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macOS needs its grid back

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Re: macOS needs its grid back

#81

Post by thewebguyd »

pjmlp wrote: post #74
jlarocco wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been a while since I dumped OSX and went back to Linux, but IIRC, this setting gets reset every time the system updates. At some point Apple realized the "power user" market was too small, and they were better off treating all of their users like idiots. And that's when I left.

The power user market was never that big for Apple since Mac Classic came to be, that was the target market, the "idiots". Desktop power users were on the Acorn, Amiga, Atari and PC. As NeXT "acquired" Apple, Linux users thought OS X was the UNIX experience they were looking for, and since they were never part of Apple culture, keep getting their expectations wrong.

Apple also kind of accidentally won the power user/developer market. When macbooks became synonymous with SV devs, Windows sucked for everything that wasn't Win32 development, and Linux on the desktop wasn't quite there yet (workable, but no where near the state its in today). Your only other choice was mac. It was UNIX, could dual boot windows if you needed it, so it checked the boxes is nice looking hardware (this was around 2008-2012 era, PC hardware at the time was complete crap).

They never set out to build the ultimate power user machine, their target was still general consumers. They just happened to have the right product at the right time when everything else just failed to compete.

Had desktop linux been in a better state, or had MS built WSL earlier, things might look a lot different today.

Re: macOS needs its grid back

#82

Post by Nursie »

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

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 there (she doesn't live on the same continent) I went in and disabled notifications on all of her installed browsers.

As far as I'm concerned the whole 'let this website notify you' feature is an antipattern and yet another example of browser overreach.

Re: macOS needs its grid back

#83

Post by bartvk »

kdheiwns wrote: post #66
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…

The scary thing to me is how Apple makes you jump through hoops to install or use any sort of app, but when it comes to adding items to your login items, they don't even require you to grant permission. Tried some little throwaway app and realized you don't need it? Sucks for you. It added itself to your login items and it'll start up in the background every single time you turn on your computer. And it won't even te…

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.

Re: macOS needs its grid back

#84

Post by wodenokoto »

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…

Is the video still around? Share a link!

Re: macOS needs its grid back

#85

Post by pjmlp »

thewebguyd wrote: post #81
pjmlp wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The power user market was never that big for Apple since Mac Classic came to be, that was the target market, the "idiots". Desktop power users were on the Acorn, Amiga, Atari and PC. As NeXT "acquired" Apple, Linux users thought OS X was the UNIX experience they were looking for, and since they were never part of Apple culture, keep getting their expectations wrong.

Apple also kind of accidentally won the power user/developer market. When macbooks became synonymous with SV devs, Windows sucked for everything that wasn't Win32 development, and Linux on the desktop wasn't quite there yet (workable, but no where near the state its in today). Your only other choice was mac. It was UNIX, could dual boot windows if you needed it, so it checked the boxes is nice looking hardware (this…

Or even had they acquired Be instead.

Microsoft had "WSL" earlier, only badly.

The only reason I started with Linux at home back in 1995, was the half hearted UNIX subsystem on Windows NT.

Had they been serious about it I am sure GNU/Linux would never taken off.

As shown by Apple sales of folks buying POSIX instead.

Re: macOS needs its grid back

#86

Post by deafpolygon »

kdheiwns wrote: post #66
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…

The scary thing to me is how Apple makes you jump through hoops to install or use any sort of app, but when it comes to adding items to your login items, they don't even require you to grant permission. Tried some little throwaway app and realized you don't need it? Sucks for you. It added itself to your login items and it'll start up in the background every single time you turn on your computer. And it won't even te…

I get notifications that an item has added itself to your login items.

Re: macOS needs its grid back

#87

Post by _wire_ »

This is all normalization to iOS horseshit.

A list ordering is the most primitive and least memorable layout because lists sort arbitrarily and alphabetical listing of capabilities are not intuitive.

But the weirdness only grows from here:

For example, Photos shows library recents bottom to top, but pick-photo from library shows recents top to bottom

Portrait orientation puts "Done" on one end, landscape puts it on the other.

"Done" can be implied by a return tap or involve a "done" tap.

Some controls tap, some slide and some do both.

Release to release, the formats move around.

Format varies between apps & modes.

Mystery meat abounds

Holding the device a certain way causes spastic mode changes, which vary release to release.

Almost any way you touch the device instigates an action or mode change and some controls have 3+ levels of function:

WTF does the "power" button do?

- stand-by - camera shutter - emergency SOS vs shutdown - arbitrary mode change depending on accessibility setting

Bugs and features overlap.

The UI is never baked, ever more modal...

exhausting

Re: macOS needs its grid back

#88

Post by AbuAssar »

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/

We can do this natively in macos, isn’t it?

Re: macOS needs its grid back

#89

Post by linguae »

thewebguyd wrote: post #81
pjmlp wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The power user market was never that big for Apple since Mac Classic came to be, that was the target market, the "idiots". Desktop power users were on the Acorn, Amiga, Atari and PC. As NeXT "acquired" Apple, Linux users thought OS X was the UNIX experience they were looking for, and since they were never part of Apple culture, keep getting their expectations wrong.

Apple also kind of accidentally won the power user/developer market. When macbooks became synonymous with SV devs, Windows sucked for everything that wasn't Win32 development, and Linux on the desktop wasn't quite there yet (workable, but no where near the state its in today). Your only other choice was mac. It was UNIX, could dual boot windows if you needed it, so it checked the boxes is nice looking hardware (this…

Apple did openly court Unix users during the early days of Mac OS X. As a teenager during this era, Macs of this era were my dream machines due to Mac OS X, and I was so happy to buy an 2006 MacBook the summer after my freshman year of college with money earned from a summer research internship.

Here's a Titanium PowerBook G4 ad that says "Sends other Unix boxes to /dev/null": https://www.reddit.com/r/vintageunix/comments/b4kojo/sends_o...

Here's a snapshot of the software solutions page for the aluminum PowerBook G4 from November 2004, proudly touting Unix and even X11:

https://web.archive.org/web/20041126011836/http://www.apple....

Some quotes from the Power Mac G5 page (https://web.archive.org/web/20041126015955/http://www.apple....) from the same era:

"With the Power Mac G5, a researcher can now run both productivity applications and high-performance UNIX applications on a single system. Mac OS X Panther includes 64-bit optimized system math, vector and image libraries that take maximum advantage of the 64-bit G5 processor."

There was also a cluster in Virginia made of Power Mac G5s, which Apple also touted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_X_(supercomputer)

Re: macOS needs its grid back

#90

Post by pjerem »

Honestly, anyone who used and loved macOS in the past should really try a modern KDE Plasma desktop.

It’s not the same, per se, but it’s just … mature. It’s mature because it’s a nice mix of « it’s old and boring » + they took inspiration from everything that worked on macOS and Windows and stole it. They never removed features for any bullshit marketing reasons.

It’s not perfect : there are things that I like better on macOS (but they tend to be very rare tbh) or even Gnome or whatever I’m trying nowadays (it’s Niri!)… but I do think KDE is the best overall when it comes to respecting its user, giving him nice and clean defaults while giving them enough options to work however they like to.

And yes, that includes virtual desktops arranged in a custom grid. It’s not the default but the option is right there waiting for you to enable it if you want it.

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