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macOS needs its grid back

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Re: macOS needs its grid back

#51

Post by rafaeltorres »

hajile wrote: post #44

Humans have good spatial memory and having a handful of statically-positioned desktops in a 2D plane makes navigation intuitive and consistent. The real issue is how the ORDER of the desktops changes all the time which messes with that spatial memory and kills a lot of the productivity improvements. A consistent straight line would still be worse than a grid, but still MUCH better than the current situation.

I think this behavior can be changed in System Settings > Desktop & Dock > Automatically Rearrange Spaces based on most recent use (turn it off)

Re: macOS needs its grid back

#52

Post by keyle »

pwg wrote: post #29

> Two decades ago I had a better Mac desktop experience than I have today. Two decades ago was 2006. I have the same desktop experience today as I had two decades ago (Fvwm2) and have had the grid virtual desktop layout this author misses so much for the entire time via the Fvwm2 (and Fvwm before that) virtual desktops feature. One of the reasons I switched to Fvwm (I no longer remember when, but sometime in the mid…

Yeah okay. But at least we have decent font rendering.

Re: macOS needs its grid back

#54

Post by mortenjorck »

I can never prove it, but I like to think I'm the one to credit/blame for inspiring Apple to "inexplicably restrict [spaces] to a horizontal line only" in Leopard. I produced a concept video in 2009 that prominently featured a linear window manager with gestural navigation, and while it's mostly forgotten today, it was covered by all the tech press at the time and inspired a few attempts at adapting some of its idioms into proofs-of-concept in the early 2010s.

While linear window management is clearly not to everyone's taste, I still think it's a valid idea! It was heartening to see this launch and its reception, as I'm actually working on something in the same area right now...

Re: macOS needs its grid back

#55

Post by skydhash »

xp84 wrote: post #19
veidr wrote: post #2

This fixes a dozens-of-times-per-day annoyance for me. The grid is good, but even better is the instant virtual display switching. Nowhere is the death-by-a-thousand-paper-cuts annoyance of modern macOS worse than having to hit Ctrl→→→→→→→ and suffer those repeated animations, over and over.

It's every action on Mac and iOS that does this, and it has been increasing in intrusiveness for a decade. I can't be sure why they do it, but it comes off as though their visual designers are immature, thinking we want to see their impressive animations not just in a demo, not just in a tutorial that we go through once, where we are meant to grasp the relationships between the things, but over and over again, all da…

I'm using cwm (x11) without a compositor (never noticed tearing). And it's so nice when everything is not trying to be cute with shadows, animations and round corners. Animation only makes sense when there's a direct action that controls it (like when swapping spaces or hovering) or the system wanting to inform us (notifications). And it's better be fast. Otherwise it's just visual effects that quickly become tiring after a few days.

Re: macOS needs its grid back

#56

Post by a-ve »

A bit of self-promotion here, but coming from Windows/Linux land I got used to having the taskbar at the bottom and never really liked the Dock. I love my Mac, and I know folks who have been using macOS for decades swear by it, but this is one UI feature from other OSes that I would have liked to see in macOS.

One major issue is that the Dock cannot filter apps between Spaces, so I built boringBar[0] for this. It frees up real estate taken up by the Dock and makes it much easier to figure out what goes where.

I do understand the need for an app switcher on the Mac, though. It has the same problem I faced: it is very app-centric rather than window-centric. Switching between windows is nigh impossible on a Mac without third-party apps, unless you like using the three-finger swipe up gesture. I have never been able to switch quickly between windows using Mission Control.

[0] https://boringbar.app

Re: macOS needs its grid back

#57

Post by jimrandomh »

willtemperley wrote: post #30
jimrandomh wrote: post #15

Prior to MacOS 10.11, Mission Control was good: you would swipe up with four fingers and it would show you a preview of all of your spaces. Then in 10.11, for no discernable reason, they changed it to suck: rather than showing you a preview, the bar just says "Desktop 1", "Desktop 2", etc until you mouse over it; the practical effect is that using spaces is disorienting and requires memorization. Some third-party sof…

> rather than showing you a preview, the bar just says "Desktop 1", "Desktop 2" I never noticed that behaviour because I only use mission control in full-screen mode. If you swipe up with three (or four) fingers from a full-screen window the previews are visible immediately. I have no idea why we need a different preview for desktop vs full screen however. The part of this UX that annoys me is the spaces get re-order…

The full-screen mode handling might be a clue about what went wrong: if you swipe up from a space that contains a full screen app, it has an animation where the app goes into a slot in the preview strip, but that animation doesn't make sense visually for a non-full-screen space. So, perhaps someone was implementing that animation, didn't want to implement an alternate animation for the non-fullscreen case, and decided to minimize the preview strip instead? And because this was after Steve Jobs had died, there was no one left in charge of UX to explain why that was a bad idea?

Re: macOS needs its grid back

#58

Post by refactor_master »

joshspankit wrote: post #28
xp84 wrote: post #9

> If they approve, the settings open, then the user has to find the specific little toggle and enable it. Another security prompt then done. Why isn’t this at most 2 prompts? Answer: Because modern-day Apple has subscribed to a particular brand of mitigation for the "noobs will always click 'Allow' especially if you ask them to first" problem. The mitigation is that Apple just dumps you on step 2 of a little 4-5 step…

For a long time, I’ve believed that the actual solution is to make the system transparent enough that a compromised system is obvious. Imagine playing hide and go seek in the salt flats

If I log into my system it's safe. If someone reads my password off my screen post-it and logs into my system it's quite thoroughly compromised. How would you demonstrate which of the two sessions are compromised, during the act?

Re: macOS needs its grid back

#59

Post by drfloyd51 »

Analemma_ wrote: post #3

Oh man, thank you! I was just complaining the other day about the missing Spaces grid… when they first took it away in Lion I looked frantically for the setting to bring it back, with no such luck. Ironically, I think the reason they took it away was to help with fullscreen macOS apps, which are a garbage anti-feature it doesn’t seem like anybody uses. Long live the grid!

I want to use full screen apps. But they are not in the command-tab order. So… no good.

Re: macOS needs its grid back

#60

Post by jlarocco »

js2 wrote: post #31
xp84 wrote: post #9

> If they approve, the settings open, then the user has to find the specific little toggle and enable it. Another security prompt then done. Why isn’t this at most 2 prompts? Answer: Because modern-day Apple has subscribed to a particular brand of mitigation for the "noobs will always click 'Allow' especially if you ask them to first" problem. The mitigation is that Apple just dumps you on step 2 of a little 4-5 step…

> but they should offer a way for those of us who aren't clueless to turn whatever it is off. I'm not sure if it's what you're asking for, but you can disable SIP: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/disabling...

It's been a while since I dumped OSX and went back to Linux, but IIRC, this setting gets reset every time the system updates.

At some point Apple realized the "power user" market was too small, and they were better off treating all of their users like idiots. And that's when I left.

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