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Tailscale's new macOS home

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Re: Tailscale's new macOS home

#101

Post by kccqzy »

bredren wrote: post #60
alin23 wrote: 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…

This is not an unknown issue at the fruit co. Can anyone speculate on any rational if not good reasons for not solving this problem yet?

I don’t work at the fruit co but since you asked for speculations. Mine: the fruit co designers are still designing a nice interface to show the overflow, because they obviously think that the Windows tray overflow looked inelegant and are still searching for the ideal UI. But the designers themselves don’t have a lot of menu bar apps so they don’t think it’s a priority.

Re: Tailscale's new macOS home

#102

Post by ezarowny »

CharlesW wrote: post #7

I personally found it confusing and un-Mac-like that quitting the configuration app also now stops the Tailscale service. It was unfortunate to discover this while I was AFK. My recommendation is to rethink it to work like apps like 1Password, Default Folder, Keyboard Maestro, Ice, etc., where I can always easily open a configuration app, but the service must be intentionally/knowingly quit via either the configurati…

This was driving me nuts but at some point very recently they added a "Hide Dock Icon" to settings.

Re: Tailscale's new macOS home

#103

Post by snowwrestler »

nozzlegear wrote: post #49

Isn't it true that Apple just prefers apps not use the menu bar in the first place? I'm not sure where I had read that, but it might explain why Apple doesn't improve the menu bar. Personally I'm of the opinion that they should improve it because the current situation is untenable. But am I misremembering this?

Yes, it was a huge mistake to allow any random app developer to claim such a prominent and limited piece of screen real estate. But it’s been an option for so long now that everyone will scream bloody murder if they try take it away.

Apple’s opinion seems to be: running out of space happens to only a few people running tons of menu-bar-loving apps, so if you are dorky enough to run into this problem, you should be dorky enough to solve it yourself.

Re: Tailscale's new macOS home

#104

Post by varenc »

I always change my screen resolution to avoid the notch on my Mac. It's non-obvious how to do this but you end up with a slightly shorter resolution than the default.

I know this means I'm wasting potential pixels, and wasting all the engineer effort that went into the nearly bezel-free design, but worth it IMHO.

Re: Tailscale's new macOS home

#105

Post by jasomill »

nozzlegear wrote: post #49

Isn't it true that Apple just prefers apps not use the menu bar in the first place? I'm not sure where I had read that, but it might explain why Apple doesn't improve the menu bar. Personally I'm of the opinion that they should improve it because the current situation is untenable. But am I misremembering this?

Not exactly, though many apps violate Apple's Human Interface Guidelines for macOS menu bar extras[1]:

Let people — not your app — decide whether to put your menu bar extra in the menu bar. Typically, people add a menu bar extra to the menu bar by changing a setting in an app’s settings window. To ensure discoverability, however, consider giving people the option of doing so during setup.

Avoid relying on the presence of menu bar extras. The system hides and shows menu bar extras regularly, and you can’t be sure which other menu bar extras people have chosen to display or predict the location of your menu bar extra.

Consider exposing app-specific functionality in other ways, too. For example, you can provide a Dock menu that appears when people Control-click your app’s Dock icon. People can hide or choose not to use your menu bar extra, but a Dock menu is aways available when your app is running.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

Re: Tailscale's new macOS home

#106

Post by harikb »

oaweoifjwpo wrote: post #62
paxys wrote: 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

I struggled with disappearing icons (like our company VPN client - which wasn't tailscale by the way) thinking the app was somehow "stuck". I would go kill the app, restart machine etc - during restart it would get fixed "automatically" by being an app earlier in the order!

Took me months to figure out it was running afterall and just hidden by the notch.

How hard is for apple to move the "least used icons" to a fold? (but still accessible)

Re: Tailscale's new macOS home

#107

Post by KellyCriterion »

I stumbled across TailScale while I asked ClaudeAI regarding switching off of VPN: I wasnt aware of the tool.

Im "shocked" how perfect it functions! It worked out of the box for a fairly simple but old windows setup where I could apply it: Everything was perfectly fine, super user friendly in the beginning.

Actually one of the tools that you could use to admin your mum & dad computer

Re: Tailscale's new macOS home

#108

Post by wrs »

ryanisnan wrote: post #93
wrs wrote: post #82

> no options to rearrange the menu bar items This, at least, is not correct. Hold down Command and drag an icon to rearrange the order.

I think they mean developers have no way of requesting or specifying order.

Long experience with Window Taskbar icons has demonstrated you should not give developers that sort of control, only users.

Re: Tailscale's new macOS home

#109

Post by airstrike »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #8
paxys wrote: 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.

macOS UI/UX has been declining at an accelerating pace with each new version.

My only hope at this point is it gets _so_ bad it becomes an absolute meme and they get around to fixing it.

Re: Tailscale's new macOS home

#110

Post by denkmoon »

Diti wrote: post #56
nightski wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just use WireGuard to connect my local network. I see no point in throwing a middleman into the mix.

This comment might be of interest to help you understand what Tailscale does that WireGuard cannot: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47064875

I would phrase that as what Tailscale does that is more convenient than wg. If you “barely know what a subnet is” go for it. wg is easy as pie though, and just don’t maintain 90 tunnels… You don’t need a full mesh. An extra hop or two, especially within a lan, won’t hurt.
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