321–330 of 573 posts
I think pre-installed stuff is a slippery slope with bloatware on one end of the spectrum, and a bare bones alpine version on the other end.
I don't mind installing stuff. My preference is minimalism. I prefer to have 3+ independent apps to choose from where possible.
I think this is more about the ethos of the Mac. Unix (which is the underpinnings of Mac) was all about lots of small tools that build together to make something great, and if the base OS doesn’t have what you want then that’s a great third party (or DIY) opportunity. This bleeds over to the Mac in my opinion. I don’t want Apple to make everything, I want them to provide hooks and APIs that allow other people to make…
Alas, OpenDoc was a product of “interregnum” Apple, a font of innovation but had no singular vision (OpenDoc was one of many visions Apple promoted in the mid-1990s as the future of Mac development) and a track record of failed projects (Pink/Taligent then Copland). When Steve Jobs returned in 1997, he brought and enforced a singular vision for the Mac, one that revolved around NeXT technology. OpenDoc was killed under these circumstances:
I always feel like Apple must have some grand 1000IQ concept for window management and I just don't get it. Stage Manager, Spaces, Mission Control, Expose, Window Zooming, Hiding, Minimizing (which is different from Hiding), Fullscreen/Splitscreen... yet the first thing I do is install a third-party window manager. I tried for months to go vanilla and get my head around the features. But why, why do fullscreen window…
If you look at old screenshots of how people used desktop computers [1], it was rare to see fullscreen windows, even on the tiny monitors of the day, and when most people used only a single monitor. Today, we all have gigantic monitors, many have more than one, but for whatever reason people want to maximize or tile windows. Maybe it's the influence of the fullscreen only, unitasking paradigm from phones and tablet c…
https://appfire.com/ as an example, but I’m always flummoxed how ALL wordpress themes cap at 10 words per line of text in the body of the blogs, and 25cm of white blank on either side (10 inches).
I need a bigger screen.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
because they have a track record of mostly decent design decisions
IME it's the opposite
Same reason why Mac mouse doesn’t have right click and why ~double-click~ [edit: pressing “return”] on a folder is renaming, and why window controls are on a left side of a window and do things unlike MS Windows (not closing, not minimizing, not maximizing). Patents.
> Mac mouse doesn’t have right click This hasn't been true for over a decade. The Magic Mouse supports right-click (and the Magic Trackpad supports two-finger or bottom-right corner to right-click). Not sure if it's the default or not though.
Can an Ask HN self-post be clickbait? Apple isn’t refusing to do anything. They just haven’t done some minor thing that you personally would like. The fact that you’re “shocked” by something as banal as “lack of window snapping” is kind of funny actually.
Apple refuses to do things all the time. Aside from the aforementioned window-management gaffes, here's what I think is the most ridiculous design defect of the iPhone, which I reported first as an engineer there and repeatedly as an independent dev: It does not provide audible notifications of MISSED CALLS. I mean... WTF? A 1990s StarTAC (and probably most other phones) provided this obvious feature. So did 1980s an…
I always feel like Apple must have some grand 1000IQ concept for window management and I just don't get it. Stage Manager, Spaces, Mission Control, Expose, Window Zooming, Hiding, Minimizing (which is different from Hiding), Fullscreen/Splitscreen... yet the first thing I do is install a third-party window manager. I tried for months to go vanilla and get my head around the features. But why, why do fullscreen window…
If you look at old screenshots of how people used desktop computers [1], it was rare to see fullscreen windows, even on the tiny monitors of the day, and when most people used only a single monitor. Today, we all have gigantic monitors, many have more than one, but for whatever reason people want to maximize or tile windows. Maybe it's the influence of the fullscreen only, unitasking paradigm from phones and tablet c…
I keep my terminal (read: text editor) fullscreen because then I have enough horizontal space to have two panes open next to each other (sometimes with an additional directory viewer to the left).
99% of the time, I'm in the terminal or the web browser. I don't understand what I would gain from not maximizing them, but I do understand what I would lose.
This appears every now and then on HN. Window management in macOS is superficially similar but profoundly different from Windows or most Linux DEs. It's got a fixed menu bar which windows are independent from. That alone already changes a lot and has deep implications. My advice is to learn how and why it's different instead of trying to make it behave as something it's not. Waiting for Apple to turn it into a chimer…
Different enough, fine! Would you please kindly provide a reference to a guide explaining the right way to operate macOS windows, preferably with some explanation of the concepts behind it. and the advantages it offers over the established practices known from elsewhere? E.g. vi navigation is pretty different from Notepad's, but it's relatively easy to make a case when it shows certain advantages. What are the superp…
Off the top of my head: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/amp/
The after show of this podcast: https://atp.fm/96
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple loves to hide functionality to the point where it essentially doesn't exist. When I started at Apple as an engineer, the first bug I filed was "Can't resize windows from their edges" (or any corner except one). Just mind-bogglingly stupid. And when Apple finally does capitulate and admit that others have done it better, they petulantly try to hide the functionality anyway. In the case of the windows, there's no…
My favorite is how, if you have multiple windows of the same app visible, when you cmd-tab to that app, it moves all of the windows to the top of the stack. So if you want to switch between windows of two different apps, you better hide the ones you don't use.
On the one hand X11 sort of sucked with it's inconsistent window handling mechanisms. On the other hand because there was no central policy some very good novel productivity advancements were made in X11 space. select/single click paste, focus follows mouse, don't raise on focus. tiling window managers.