michael-mccracken.net (skim)

Skim Knockoff(s) on the Mac App Store

Michael McCracken — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 21:15:00 GMT

Sometime in January, a Skim user asked the developers if we'd submitted it to the Mac App Store. We hadn't.

The app listed for sale for $29 on the store as "PDF Reader" is actually our free and open source Skim app, although no mention of the Skim Sourceforge project is made in the description, and the support link just goes to a livejournal post where the Skim web page ad copy has been pasted. There is also a $19 app called "PDF Expert" that appears to be another copy. That one even went ahead and used Adobe's Acrobat trademark in their icon!

Anyone who buys these apps is paying for a program that has no support from and no coordination with the actual developers and an unknown update or bug fix schedule. They won't know about the tips and support available on the Skim wiki or the users mailing list. They could get a better product for free.

Naturally, I'd like to see these unofficial copies removed from the store.

Because the project uses the permissive BSD license, it's officially OK to take the code, change nothing, and sell it. However, there is an acknowledgement clause, so if a copy doesn't mention the actual authors anywhere, it's in violation of the license.

At one point in mid-January, "PDF Reader" was offered for free, so the main developer, Christiaan Hofman, downloaded it to check. He found no mention of the original authors. So now we have something we can actually complain about.

Now, I wrote an initial prototype and started the sourceforge project, but Christiaan deserves most of the credit for the great app that it became. However, mostly because of my role at the beginning, I am the copyright holder of the overall product and many of the source files. So I took the lead, and over the past few weeks I've been trying to figure out who to talk to in Apple to even find out what my options are.

I emailed Mac App Store support, who pointed me to both the Developer Relations contact info and to Apple Legal. Developer Relations said they can't help me because I'm not a member the Apple Developer Program, so they also pointed to Legal. Ok, a bit of runaround, but I thought contacting Legal seemed reasonable.

Funny, I never thought I'd want to send a DMCA takedown notice, but this is a copyright claim. I decided to use their copyright violation reporting form. In Safari and every other browser I tried, this form just doesn't work! It keeps asking for my phone number even when it already has it... So on January 26 I sent a request to copyright@apple.com with the info for the form and asked what to do next.

Since then I've heard nothing, so I thought it might be time to ask the rest of the world - has anyone had to deal with violations like this before, and is there a better way to address it?

Measuring PDFs with Skim

Michael McCracken — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 01:00:00 GMT

I love it when I can guess how to do something new in a program. Skim just did this for me - I needed to figure out how big the rectangle of text in a paper I'm working on is, in inches. I looked for rulers, and then decided I'd just see if I get any size feedback when I make a rectangular selection. Turns out there's a nice feedback status line in the bottom right - clicking toggles between measurement in pts and in inches.

I like how this solves my problem without adding a lot of new UI for measurement - no rulers, no extra tool to measure length.

Skim 0.7

Michael McCracken — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 02:20:00 GMT

The amazing Christiaan Hofman has released another nice update to Skim, the great PDF reader that is quite literally my dream reader app.

As usual, there are detailed and complete release notes, and I'd like to call attention to my favorite new feature, because I use it all the time, and actually wrote part of it:

Skim can now download PDFs from remote URLs, which can be provided on the clipboard, dropped on the Skim icon, or through Services.

I use this all the time to drag a PDF URL from a browser to the Skim dock icon - Skim downloads the file and displays it in one step. Very handy.

Announcing Skim: Stop printing - Start Skimming.

Michael McCracken — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 18:12:00 GMT

If you spend a lot of time reading articles and research papers that you get in PDF form, then you might be interested in the latest app from the folks who brought you BibDesk. If you already use BibDesk, then you certainly want to take a look.

Even though we keep our research papers stored on disk as PDF, all too often we print them out to read and write notes on. There's something missing in the experience of reading papers on a computer, but it doesn't have to be that way.

Announcing Skim. Skim is a PDF reading and note-taking app for Mac OS X that is designed to make reading research papers and manuals better. Just like in Preview, you can search, scan, and zoom through PDFs, but you also get some custom features for your workflow:

Snapshots: if there's a graph on page two and the description continues to page three, just draw a box around the graph with the command key down and a snapshot window pops up with the graph, and you can keep on reading with the graph in view. For more fun, minimize that snapshot window - they stick around in their own dock in the document window.

Tooltips: If a PDF has links, such as for citation references or indexes and section headings, you can click on them as usual to go to the destination, but there's more - hover the mouse over those links and Skim will show you a tooltip with the target of the link. No more losing your place to peek at a citation! For more fun, command-click on a link to pop up a snapshot window showing the link's destination.

Presentation and Full-screen Modes: Full-screen reading is handy. So is showing a PDF as a presentation. But they're a little different. For instance, you might not want to show the table of contents in a presentation, but it's nice to see it when you're just reading by yourself. So Full-screen and Presentation are separate modes in Skim.

There's plenty more - download it and take a look, and join the mailing list to discuss it. There's even a full help book in the first public beta release!

Many thanks to everyone who has worked on this app, and especially to Christiaan Hofman, who moved the app from a prototype to something really useful faster than I would have thought possible.