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The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe

noheger.at

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Re: The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe

#202

Apple is at the point where they need a Jobs-ian correction again. Steve Jobs would have had a fit over this product line. As '97 era Jobs put it, "The products suck! There's no sex in them anymore!" My modest proposal for Apple diehards (especially employees) is to feed all the data that exists on Jobs into a multi-modal model so that Apple can hear just how much their shit sucks from Jobs' digital ghost. A good sta…

>"The products suck! There's no sex in them anymore!"

Enter "Lickable Pixels" -- the phrase that stuck to describe the Aqua era.

Introducing Mac OS X's Aqua interface, Jobs said at Macworld in January 2000: "We made the buttons on the screen look so good you'll want to lick them."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_(user_interface)

Then there was the red hot irresistibly sexy and well designed IBM Thinkpad TrackPoint -AKA- Keyboard Clitoris -AKA- Joy Button, and IBM's explicitly lascivious "So Hot, We Had To Make It Red" ad.

https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/hodidb/so_hot_we_...

Ted Selker, the inventor of the TrackPoint, told me the story of how that ad got written and refined by focus groups: He slyly suggested the slogan, and IBM's ad designers begrudgingly put it on the page in small text in the corner, below the photo and ad copy. Then they A/B tested it with the text a little bigger, then a bit bolder, then even higher, and it finally worked its way up to the top of the page in BIG HUGE BOLD TEXT!

More about Ted's work:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34425576

Ted Selker fondly reminds me of "Mr. Lossoff" the "Button Man" in "A Nero Wolfe Mystery” episode “The Mother Hunt”, where Archie drops in on "Mister Lossoff’s Distinguished Buttons” in the garment district of New York:

https://youtu.be/h-QgWOSVKm4?t=724

He's totally THAT enthusiastic, a distinguished expert fiendishly obsessed with buttons! He even carries around a big bag of replacement Joy Buttons that he hands out for free like candy to anyone who’s worn theirs out.

I know this from personal experience: Ted and his wife Ellen once ran into me working on my Thinkpad at some coffee shop in Mountain View, and Ted noticed my worn out Joy Button. He excused himself to run out to his car to fetch his Button Bag, while Ellen smiled at me and rolled her eyes up into her head and shrugged, and we hung out and talked until he got back. I really appreciated a nice new crisp one with fresh bumpy texture, because mine was totally worn down, and it made his day to get rid of a few. (I imagine their house has hoards of boxes and piles of bags full of them!)

The common thread: design that makes you come. Back for more, that is. Buttons to lick till they click. Nubs to rub till they're bald. Products you touched obsessively until they're worn smooth. Tahoe gives us clownish corners we can't even grab. Apple dropped the ball -- and frankly, it's a kick in the nuts.

Re: The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tahoe is uniquely bad in so many ways, so I tried the Asahi Fedora Remix with Gnome on my M2 Mac Mini. Aesthetically I was more attracted to Gnome, it feels like what we lost with Tahoe. Tahoe to me feels like a really chopped Android skin or something. I made it a few weeks on the Fedora Remix but ended up having to switch back to Mac over missing webcam drivers and other random hardware issues. Plus there’s little…

>ended up having to switch back to Mac over missing webcam drivers and other random hardware issues This has been my experience every time I try Linux. If I had to guess, tracing down all these little things is just that last mile that is so hard and isn't the fun stuff to do in making an OS, which is why it is always ignored. If Linux ever did it, it would keep me.

One solution to this problem is to buy from a vendor that installs Linux for you (e.g. System76). Much like with Apple, they can sell you a fully functional computer that way.

Re: The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe

#205

Does anyone know if Stephen Lemay replacing Dye will potentially "save" the increasing mess that is OSX, at least UX wise, or is it more of a meaningless figurehead swap in a big org? Tahoe is tragically bad by almost every UX measure, and following various Apple subreddits i wonder if they just don't care anymore - since the majority of people are shocked by the amateurishness of both bugs and design choices in the…

He will prevent it from getting much worse than it would have under another decade of Dye, but I don't think he can totally reverse the trend. I think this is just what happens to companies as they get older. Most of the people who pioneered the Human Interface Guidelines aren't at the company anymore, and management doesn't see much financial growth in Mac sales compared to AI and services.

> compared to AI and services

It's probably the services (Care, iCloud, Music, and even TV), Apple's AI isn't on the overall map at all compared to the competition.

Re: The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe

#206

This post is very well presented and it highlights how absolutely bizarre the latest update was. The video demonstration was also very well done. I remember a few years ago, people complained when Apple merely made the entire operating system uglier. (Something about a gradient on the battery?) A lot of people would talk hyperbolically ("apple KILLED macos!"), and that's indistinguishable to an outsider when an updat…

I especially liked the part with the hand trying to grab the plate. Perfect imagery.

Re: The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe

#207
post #159

I have been using Moom for a long time for especially two things: - moving windows without holding from any particular position - resizing windows without grabbing a particular corner Life changing small things.

I didn't realize it was moom giving me my "move app to other monitor" hotkey, and moom didn't launch on startup after upgrading to tahoe. I've been using that hotkey for years. That's when I realized there's no default hotkey for moving an app to an external monitor. That is absolutely wild. (Happy to be wrong)

I think there is an option in Keyboard Shortcuts to set a keybinding for moving to other displays, but it‘s not by default like in Windows.

For this kind of stuff Raycast is more than enough though. I use its window management features extensively.

Re: The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Luckily for Apple, Windows 11 is not exactly in a position to attract switchers. Yes, but Linux is finally in that position, not to mention we're seeing silicon from intel and amd that can compete with the M series on mobile devices.

Linux isn't in position regarding display/UI. It doesn't handles HiDPI (e.g 4K) screen uniformly, leading to a lot of blurry apps depending on the display abstraction used (Wayland/X11) and compositor (GNOME, KDE, etc, all behave differently). Let's not even talk about the case when you have monitors that have different DPI, something that is handled seamlessly by MacOS, unlike Linux where it feels like a d20 roll de…

> Linux isn't in position regarding display/UI. It doesn't handles HiDPI (e.g 4K) screen uniformly, leading to a lot of blurry apps depending on the display abstraction used (Wayland/X11) and compositor (GNOME, KDE, etc, all behave differently).

I have been using a 4K display for years on Linux without issues. The scaling issue with non-native apps is a problem that Windows also struggles with btw.

Re: The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux isn't in position regarding display/UI. It doesn't handles HiDPI (e.g 4K) screen uniformly, leading to a lot of blurry apps depending on the display abstraction used (Wayland/X11) and compositor (GNOME, KDE, etc, all behave differently). Let's not even talk about the case when you have monitors that have different DPI, something that is handled seamlessly by MacOS, unlike Linux where it feels like a d20 roll de…

It also doesn't offer a Mac-style desktop environment, which is one of the things keeping me away. KDE/Cinnamon/XFCE lean more Windows-style, GNOME/Pantheon (Elementary) is more like iPadOS/Android in desktop mode. My productivity takes a big hit in Windows-style environments and I just don't enjoy using them. I hope to put my money where my mouth is and contribute to one of the tiny handful of nascent Mac-like envir…

So apparently when Canonical was the gorilla in desktop Linux, they had a push to have apps make their menus accessible via API. KDE supports that protocol. There are KDE widgets that will draw a Mac-style menu bar from it.

That means you can take the standard KDE "panel" and split it in two halves: a dock for the bottom edge, and a menus/wifi settings/clock bar for the top edge.

There are some things I don't know how to work around - like Chrome defaulting to Windows-style close buttons and keybindings, but if the Start menu copy is the thing keeping you off Linux, you can mod it more than you think you can.

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