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macOS needs its grid back

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Re: macOS needs its grid back

#201

Post by andrewl-hn »

felixding wrote: post #24

Slightly 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).

To be fair, so are many other UIs. Windows 95-style boxy buttons and bevels make the content look organized. Every possible action gets its button that looks like a button. You often see the total set of available actions by looking at a toolbar. You don't need to second-guess whether some piece of content itself is clickable / editable or not.

Also, everything has excessive padding now. Modern Windows control panel UIs often feel like a multicolumn wall of text with lots of empty space and a few switches dropped in, and to fit the same amount if options as the older UI they had to either hide some toggles because "known needs them anymore" or introduce extra intermediary navigation steps. As a result the new Control Panel feels bloated and less useful.

Re: macOS needs its grid back

#202

Post by xp84 »

bayindirh wrote: post #108
bartvk wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I try to always install with Homebrew. Because then you can uninstall with the --zap option, for example: $ brew uninstall --zap aerospace Usually it blows away everything associated with the app, including cached files, configuration in ~/Library and ~/.config, etc. Very useful. It'll leave a non-functional login item which isn't active and can't be active.

I like the app uninstaller included in Forklift. You open Applications folder, and delete an app. A window appears with all the associated files Forklift can find (which is extremely accurate, BTW), and you can uninstall everything you want from there. For .pkg files, there's UninstallPKG which reads the package manifest and properly uninstalls it.

I would like to take this moment to rage against Apple for shipping that package installer, literally 25 years ago, and never once having apparently even considered a native, out of the box way to uninstall programs that were installed that way.

Speaking of packages, even more embarrassing, Microsoft Windows literally beat them to shipping a first-party package manager. I feel like Apple lives in a fantasy land that the drag’n’drop app install method from the classic macOS is some kind of platonic ideal — never mind that they can’t stop half the apps out there from going outside that paradigm and installing their crap all over the place.

Re: macOS needs its grid back

#203

Post by [deleted] »

ramathornn wrote: post #39

Magnet is easily one of the best mac apps i've ever purchased - makes window management so easy and it works great every time. Just Command + Shift and then you can pick any portion of the screen you want the window to go to. That paired with multiple desktops does the trick for me! Highly reccommend (not sure if it's okay to share URLs? sorry in case it's not): https://magnet.crowdcafe.com/

[deleted]

Re: macOS needs its grid back

#204

Post by xp84 »

projektfu wrote: post #199
jahller wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you really underestimate the will of people to not change anything that annoys them about their OS. they will click 1 million times a popup away before even considering that it could be resolved indefinitely by an option change. i think Apple's system works well to keep the average user safe.

This is evidenced by the people who constantly dismissed the Wi-Fi pop-up on iOS. Which is just about everyone I know with an iPhone.

Which pop-up do you mean?

Re: macOS needs its grid back

#205

Post by wolvoleo »

comboy wrote: post #109
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…

> As a complete nerd, you'd think maybe I'd like that I can prove my skills like this, but it comes off as deeply disrespectful to me as the user that I can't disable this. You seem to have understood the problem. But then you didn't follow. If there was a way to disable this, first thing that the grandma would do is watch a video how to disable that and lose security from then on. Of course it is not perfect, but th…

Their approach is not decent. There should be some kind of master key to get full admin access. Leaving al the keys in the hand of a mega corporation is asking for trouble.

It's gone so far that even tech people now think that having root access to a mobile device is somehow scary. Well guess what that root access is still there for the manufacturer. It needs it for stuff like updates. It just shields you from having any kind of input or visibility on what is going on.

And once you've given up your admin control to the mega corporation, your government is going to be next. They'll be demanding backdoors and regulatory bullshit like age verification and snooping backdoors. Even today the EU launched yet another chatcontrol proposal. Eventually they'll manage to get it through when they've paid off enough representatives.

Keeping full control is the only way to prevent this.

Re: macOS needs its grid back

#206

Post by bitexploder »

drob518 wrote: post #198

I’m convinced that the biggest threat to good UIs are the majority of professional UI designers. Think of it this way… Half of all UI designers are below the median. These people chose UI design as a career. You don’t advance your career by simply defending the status quo year after year. To advance you need to design something new. So, you do. You do whether whatever was there before is working well or not. Because…

This assumes that every designer is on the bell curve at the big tech firms in the roles that can influence this. I am not defending modern UI/UX, but that is quite an assumption.

Re: macOS needs its grid back

#207

Post by xp84 »

Nursie wrote: post #82
syabro wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but the damage of notifications is almost zero compared to keylogger IMHO

Depends on what you allow and what your level of sophistication is. My mother recently had "There are antivirus notifications taking over half the screen, do I need to click on them and renew Norton?" She'd been somewhere and done something that had allowed an unscrupulous site to flood her with alerts directing her to give payment information to a scam site pretending to be antivirus renewal. When I finally got over…

> 'let this website notify you' feature is an antipattern and yet another example of browser overreach.

Yes and no. Prompting for it modally the way they do now is for sure wild, but for some webapps (e.g. Slack) it makes plenty of sense. I think Firefox used to have a UI they used for some things where they'd inject a non-modal bar with a couple of buttons inside the content area. This sounds like the right type of UI, maybe at the bottom of the viewport.

  site.com can send notifications when you're not on this site.  (Get Notifications from site.com) (Dismiss)

Re: macOS needs its grid back

#208

Post by airstrike »

mortenjorck wrote: post #54

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 idiom…

FWIW your video is amazing. make it 2D and add hotkeys to go to spaces and I'll use it right away

Re: macOS needs its grid back

#209

Post by xp84 »

klodolph wrote: post #26
xp84 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the permissions are treated the same way though. Microphone access. Screen sharing access. etc. Yes, all could be used to spy on you in evil ways, but the replacement of a straightforward "Want to grant this app the following permissions?" with these stupid little spelunks through the garbage app that is Settings irritates me every time. Apple should throw this whole thing out and replace it with first-launch lis…

Honestly, I think the permissions model for desktop and laptop computers is way too permissive to begin with, I think it just kinda sucks and doesn’t do its job. Apple is kind of fixing it but there is a long way to go. There have been alarm bells ringing in my head for a long time with all these settings, and the fact that they’re buried in the settings app gives me a lot of peace of mind. I’ll click through a lot o…

> I think the permissions model for desktop and laptop computers is way too permissive to begin with

Well, if you feel that way, they do make platforms that sound like a better fit: iPad, iOS, even Android kinda fits that mold. I would call them "toy computers" but that is my bias. It's not a real computer to me if I am not even in control of what code runs on it.

Re: macOS needs its grid back

#210

Post by boronine »

ubercore wrote: post #146
leojfc wrote: post #142

Yes, and I'd go a step further: OSes in general need a concept of a 'project' or 'task' or whatever, which a) cuts across apps and b) integrates deeply with windowing and spaces. Multitasking and context switching has been increasing for years, instant messaging boosted them again, and agent-based workflows are only going to push further in that direction. The OS needs to support that, and it's not an app-level conce…

I make a version of this happen with Aerospace on macOS.

For anyone wondering, you can use Aerospace purely as a workspace switching solution without the tiling: https://www.boronine.com/2025/02/09/Instant-Workspace-Switch...
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