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Native Instant Space Switching on macOS

arhan.sh

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Re: Native Instant Space Switching on macOS

#281

Post by alsetmusic »

abustamam wrote: post #249
aylmao wrote: post #52

I grew up with this animation so I didn't consider it annoying until I bought a new Macbook a couple years ago. I noticed sometimes I would press keyboard shortcuts before my system's focus had switched. Just little stumbles here and there, some inoffensive, some annoying, but who knows maybe I didn't catch enough sleep. Over time it happened often enough that I decided to google it, and it turns out my muscle memory…

Wow I never realized I had this problem until now! I never even considered the reason keys would dispatch to the wrong window was because of the animation. I just knew that sometimes when switching workspaces I'd have to wait until whatever window I'm switching to has focus before typing.

I believe I first learned to shorten animations on MacOSXHints.com (gone now). Regardless, I learned a lot of great "enhancements" here:

https://github.com/mathiasbynens/dotfiles

And here's the blog of the person who ran MacOSXHints.com:

https://robservatory.com/make-your-macos-dock-suck/

Fun aside, I'm pretty sure that my mention of a system issue that I read about that morning on MacOSXHints.com was a helper in landing a job in an interview that afternoon. What I mean is, I said, oh are you talking about "whatever thing on that site today…?" and it demonstrated that I was familiar with whatever internals.

Re: Native Instant Space Switching on macOS

#282

Post by coldtea »

veber-alex wrote: post #265
mort96 wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Complaining about the distinction between apps and windows isn't a "stupid reason" to complain though. Say I use Slack, Teams and Outlook. If I use their Electron versions, I switch between them with cmd+tab. If I use them in separate browser windows, I switch between them by using cmd+tab to switch to Firefox, then cmd+` to cycle through windows until I find the one I want. That's weird; how you switch between these…

I would also add to this that in order to open two instances of an app the app explicitly needs to support this. For example, you can't open 2 instances of Calculator.app side by side. This is really annoying.

Yeah, I always want 2 calculator apps when I'm speed calculating... what?

Re: Native Instant Space Switching on macOS

#284

Post by taude »

Barbing wrote: post #118
taude wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar I just use RayCast Hotkeys to bring mostly full-sized apps of my choice to the forefront and not worry about much. I'm also just optimizing around a small single screen setup these days for focusing on stuff. option-cmd-o BOOM, outlook opt-cmd-g Bang, Ghostty opt-cmd-v POW, VSCode opt-cmd-s Boff, Slack etc etc... ALSO: I learned this from some prior thread on something similar.

How does that compare to using Alt Tab? And I forget if you have to suffer through any animation at all when you do it that way

No animations for quickly switching to displaying apps in the foreground

I do use alt-tab, to switch between the multiple windows of the same app. (Something's happened with my AltTab config, not sure if it's due to corp background system software or a Tahoe update, but I no longer see the mini screen shots of the different window states.)

Re: Native Instant Space Switching on macOS

#285

Post by alsetmusic »

PaulHoule wrote: post #100
veber-alex wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such an insane bug to still have around all these years. Are apple engineers not using macOS?

I think Apple's self-image of being the epitome of design actually acts against them. Leads to monstrosities like Liquid Glass kinda vandalizing random parts of the UI in small ways that I intuitively read as "they are anti-anti-aliasing" not "they added cool refraction effects." It used to be you'd see something in a well-chosen color, now it is just a muddy kind of greyish brownish whatever. I'd like to see them ma…

> too easy to turn reject iPhone chips into netbooks in 2026.

You mean the flagship chip from their former pro phones? I was with you until you said this. Makes you sound out of touch or ideological.

I think they've been on the worst design tear since they went to OSX for the past eight-ish years. At no point does their awful software design intrude on their awesome chip designs.

My partner's first Mac is a MacBook Neo and she loves it. Pink. Looks pretty good. Does what she needs. Not right for me, probably not right for you, but what I'd tell my mother to buy if it existed when I told her to buy a regular MacBook Air.

Re: Native Instant Space Switching on macOS

#286

Post by alsetmusic »

godelski wrote: post #201
PaulHoule wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Apple's self-image of being the epitome of design actually acts against them. Leads to monstrosities like Liquid Glass kinda vandalizing random parts of the UI in small ways that I intuitively read as "they are anti-anti-aliasing" not "they added cool refraction effects." It used to be you'd see something in a well-chosen color, now it is just a muddy kind of greyish brownish whatever. I'd like to see them ma…

> I think Apple's self-image of being the epitome of design actually acts against them. Leads to monstrosities like Liquid Glass kinda vandalizing random parts of the UI I'm pretty confident many Apple employees have eyes, and thus are aware of how absurd Liquid Glass is (wtf, my iPhone capitalizes that but not a standalone i?!?!) So assuming everyone at Apple isn't deaf (it's all over public discourse), blind (it lo…

> Maybe Apple engineers are afraid to push back on management?

I can tell you with confidence that this isn't the issue. HIG (Human Interface Guidelines: a design spec that became a department / org) overrides them.

Re: Native Instant Space Switching on macOS

#287

Post by alsetmusic »

naikrovek wrote: post #270
drob518 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steve Jobs knew what he wanted and was willing to put his foot down in order to get it. Yea, I’m sure he was difficult to work with and drove people insane, but he was the plumb line that kept Apple driving in (mostly) the right direction. Now, it seems like they have bored designers trying to make a name for themselves with a “new” and “revolutionary” interface in Liquid Glass, which nobody likes and is less usable…

Well, the UI leader behind Liquid Glass is no longer with the company, replaced by a long time Apple employee known for his eye for detail. I do t think Liquid Glass is going to go away soon, Apple doesn’t seem to reverse itself ever, but I do expect Liquid Glass to become better over time. We’ll see what WWDC brings on that front I guess.

> Apple doesn’t seem to reverse itself ever

I agree, but also they broke that rule very recently when they lowered the price of a display and issued refunds one month after intro. The VESA price dropped $400. I learned about it from Accidental Tech Podcast.

https://www.apple.com/us-edu/shop/buy-mac/studio-display-xdr

Re: Native Instant Space Switching on macOS

#288

Post by alsetmusic »

jbverschoor wrote: post #165
harrall wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My pet opinion is that Steve Jobs was an asshole but an asshole that used his own products and used his powers of complaining to steer the whole ship to fix major "this annoys me everyday" bugs. From my experience, "annoying but not blockers" bugs are often very neglected compared to (1) bugs that actually break things and (2) feature work. Neglecting quality of life issues leads to the "do you even use your product?…

This is exactly my thought as well. Soo many things either work buggy, laggy, inconsistent, or don’t work at all Filling bugs doesn’t help. And I don’t think anyone is inventive to fix bugs. Resolving sure. But closing WONTFIX or NEEDSINFO is also a resolution. Most of what I do is chrome +Linux terminals and vscode anyway And the only reason I’m on Mac is because of hardware, encryption, and ease of backup/restore/w…

There's a windowing bug that was introduced in 2009 that I'm confident will persist until MacOS has another MacOSX-style transition to something entirely new. They need someone who cares about fit&finish more than features driving the ship. That's not what gets promoted to the top, unfortunately.

Re: Native Instant Space Switching on macOS

#289

Post by abustamam »

alsetmusic wrote: post #281
abustamam wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow I never realized I had this problem until now! I never even considered the reason keys would dispatch to the wrong window was because of the animation. I just knew that sometimes when switching workspaces I'd have to wait until whatever window I'm switching to has focus before typing.

I believe I first learned to shorten animations on MacOSXHints.com (gone now). Regardless, I learned a lot of great "enhancements" here: https://github.com/mathiasbynens/dotfiles And here's the blog of the person who ran MacOSXHints.com: https://robservatory.com/make-your-macos-dock-suck/ Fun aside, I'm pretty sure that my mention of a system issue that I read about that morning on MacOSXHints.com was a helper in lan…

Nice resources! I've use MacOS for over ten years and I never really modified anything other than my zshrc. I'll check then out!

Re: Native Instant Space Switching on macOS

#290

Post by jzer0cool »

coldpie wrote: post #275
bigfudge wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who never uses spaces or any window manager, what am I actually missing? What’s wrong with cmd tab and just switching between apps? Is this going to be some Kind of major epiphany?!

> What’s wrong with cmd tab and just switching between apps? Open 3 terminal windows. Try to switch back & forth between just two of them with a keyboard shortcut (without mentally tracking whether or not to press Shift). You can't. Open a browser and two terminal windows. Try to switch between one terminal (your editor) and the browser window (your reference docs), without also bringing the other terminal above the…

Using built-in tooling (settings) could anyone share your ways to get to app + switch to correct window.
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