I frequently need to split and crop PDFs of scanned books, as well as adding outlines (permanent Bookmarks) to break them up into easily navigable chapters. I also read and annotate lots of journal articles. Post-Snow Leopard, Preview has been a buggy, constantly crashing mess, so its useless even for reading and annotating. Skim is great, but offers no PDF editing features. I wanted one PDF app that could do all the above: I tried Adobe Acrobat Pro and PDF PenPro. Acrobat Pro is hopeless: clunky, slow to scroll and with a counterintuitive non-standard UI. PDF PenPro has significant stability problems. PDF Nomad, on the other hand, works great.
The UI is attractive and carefully well thought out, and the dev is friendly and responsive to feature requests. Most importantly, its very stable – can’t remember it ever crashing on me – and fast. Much faster to perform editing (rotating, deskewing, saving) functions than the above apps, actually. It’s also the only app I’ve found that allows splitting pages vertically en masse; very useful when you have book scans consisting of double pages. You can edit PDF metadata very easily, which is rare, and again, very helpful for academic researchers.
It’s also excellent value: the latest version 2.0 adds OCR, which though I rarely use (I normally get documents already scanned off colleagues), is good to have and normally entails a much more expensive app. PDF Nomad normally $50, but is $25 till the end of June; 1/2 the price of Prizmo (the slick scanning app that was in the last Macupdate bundle), 1/4 the price of PDFpenPro, 1/12 of the absurd Adobe Acrobat Pro.
Ideally, I’d like the OCR function to be faster, and to use less RAM, and to have some example Applescripts provided for batch processing documents, but I can’t find much to fault. More generally, I’m excited to see an efficient PDF editing app that gets the basics right (speed and stability), has lots of features and is in very active development. I don’t normally post long reviews, but I really think PDF Nomad deserves more exposure. And more selfishly I hope this leads to an even better app.