191–200 of 647 posts
How stable is Monterey for those that have been using it? Ironically I just upgraded to Big Sur yesterday from Catalina. I think I'll probably wait again to let 3rd-party apps catch up.
is CSAM scanning included?
Note that Apple never included macOS in the initial announcement. They just included it for the Siri changes, and possibly the Messages changes.
I've been away from MacOS for about 10 years. Big Sur now. Kinda hate it. I keep accidentally invoking extra layers of UI everywhere. That's fine I guess. But what I ran into that I LOVE is making EVERY app full-screen, pretending there is no desktop or window management, and just swiping right/left among them. I wish there was a way to smooth out the UX so that this feels first-class and I stop accidentally breaking…
I think window management in Mac leaves much to be desired (hot key and snapping floating windows). But associate fullscreeen window/split with a new workspace is actually one thing it does right. I installed an addon on Gnome just to emulate that. Split is kind of useless with an ultrawide monitor though, I wish it was 3 columns
The Macbook Pro 16" thermal throttling problems with external monitors [1] finally seems to be fixed with Monterey by enabling low power mode. (At least with 16:9 60Hz monitors). I've been dealing with `kernel_task` hitting 900% CPU usage and the entire window server running at 2 FPS when using external monitors since I got the mbp 16" a year ago. Good riddance. [1]: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/16-is-hot-noi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But no one uses tablets in practices. Everyone I know who bought an iPad or iPad pro use it for a bit and then it just takes dust.
Correct. Or they become Netflix viewers, or are used to doodle in Procreate or something. I am yet to meet a person who uses the OS (as opposed to specific apps) for something complicated. Apple loves to show how easy it is to drag an image from Email in to Pages. But nobody uses an iPad for Pages. And even that simple interaction is still somehow easier on a Mac. The latest MacBook gives me hope that post-Ive Apple…
It is frustrating to see how stagnant desktop OS's have become. Both macOS and Windows 11 have added incremental features that are surely nice to have, but no one dares to improve on the human-computer-interaction which has remained the same for decades now. With the advances in AI and the ridiculous compute power of modern CPUs, we should be able to have OSs that are Digital Assistants. Just one example: - file mana…
- Business: there isn't a strong business need to re-think the desktop UI. There are needs on mobile and the web, but improving the classic desktop doesn't give a competitive advantage (unless you can combine it with the web and mobile, which is exactly what Apple, Google, and MS are trying to do).
- Developers: you need to attract developers to your platform too. Devs will ignore your unique features if they are not attractive enough to justify the change, and they are not cross-platform. Examples:
- Smalltalk envs are like an extremely hackable Desktop OS (eg. Squeak or Pharo). They don't use the files as the storage unit, and the technology to scale the object image existed for a long time (eg. GemStone/St). The first complaint that you'll hear about St is: "where are my files and version control?". There is no interest in the dev community to make files go away because it breaks the tools that you use every day.
- macOS has features to support version history, or conveniently handle files (eg. auto-save, rename in place, cloud support). But, those features are not cross-platform, and they are ignored by the cross-platform "pro" software: VSCode, JetBrains IDEs, Adobe Products, Figma.
Maybe the next generation "desktop" is not a classic desktop but an evolution of the web browser. The sad part is that all the new environments (iOS, iPadOS, Android, ChromeOS, SaaS apps) are extremely closed and hostile to tinker with the system.
It is frustrating to see how stagnant desktop OS's have become. Both macOS and Windows 11 have added incremental features that are surely nice to have, but no one dares to improve on the human-computer-interaction which has remained the same for decades now. With the advances in AI and the ridiculous compute power of modern CPUs, we should be able to have OSs that are Digital Assistants. Just one example: - file mana…
Please don't touch my OS.
>Regular users are consistently struggling with low-level concepts like 'files' and similar remnants of trying to emulate desktop metaphors from the workplaces of the 80ies.
I'm going to make argument that regular users are struggling with directory structures because of how OSes are increasingly "helpful". In DOS 2.0, it was simple: each physical disk has filesystem with tree structure, no shortcuts, no symlinks. I doubt anybody was confused by that. But let's pretend I don't know about usual quirks and see how that goes in Windows: where the hell is "Desktop"? Does everything is contained inside it? After all, "My Computer" icon is there, and clicking "dir up" in My Computer goes back to Desktop! But then, Desktop itself is contained in My Computer, so hmm... And why on Desktop there are shortcuts there that.. doesn't seem to be in Desktop directory? Ah, because they are in some magic place "C:/Users/Public/Desktop". And by the way, why it is usually called "Pulpit" (localized name in my language), but when in path it's not localized and just "Desktop"? Where my browser stores browsing history? Surely it must be in some file? Right, probably in user directory... wait, how do I open user directory? Documents folder surely must be stored inside it, so let's click "dir up" there. Uh, it went back to dreaded My Computer. Fine, I will go there manually through C:/Users/. So the browser files will be in AppData.. but it isn't here.. ah right, it is hidden for some reason. But there's still something fishy about the Documents, it doesn't behave like a normal directory. Let's see in Properties dialog, there's Location tab, so it looks like it works like shortcut to it, simple enough. Uh.. actually no, because it is part of "Libraries" mechanism, and is actually configured in AppData/Roaming/Microsoft/Windows/Libraries. Documents (and other libraries) might be actually configured to squash multiple directories in their virtual view. Now, why OneDrive is another special directory, and even worse, MS Office seems to have special relationship with it? And so on and so on...
Really, it's no wonder that most regular people are confused about it.
If any apple product managers are reading this, the biggest thing holding MacOS back is that it global searches when you search a folder. I know there's a config setting for it, but dammit I want the default to be local file name search and full text search should be an off-by-default option, and search the whole hard drive should be a different also off by default option.