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Remove the Notch

topnotch.app

81–88 of 88 posts

Re: Remove the Notch

#81
post #37
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your phone had a front-facing camera, you never had the use of the full front area. (Unless it was one of the weird ones with a pop-up camera!) A notch lets you use those odd-shaped blank spaces at the top of your phone for junk like a clock, and gives you more space for apps.

Besides that the notch is aesthetically displeasing, it's also impractical when you end up with more notifications than can even fit in the area left over. And yeah my phone is one of the "weird" ones with a pop-up camera. Solves the problem nicely.

If you mean the app icons in the menu bar, if you have a lot of them you should get either Bartender or Vanilla. They do a good job of hiding most of those icons until you need them and you can reveal them with a click.

Re: Remove the Notch

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s true, but the XPS 13 camera and angle is terrible and that’s certainly not preferable for me in the age of Zoom.

XPS 13 camera has been back on the top for a while already.

Yea. I was responding to the suggestions that below the screen might be an acceptable alternative.

The XPS camera is still bad but the angle is fixed at least.

Re: Remove the Notch

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

XPS 13 camera has been back on the top for a while already.

Yea. I was responding to the suggestions that below the screen might be an acceptable alternative. The XPS camera is still bad but the angle is fixed at least.

They suggested people considered the bottom camera a nuisance.

Re: Remove the Notch

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of people who disagree with the tradeoff who aren't raving lunatics. Any tradeoff will please some people and displease others - it's irrational to assume the displeased are always same people, and are therefore un-pleasable hypocrites. Don't cast aspersions with so little regard.

Maybe Apple knew those who disagreed with the tradeoff would almost certainly get a third-party app like this, and so worrying about them is unimportant because then there are options for both - it's just that that anti-notch group might not like the default. More options are better than fewer.

This app is for people who don't like the look. It doesn't address the functional problems at all.

Re: Remove the Notch

#85

There's just no pleasing people. "Here's more screen real estate, but it's not contiguous." "No! I hate you! This is an abomination! I will black it out and make it useless." If they hadn't made any camera updates people would also be ticked about that. Edit: I thought people were using this to push their menubar down below the level of the notch and creating black dead zones on the left and right of the notch. But I…

>I still think it's silly and picayune for people to quibble about the color of the menu bar.

I get you, but quibbling about minutia has been the bread and butter of software UI differentiation for so long that I don't really think it's incongruous for this kind of thing to show up as a 3rd party UI modification.

Re: Remove the Notch

#86
post #80
post #3

But does it exclude the bar from being populated _under_ the notch? I feel like that is a greater sin.

Yes, that is a bug in apps that have not been updated yet

https://twitter.com/bjango/status/1453171506263982087 & https://twitter.com/bjango/status/1453194728506216457 indicate that this uses the normal APIs and there isn't an obvious "update" that could be made to behave differently.

Re: Remove the Notch

#87
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't help but thinking that there is an option in between those two choices.

What exactly would be between "we put a screen next to the camera" and "we put a bezel next to the camera"?

Punch hole cameras are a thing now in smartphones, would be better than a big block. I just feel like this was the wrong compromise. Not that my opinion matters, I bought the Surface Laptop Studio like the MS cuck that I am, which is full of bad compromises itself.

Re: Remove the Notch

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> top area can be split into two regions, one for menus and one for status widgets as we have long been doing anyways Some people use lower resolutions or apps with more menus than you apparently.

There's definitely going to be edge cases, although if I were still a macOS software developer, I would update my app immediately to nest my menus more when operating with a notch. I think there's more that Apple - and also third-party developers - can do to make this a well-crafted experience. This is definitely a V1 but I see paths to it getting better! Never could say the same for the Touch Bar haha. I'm certainly…

The only problem with the touch bar was it replaced a row of keys.

Lots of menus isn't an edge case for the kinds of people Apple said the MacBook Pro is designed for.

Having different menu layouts on different screens isn't what I'd call a well crafted experience.

It's interesting you assume it's my use case. I just know not to speak for everyone.

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