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Comment by handrous | Hacker News Reader

There are tons of excellent pieces of Apple software that come with iOS[EDIT macOS, that is] (or are free to download).

Preview's simply amazing and I miss it very much on every other platform, including iOS, but probably doesn't count as a hidden gem.

One that took me way too long to discover was the Digital Color Meter. It's a color picker that comes up instantly (much of what's so great about Apple's software is that they give at least half a shit about performance, unlike seemingly everyone else these days—it shouldn't be impressive that a color picker window comes up instantly from a cold start, but in the current software environment, it kinda is) and works for everything on your screen.

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Spotlight is also amazing, but like Preview I suppose it doesn't count as a hidden gem.

Finder's column view is also excellent. I think it's the best way to navigate the filesystem through GUI; the way it displays nested directories is just super nice. It makes me wonder why other OS don't haven't copied this layout in their filesystem explorer.

Grapher.app is also perhaps a hidden gem.

The built-in screen zoom is pretty neat. Hold `Ctrl` and use the vertical scroller on whatever pointing device you have to zoom in and out. Real nice when you want to take a (much) closer look at a thing without affecting layout: it zooms your viewport without affecting any of the actual content, unlike, say, increasing font size.

Looks like it’s been updated, I don’t remember the different zoom type options. Maybe I just never discovered them.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210978

I agree Preview.app is amazing. It's fast, has a lot of features and not bloated at all. However I think recent built-in apps are so bad almost unusable (like Music.app and TV.app), Preview's elegance seems to be a lost art in Apple.

What’s wrong with the AppleTV app? Perf is fine. UI/X is par with HBOMax, Disney+. Definitely better than Prime Video.

I might have different use case than most people that I mainly use it to manage local video files and sync with my phone. The bugs are very similar to the bugs on Music.app where there's a lot of desync between app & local folder, duplicate entries, broken thumbnail, clunky UX etc. The quality difference between that and older macOS built-in softwares is pretty obvious imo (the most obvious drop is Music.app rewrite in Big Sur)

Oh wow, how have I never noticed the Color Meter!? Thanks for pointing to that!

I used to use sip. Didn’t realize Apple made a native one. Thanks!

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