I loved spaces. It was so awesome. I tried stage manager the other day and died inside. Immediately turned it off.
macOS needs its grid back
61–70 of 272 posts
Re: macOS needs its grid back
#62> 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
I agree, however the fundamental problem here is that transparent systems are on the far side of the axis from user focused systems, think about it, the whole point of building a user interface is to hide and remove choice from the user, to change the system from "A steady hand with a magnetic needle" to "point and grunt" the whole point is to build a shiny facade that hides the inner working of the machine. So while you and I and many other people like to see the machine, the inner workings whirling around in grandiose majesty. Millions of man hours have been spent hiding that stuff away keeping it from view, pretending it does not exist. And thus the transparency of our computing environments have suffered correspondingly to this focus on hiding things.
Re: macOS needs its grid back
#63> 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
That seems ≈impossible in a world where you're running arbitrary, Turing-complete code. A modern consumer machine can do so many different things—often a bunch at a time—that there is always a massive amount of space to hide bad behavior.
There might be some way to design a system from the ground up to avoid this problem (some kind of declarative, capability-based security?), but retrofitting that onto an existing behemoth of a system does not really work.
Re: macOS needs its grid back
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
that's a setting you can turn off. settings -> desktops and spaces -> reorder spaces
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Re: macOS needs its grid back
#65I use Charmstone for spatial app switching - https://charmstone.app/
Not the same as full spaces, but it gives the same vibe of always having a particular app on a particular hotkey.
I try to limit my multi-tasking though, so I can imagine where full spaces would be useful.
Re: macOS needs its grid back
#66> 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…
The scary thing to me is how Apple makes you jump through hoops to install or use any sort of app, but when it comes to adding items to your login items, they don't even require you to grant permission.
Tried some little throwaway app and realized you don't need it? Sucks for you. It added itself to your login items and it'll start up in the background every single time you turn on your computer. And it won't even tell you. Thought you deleted the app from your Applications folder? If you didn't check your login items, there's probably some little script that deeply installed itself and it'll reinstall it in the background during your next startup.
Adobe is the fucking worst with this. Their Creative Cloud spyware keeps enabling itself and reinstalling itself so long as you use photoshop. And it'll constantly find ways to turn itself back on. Steam also adds itself to login items, which is fucking annoying because you'll reboot and be hit in the face with game ads. At least it respects your decision when you turn it off, but login items should be opt in, never opt out.
Re: macOS needs its grid back
#67Prior 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…
Agree! That "Desktop 1", "Desktop 2" view is so annoying, and given we have higher res monitors now, it serves no purpose if the intention was to save space.
I loathe that I can't even rename the desktops.
Wouldn't it be great to have them named "Design", "Dev", "Productivity", "Games". Or whatever makes sense given your needs, instead of simply desktop #.
Re: macOS needs its grid back
#68Slightly off-topic: the old Aqua UI looks so much better. Not only it was much easier to see what's a control and what's text, but it also looked visually nicer (subjective, I know).
Funnily enough when Aqua was new i remember thinking Platinum looked so much better.
That is correct. Platinum still looks fantastic, carefully hewn out of the HIG. Early Aqua is a bit ostentatious and at the very least indulgent. Still better than the fucking flat-slop plus glarse vomit we have to put up with now.
Re: macOS needs its grid back
#69> Textmate (and its revolutionary text-snippets) were the catalyst to my migration
Hooo damn TextMate snippets, that brings back memories. Hard to convey how hyped I was to use these. That is also what drove me to Mac at that time. I remember writing hundreds of those snippets for every possible C++ construct, and to fill in variable name, type, loop counters and so on.
Re: macOS needs its grid back
#70DockDoor does this and a lot more. Its also open source https://dockdoor.net/
But we're not talking about Dock Door. Respect the Maker by giving him his time.