Review: Skim-PDF Reader

If you own a Mac, it’s a little hard to get excited about a new PDF reader. Preview does a great job as a light weight reader and Adobe Reader works when you need forms to file your taxes. Both are free.
Scientists have a peculiar problem with PDFs, however. We use them ALL THE TIME. A good reader doesn’t just show the text and graphs. It also allows annotation, helps the user act as a librarian to keep things organized, and helps with searching. Some, such as DEVONthink, even try to make relationships between articles by using sophisticated AI functionality. Many folks have different methods to keep things organized. There has been an active discussion of different options at MacResearch.

One of the most respected projects in the literature organization niche is BibDesk, which combines a PDF library or database, with a very lightweight viewer, and (most importantly) an easy interface for citations in LaTeX. These kind souls who produced BibDesk free of charge (and, yes, free as in freedom as well) now present Skim. Skim is currently in early Beta, but is very promising. It lets you do to a PDF what we would all do to the printed version. It lets you add notes, underline and highlight text as well as box whatever you want. You can then save your amended version to look at later.
This may not sound to different from Preview, but Skim already allows more types of note taking and commenting than Preview. I downloaded version 0.2 today and I was immediately abel to figure out how to get more flexibility and features then what I get from Preview.
Full screen viewing/editing is cool, but “snapshots” seem to be a more unique idea. In other browsers I find myself shuffling between pages so I can look at a figure that is two pages beyond where the author describes the data. “Snapshots” allow you to actually drag that dang Fig. 3 over to page 5 where the author tells you all about what is going on.
Since this is a product from BibDesk you won’t be surprised that they have thought through the citation functionality pretty hard. Rather than shuffling to the last page to see the citation mentioned on the second page, just hover your cursor over the in-line citation and a box shows you all the information you need. Cool. With the limited testing I did, it seems that this feature may not have all the kinks worked out, and it clearly requires that you have a rather specifically formated PDF to begin with. However, when it works, it rocks.
Skim may not be yet be in the patheon of apps every scientist must have (what is that list again?), but let us not forget that the official release of the 0.2 Beta was only a few days ago. This is clearly a project with great potential and one I’ll be watching very closely.
Get the sourceforge site.
One of the developers describes it here with more detail and screenshots.