Membranophonist’s Ramblings

I’ve been very happy with Skim as my default PDF reader. It feels faster and more elegant than Preview.

Kudos

1. The Magnify tool is very useful, particularly for vector-based drawings such as the New York City subway map. I can leave it zoomed out fairly far and use the magnify tool to see details of areas of interest, which blow up smoothly because they are vectors. This helps me keep my bearings and cuts down on fiddling with zoom controls. The tool could use a little more visual flair, but it works well as is. The modifier keys provide additional magnification functionality.
2. The search result circling makes locating matches much easier than simply highlighting the text.
3. The search cross fade is a nice visual touch.

Suggestions

1. The View menu should be immediately right of Edit (File, Edit, View is the order recommended in the HIG, though a number of Apple apps order them otherwise).
2. Being able to select multiple pages (the last selected always being the one displayed) and use contextual menu commands would be great:
   1. Save Selected Pages as PDF…
   2. Print Selected Pages…
3. Provide a contextual menu to quickly change the color of the Reading Bar to one of a few high-contrast colors.
4. The Preferences make some of the same assumptions that Preview does; what does the 3 for the default Greeking threshold mean? What is Greeking? (Given the targeted users, this might be less of a problem, but a brief note about Greeking would still be useful.) What is anti-aliasing? My redesigned Preview preferences have alternate wordings.
5. Individual document scroll positions, pane visibility, and window position should be retained across openings. The pane visibility and window position are retained across launches (quitting Skim once you have each document displayed as desired). I’m guessing this has to do with writing the settings to a file that is only changed when quitting Skim.
6. The Reading Bar would be more useful if it could also be dragged by grabbing it outside the page using a visual affordance. This would also allow positioning of the reading bar without having to switch to the text tool (less modal).
   
   1. The handles would remain a stable size regardless of the line height of the highlighted text. The ones in the mockup are 20px wide by 16px tall, but those are not necessarily best.
   2. The handles could be made semi-opaque unless the cursor is over them to keep the visual focus on the document itself.