I have a plugin for Illustrator that has several options for helping to make sure your file gets saved regularly. I have it configured to just pop up a polite little warning after fifteen minutes of unsaved work.

Sometimes it grabs focus from whatever I'm doing in Illustrator and this is indeed slightly annoying but it is also useful since I want it to interrupt whatever I'm doing and make me ask myself if I am at a good place to save, and if I'm not, then to save as soon as I am.

Arguably this is still annoying but it is an annoyance I have explicitly asked for, knowing it'll be annoying.

Consider how some developers today talk about "toast" notifications: they understand on some level that calling them pop-ups is bad, but came to a consensus that using a different name was appropriate, rather than not actually making pop-ups in the first place.

> Are pop-ups ever not annoying? :)

Pressing space to "preview" a file in Finder on macOS is pretty much "non-annoying popup", since you actually want it :)

Maybe when you repeatedly try to do an impossible action and don't understand more subtle UI cues? The the popup would be correctly interfering to explain the frustration of the repeated fails?

>> I basically cannot come up with a situation where popups are actually an unavoidable and proper good choice

How about pop-up with 2fa request? Better to have pop-up for push notification than to look for auth app by yourself.

"Are you sure you want to close 146 tabs?"

I listen to a prank call show where one of his recurring bits is to call people who listed used items for sale to let them know that he's not interested in purchasing their item.

What I miss from Acrobat is its Print dialog. Yes, really, the Print dialog. I've had to install the whole bloated mess just to get that dialog.

Why? PDFs are often print-first documents. Sometimes I need to print them. Sometimes my printer needs a little coaxing to get the perfect output. Acrobat's Print dialog has enough capability to do this immediately, no fuss. Others simply don't. If SumatraPDF had the same capabilities instead of just dumping everything onto the cruddy Win95-era system default Print dialog, I don't think I'd ever use anything else.

It never ceases to amaze me that it’s any sort of industry standard any more. It has, by far, the worst implementation of form filling (filling forms on existing PDFs) of any modern PDF viewer I’ve used. Even the paid version is pretty bad.

I had to have Adobe Reader installed at my last job because there were official federal and state government PDFs we had to work with that only displayed correctly in Adobe Reader. Opening them in anything else, like Chrome, showed a different single page that said to open it in Adobe Reader.

100%. I recently took a pdf map from a foreign country, rotated it, and. overlaid English notes using macOS preview. I saved and it opened fine in Preview. But when I tried opening the edited map pdf on iOS in the native pdf viewer it was not rotated so the notes were meaningless. Acrobat Reader for iOS opened it correctly.

So ya looking at binary size alone is not useful. Acrobat may be bloated but there also seems to be some robust code there covering edge cases other readers mess up.

Not for power users, for governments :)

I keep the official adobe reader around because it's the only way i can sign some crap for the gov.

It's like a virus, I had to remove update daemons and spam daemons and stuff by hand.

Btw the article says it has "AI" now. Where will it send my tax forms?

I use Preview for signature annotation, joining PDFs, deleting pages, etc. but in some cases it messes up fillable PDFs - fields aren't aligned properly, or certain math functions won't work.

There are a lot of classic PDF features that are still unimplemented by alternative viewers. For work I have to use Reader for clickable metadata popups that other viewers don't support.

I've seen that many forms just don't work properly in Preview. I'm not sure if it's due to custom stuff that only Acrobat does or just features that Apple doesn't want to include in preview. But I can always tell with some forms that they've been filled out in Preview on Mac due to how they mangle it.

> joining multiple PDFs together

What about joining page 2-3 from PDF A with page 7-23 from PDF B? I remember that being a huge hassle on macOS when I was using it years ago. Think I ended up using some cloud service/website for it since the documents weren't confidential at all.

Sometimes Mac users need to communicate with Non Mac users and it's helpful to be using the same PDF reader software so you know what you send them is the same as what they'll see.

Preview is OK and better than Reader. But PDF Expert is excellent in every way, and is a dramatic improvement on both Adobe Acrobat and Preview. It’s so weird that they won’t release a PC version.

Love Preview but it doesn’t work with all PDFs. I still have to switch to Acrobat regularly.

You're right, why would anyone use Adobe Reader instead of the built-in Preview on Mac? Though Preview has its own limitations.