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Tailscale's new macOS home

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Re: Tailscale's new macOS home

#61
post #3

I haven't had enough menu bar icons to run into this but is it really the case that the notch just hides whatever icons happen to be behind it? Like, the OS doesn't handle this incredibly obvious edge case? Why not just put an overflow dropdown next to the notch (something Windows XP managed to figure out 25 years ago)? I know software quality has been going down in recent versions of macOS but this is absurd.

This is genuinely shocking that Apple is not handling that. Talk about quite a decline in one of their flagship products.

From what I can tell, OS X is no longer one of their flagship products.

Re: Tailscale's new macOS home

#62
post #3

I haven't had enough menu bar icons to run into this but is it really the case that the notch just hides whatever icons happen to be behind it? Like, the OS doesn't handle this incredibly obvious edge case? Why not just put an overflow dropdown next to the notch (something Windows XP managed to figure out 25 years ago)? I know software quality has been going down in recent versions of macOS but this is absurd.

This is a real problem, but when I complain about it I get told to just "hide the icons you don't care about" as if that's a solution.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47346079

Re: Tailscale's new macOS home

#63
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is genuinely shocking that Apple is not handling that. Talk about quite a decline in one of their flagship products.

From what I can tell, OS X is no longer one of their flagship products.

they kindamostly cared when it was OS X. everything's been a bit of a mess since it became macOS while trying to make a unified platform for all their hardware

Re: Tailscale's new macOS home

#64
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was always my biggest gripe about using a mac, the OS that "just works". I ended up a bunch of commands I had to run and a stack of apps I needed to install for it to feel usable.

TBF - It still does "just work," The fact that it doesn't completely fit into your (and my) preferences doesn't really change that, and if that's the standard, then everything will fall short of it.

If the icons are just hidden and you can't find them in order to use the programs you have running, that's not "just working". That's broken functionality. Windows has solved this with the overflow menu for literally decades.

Re: Tailscale's new macOS home

#65
post #3

I haven't had enough menu bar icons to run into this but is it really the case that the notch just hides whatever icons happen to be behind it? Like, the OS doesn't handle this incredibly obvious edge case? Why not just put an overflow dropdown next to the notch (something Windows XP managed to figure out 25 years ago)? I know software quality has been going down in recent versions of macOS but this is absurd.

If you're visually impaired, you can hit it even with just a few icons on a 14" laptop. Fonts anything other than tiny + overloaded menus + even a handful of app icons means I always hit this unless I'm docked.

Hacky menu bar modification tools are basically an accessibility requirement for me, and my vision isn't even that bad. (Best corrected is 20/30 or 20/40 or so.) People with serious impairments are totally screwed by this on macOS, sometimes even with large external monitors.

Re: Tailscale's new macOS home

#66
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m on mobile so don’t have the link handy but there’s a fork called Thaw that has been getting frequent updates

Oh! Thanks for that, I hadn't realized Ice's maintainer had stopped working on it: https://github.com/stonerl/Thaw

I had been using Hidden Bar but gonna give Thaw a shot now. Looks a bit more full featured and under active development!

https://github.com/dwarvesf/hidden

Re: Tailscale's new macOS home

#67
post #3

I haven't had enough menu bar icons to run into this but is it really the case that the notch just hides whatever icons happen to be behind it? Like, the OS doesn't handle this incredibly obvious edge case? Why not just put an overflow dropdown next to the notch (something Windows XP managed to figure out 25 years ago)? I know software quality has been going down in recent versions of macOS but this is absurd.

Yes, it's terrible and something even Windows handles better. It's one of those utterly bizarre Apple things which make me wonder which old product guy has dirt on everyone else at the company.

Re: Tailscale's new macOS home

#68
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TBF - It still does "just work," The fact that it doesn't completely fit into your (and my) preferences doesn't really change that, and if that's the standard, then everything will fall short of it.

If the icons are just hidden and you can't find them in order to use the programs you have running, that's not "just working". That's broken functionality. Windows has solved this with the overflow menu for literally decades.

I have never seen anyone with enough menu bar icons to have them hide, nor have I known anyone who ran into that problem. It’s a bug that should be fixed, but I just don’t think it’s as big of a deal as it’s made out to be.

Re: Tailscale's new macOS home

#69
post #53

The notch hiding menubar icons is such a stupid problem to have. I waste hours every week trying to help people who send me frustrated emails because they bought one of my apps and they say: "it doesn't launch" or "why doesn't it have any interface??" No amount of FAQ will help these people. And this also results in hasty refund requests and even worse, chargebacks that take 2x the amount the users paid out of my poc…

Perhaps people who have many menubar icons are hare-brained and you should check to see how many icons they’ve got before you price your product for them to account for the support overhead.
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