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macOS needs its grid back

blog.hopefullyuseful.com

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Re: macOS needs its grid back

#41

Post by rmunn »

thfuran wrote: post #34
joshspankit wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a long time, I’ve believed that the actual solution is to make the system transparent enough that a compromised system is obvious. Imagine playing hide and go seek in the salt flats

What does that actually mean?

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonneville_Salt_Flats — the salt flats are extremely flat (as the name implies), and because of all the salt, no vegetation can survive. Look at the pictures: there are no trees, no grass, no hiding places at all. Anyone standing (or even lying prone) on the salt flats is visible to anyone else for miles around.

GP was saying that systems should be "transparent enough that a compromised system is obvious". I'm not entirely convinced that that's possible (On Trusting Trust should have taught us that compromised systems can create places for the compromise to hide), which means that the salt flats analogy is not a great analogy, IMHO. But at least now you understand the analogy.

Re: macOS needs its grid back

#42

Post by OberstKrueger »

ranebo wrote: post #11
Analemma_ wrote: post #3

Oh man, thank you! I was just complaining the other day about the missing Spaces grid… when they first took it away in Lion I looked frantically for the setting to bring it back, with no such luck. Ironically, I think the reason they took it away was to help with fullscreen macOS apps, which are a garbage anti-feature it doesn’t seem like anybody uses. Long live the grid!

Part of the reason I wanted to to make the app is because _I actually do like fullscreen apps_. Or at least maybe I learned to after they took away the grid. In any case I certainly wanted this app to work with them.

As a fellow fullscreen liker (there are dozens of us! dozens!), this looks quite intriguing to me. A grid layout always fit better with my mental model of how these types of spaces should work, since I could use rows as categories of work and columns as specific applications within that category. Or one of a few other mental models I've used over the years.

Re: macOS needs its grid back

#44

Post by hajile »

Humans have good spatial memory and having a handful of statically-positioned desktops in a 2D plane makes navigation intuitive and consistent.

The real issue is how the ORDER of the desktops changes all the time which messes with that spatial memory and kills a lot of the productivity improvements. A consistent straight line would still be worse than a grid, but still MUCH better than the current situation.

Re: macOS needs its grid back

#45

Post by ido »

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).

Funnily enough when Aqua was new i remember thinking Platinum looked so much better.

Re: macOS needs its grid back

#46

Post by gnarlouse »

We need a new social media platform purely for Apple product experiences. Stay with me. People post their experiences with various parts of all their products, from hardware button position to software design and behavior. Upvotes are "It's Genius", downvotes are "It's Shit" -- because Apple has completely shirked its much needed Jobsian specter.

The joke, of course, is that I imagine a good 75% of the reviews would be "it's shit."

Re: macOS needs its grid back

#47

Post by regexorcist »

pwg wrote: post #29

> Two decades ago I had a better Mac desktop experience than I have today. Two decades ago was 2006. I have the same desktop experience today as I had two decades ago (Fvwm2) and have had the grid virtual desktop layout this author misses so much for the entire time via the Fvwm2 (and Fvwm before that) virtual desktops feature. One of the reasons I switched to Fvwm (I no longer remember when, but sometime in the mid…

Reading the article as a Linux user was almost infuriating. I can't imagine having my workflow, something I've refined for my needs over the years, taken away from me at the wish of a company. Before I switched to Plasma and Wayland I ran XFCE with the exact same config for maybe 15 years, unbothered by updates.

Re: macOS needs its grid back

#48

Post by mrpippy »

syabro wrote: post #27
manwe150 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s likely not quite the reason. It is to make you have to pause to think if this is the action you want to take. On the flip side, many websites ask if I want to allow notifications. I almost never do. I was looking at settings recently and surprised how often I’d clicked yes by accident (maybe about 5% false click rate?)

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

Right, that’s why you get a simpler yes/no dialog for notifications, and a conplex “navigate to this settings pane and click a separate button” flow for a keylogger

Re: macOS needs its grid back

#49

Post by antran22 »

gnarlouse wrote: post #46

We need a new social media platform purely for Apple product experiences. Stay with me. People post their experiences with various parts of all their products, from hardware button position to software design and behavior. Upvotes are "It's Genius", downvotes are "It's Shit" -- because Apple has completely shirked its much needed Jobsian specter. The joke, of course, is that I imagine a good 75% of the reviews would…

They already have that, it's the Apple Support Community. Apple still manages to neglect most complaints on the site.

Honestly, people have been complaining about Apple's decision on every semi-Apple-related forum forever. Still didn't prevent them from rolling out Liquid Glass. Not sure another one would do the job

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