'Preview' replacement? *Help*

Just to remind myself, what did the "hand gesture" tool actually do?

 

It's so you can click and drag to move around a document instead of using a magic mouse/trackpad gesture to scroll around the image, or assigning pan/scroll to a button on a graphics tablet (which allows you to click and drag around a document in Preview on Mavericks.).

 

Oh, is that all? Well, in that case I can safely recommend a Magic Trackpad rather than any replacement application, which is good because I used to love Preview when I was using a Mac fulltime (bugger Adobe Reader...). Damned if I'd want to click-to-drag in these days of gestures.

It used to be the case that I hated laptop trackpads with a fiery passion but you'd have to prise my cold, dead, hands from the Magic Trackpad.

 

Good alternatives? I don't think so, hence the lack of a long list of options provided by forum members. The problem is, there isn't a competitive market for "viewers". Editors, creators, databases, yes. Viewers, no.

Pretty much anything you could replace the image viewing function of Preview with is designed to do much more than view, and costs money, which makes it a less than good replacement for a system provided (free), well integrated, image/pdf viewer with light editing features.

Pixa provides viewing, conversion, tagging, and resizing functions for images and lesser functions for pdfs, but it's primarily an image database, so items must be added to its database before you can view them with Pixa.

iPhoto is a pretty good viewer and light editor, but it has the same "database" issue as Pixa.

Any graphics editor will do, like Acorn, GraphicConverter, Pixelmator, or Photoshop.

Personally, I like the "buy a trackpad" option. The gesture bus left the station a long time ago with Apple. It's only gonna get harder and harder to use a Mac and not adopt gesture based navigation.

 

for a PDF replacement look at the shareware application PDFPen. For images I suggest the shareware Pixelmator.