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Tailscale's new macOS home

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Re: Tailscale's new macOS home

#271

Post by hombre_fatal »

mort96 wrote: post #57
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…

It's such a simple problem to solve too: when there are too many menu bar icons, put them in an overflow menu. A single icon which contains a list of icons. And let me arrange which icons go into the top bar and which go into the overflow menu. Windows solved this many many decades ago with their system tray overflow menu. Browsers solved it too, by letting you put extension icons in an overflow menu. It's not hard.…

The same problem exists on the left side of the notch, too.

File, Edit, View, History, Window, Help

Where there are too many items, it gets silently truncated. A simple dropdown icon on overflow is such obvious UI here.

Re: Tailscale's new macOS home

#272

Post by kevincox »

veidr wrote: post #270
bredren wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Well I mean, recently because they have no idea how to make good UIs, and have not read their own enormously detailed (and excellent) Human Interface Guidelines tomes from 10, 20, and probably 30 years go, and have basically regressed to barbarism. But before that relatively recent fall-off-a-cliff event (whatever it was that caused it, most of us will never know), it was pretty clear that they didn't want to implici…

> and have not read their own enormously detailed (and excellent) Human Interface Guidelines tomes

This seems to also apply to all new UIs produced by apple in the last 5 years.

Re: Tailscale's new macOS home

#273

Post by kiviuq »

“We don’t have any control over where things get rendered in the menu bar,” said one Tailscale engineer, who asked to go nameless so as to share their honest opinion. “You just say, ‘I want to be a menu bar app.’ They shove it up there, and that’s it, you end up where you end up.”

> said one Tailscale engineer, who asked to go nameless

Fear in a free society? There’s no contradiction here. A free society doesn't create a fearless society. Because freedom is the freedom to amass property. If you are not in that class of capital owners your fear is justified. Class society.

Re: Tailscale's new macOS home

#274

Post by abustamam »

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…

I'm curious if people even cared about the half-centimeter extra screen space they got when Apple introduced the notch into MacBooks. Arguably it makes a bigger difference in iPhones so I'll grant them that, even if it does hide half of the top bar of the iPhone. But did people hate the half centimeter bezel on macs that much that they wanted to lose an inch of their task bar? Genuinely curious how we got here!

Re: Tailscale's new macOS home

#275

Post by programmarchy »

I really dislike how apps add themselves to the menubar. And I hate if there's no option to remove it from the menubar. Icons with indicators like WiFi, Battery, etc. make sense. But if an app does not need an indicator like that, just add the capabilities to the Dock icon!

Re: Tailscale's new macOS home

#276

Post by abustamam »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #271
mort96 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's such a simple problem to solve too: when there are too many menu bar icons, put them in an overflow menu. A single icon which contains a list of icons. And let me arrange which icons go into the top bar and which go into the overflow menu. Windows solved this many many decades ago with their system tray overflow menu. Browsers solved it too, by letting you put extension icons in an overflow menu. It's not hard.…

The same problem exists on the left side of the notch, too. File, Edit, View, History, Window, Help Where there are too many items, it gets silently truncated. A simple dropdown icon on overflow is such obvious UI here.

One of the first things I tasked to do as a junior web developer at my first job was to make a horizontal nav menu that was responsive such that when the screen shrinks any overflow items go into a drop-down.

Baffling that a trillion dollar company can't do this.

Edit: apparently i don't know the difference between vertical and horizontal :)

Re: Tailscale's new macOS home

#277

Post by frantathefranta »

kiviuq wrote: post #273

“We don’t have any control over where things get rendered in the menu bar,” said one Tailscale engineer, who asked to go nameless so as to share their honest opinion. “You just say, ‘I want to be a menu bar app.’ They shove it up there, and that’s it, you end up where you end up.” > said one Tailscale engineer, who asked to go nameless Fear in a free society? There’s no contradiction here. A free society doesn't crea…

I thought it was just Tailscale trying to style their blogpost into a news article.

Re: Tailscale's new macOS home

#278

Post by chris_st »

kangraemin wrote: post #269

Moving from a menu bar app to a proper window is a bold call. Menu bar was convenient for "set it and forget it" but terrible for anything beyond toggling on/off. Curious if they'll keep the menu bar icon as a quick shortcut or kill it entirely.

From the article:

> As we noted at its September beta release, a windowed version of Tailscale’s macOS app doesn’t replace the menu bar app, but runs alongside it. It can be pulled up from the Dock or a Spotlight search, and makes a lot of Tailscale data and features more accessible.

Re: Tailscale's new macOS home

#279

Post by seabrookmx »

iamcalledrob wrote: post #244
seabrookmx wrote: post #25

> We’re working on a comparable UI for Windows devices As a Linux user and fan of good GUI apps, it always bums me out I'm stuck with the CLI-only options for apps like Tailscale. Even for a simple tray icon I have to resort to buggy GNOME extensions. I understand the fragmented ecosystem and small user-base on the desktop Linux side make it hard to justify, but I hope that changes one day!

Re: buggy GNOME extensions, it drives me nuts that GNOME has no built in support for menu bar icons/app indicators. There's a whole class of GUI apps that should run in the background until needed, and GNOME just has no solution here. I really don't get why they removed this functionality. I don't want a "service" model where you start/stop gui apps via systemd. And I don't want to keep a window around for no good re…

GNOME 44 has built-in support finally, but they're hidden in the quick settings menu. I prefer having them in the tray so I can see if they're running without having to click around.

Re: Tailscale's new macOS home

#280

Post by miki123211 »

TheDong wrote: post #205
corlinp wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I set up a Mac I have a short list of things that I need to install. When I set up Windows I have a much longer list of things that I need to un-install. I much prefer the former.

And when I setup nixos, I have a single command which installs/configures everything. Windows isn't the alternative if you're on hacker news, OpenBSD and linux are the alternatives.

To me, it's the difference between caring about productivity and caring about improving productivity.

If you care about productivity and want your computer to "just work", install stock Mac OS (with maybe a utility or two), and you don't have to worry about anything for the next 3 or so years.

If you want to constantly fiddle with configs and spend hours just so things work exactly the way you want them to, sure, go with a BSD or whatever.

No judgment either way, this is a hobby like any other. Some people like to paint, some people like assembling model airplanes, others like building their oS from source and making sure the window is exactly the shade of blue they want it to be. Nothing wrong with any of the three.

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