip, it would seem "natural," but as things are now, my on-screen signature is as good as a chicken scratch.

[TheCoreh]

you could get a very thin sheet of translucent paper, and put it on top of the screen. the pen should still work, and you'll get a more natural feel

[tinus_hn]

Providing a pen is an excuse to leave controls that are too small to use with your fingers. So while Windows now has a Touch mode where many controls are larger, many others which are also essential to using the system are tiny and hard or impossible to use by touch. That is what Steve Jobs was trying (successfully) to avoid.

[H4CK3RM4N]

That's how it works on an iPad. Touch/pen interfaces are terrible on the PC/Laptop form factor though. At best you gimp your desktop metaphor so it's functional with touch, at worst you have an unusable touch interface.

[simonh]

I think he was anti the crappy pens and digitising systems available at the time, the requirement to have a pen to use the device at all and the poor interface designs they encouraged.

[Andrenid]

Thanks! I use that feature almost every day. We try to be a paperless home so being able to sign PDF forms and return them without printing is one of my single favourite features of OSX. We even bought our house using that feature for all parties to sign it around my MacBook.

[bdowling]

Thanks. It's a great feature, and one that adds a lot to the overall Mac OS experience. It's too bad that most people have no idea that it exists, since no other OS has it. But for those who know, it's a huge time and paper saver. Excellent work.

[gregschlom]

I just found out about this feature a couple of days ago, after being a Mac user for 4 years. My first thought was it's incredibly neat - shame I didn't learn about it before.

[pducks32]

Thank you so much!

[rileytg]

thank you! i wish apple promoted it more. what a gem.

[cptskippy]

Doesn't Quartz use PostScript for rendering the MacOS desktop?

[watersb]

NeXT used Display PostScript, and I would create widgets by writing PostScript code.

Quartz is like QuickTime plus something like OpenGL shaders plus something like NeXTStep "display PDF". I have no idea if this encouraged PDF integration into the display model.

Rather, I would say that NeXT, and then Apple, had some great IP and cross-licensing of PostScript and PDF display tech, and so they could ship the OS distribution with PDF as the printing model.

That is, one reason Windows might today re-render PDF → XPS → PDF is that they had needed to create display tech like PDF anyway, and so they did, and this was after humans had been playing with HTML for a while... Silverlight was pretty.

[jahewson]

> PDF → XPS → PDF

That's not what's happening unless you have a printer which directly supports PDF. Most likely what is happening on Windows is either:

    PDF → XPS → PCL
    PDF → XPS → PostScript

Depending on the printer. Which makes far more sense and is analogous to what OS X does:

    PDF → Quartz → PCL
    PDF → Quartz → PostScript

There's really no notable difference between these two approaches as both Quartz and XPS are based on the same printing model as PDF. Don't confuse Quartz with PDF just because it offers import/export to PDF - Quartz has its own internal imaging model.

[simonh]

NeXT Step did, but they switched to 'Display PDF' in OSX to save licensing costs as PDF is free to use.