Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe

noheger.at

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

911–920 of 1001 posts

Re: The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe

#911

Post by creeble »

lynndotpy wrote: post #18

This post is very well presented and it highlights how absolutely bizarre the latest update was. The video demonstration was also very well done. I remember a few years ago, people complained when Apple merely made the entire operating system uglier. (Something about a gradient on the battery?) A lot of people would talk hyperbolically ("apple KILLED macos!"), and that's indistinguishable to an outsider when an updat…

It's funny. one of the most significant UI axioms I ever learned came from Bill Atkinson: "Always make the 'click zone' a little larger than the visual indication of the affordance." This becomes tricky or impossible for some things like touch-keypads, but for most things it makes the difference between frustrating and magical.

Apple seems to have forgotten its own innovations.

Re: The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe

#912

Post by postalcoder »

hyperjeff wrote: post #899
postalcoder wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Touch Bar implementation sucked but I'm going to defend that attempt 100 out of 100 times. If Apple didn't remove the function keys I think it would have been a hit feature. There wasn't proper commitment to the feature.

Full agree. The TouchBar was a genuine innovation that gave new ways to interact with data and context. But without the function keys (and the real ESC) there were frequent accidental touches on the bar and a real tactile loss for existing function key intuitions. And now an extremely rare, genuine, programmable HCI innovation is scuttled because of an unthought-thru roll out. A missed opportunity. (I keep my 2019 MB…

Bret Victor being behind the touch bar explains so much about its potential. Apple has such a weird track record of releasing really interesting stuff that they let languish without enhancement. And then you have weird episodes where they have too much conviction on the wrong things, like the butterfly keyboard, where they release multiple iterations which all end up failing.

Re: The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe

#913

Post by MarleTangible »

ksec wrote: post #846
signal11 wrote: post #9

Tahoe is a macOS mis-step on par with Windows 8 or Windows Vista. If you’re from Apple and reading this, my feedback is pretty succinct: “I don’t recommend others upgrade. I wish I didn’t.” Luckily for Apple, Windows 11 is not exactly in a position to attract switchers. Let’s see if Apple can turn things around. iOS 8+ did improve on iOS 7’s worst bits.

> iOS 8+ did improve on iOS 7’s worst bits Or iOS 8 and 9 did revert back a lot of iOS 7 changes. I am not against changing UI, but it seems every time they are doing it they forgot all the lesson learned from previous attempt, and in such short period of time suggest they haven't learned anything.

And that's exactly why I'm waiting for the 27 series to upgrade.

Re: The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe

#914

Post by Wowfunhappy »

npunt wrote: post #362
Lammy wrote: post #43

Compare to Aqua and Platinum where every resizable window/pane had a big square drag target clearly labeled as such with some diagonal lines: https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/system/managers/filema... https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/system/managers/filema...

In the Aqua image the big bright blue scrollbars stand out far, far more than the content. That sucks, honestly. So does the percentage of the screen dedicated to their presence. Also, horizontal scrollbars suck. One thing later versions of Finder did well was adjust columns to minimize the presence of them. We just don't need UI that big anymore. These days our cursors are much more accurate, from the magical Mac tr…

I actually don't think there's anything wrong with horizontal scrollbars, as long as you're using an input device (like an Apple trackpad) that makes it equally easy to scroll either axis.

Re: The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe

#915

Post by bluenose69 »

The cursor changes when you get to resizing corners and edges, so I don't suffer from the problem pointed out in the original article. However, I do find something annoying: sometimes when I'm resizing (or maybe dragging) a window, it gets expanded to fill the whole screen.

I think that kind of behaviour ought to be controlled by the green dot at the top-left of windows, not by some particular mouse movements.

There was a time when the changes to the mac UI were quite good, or at least not annoying. Sometimes it seems as though they are changing stuff just to change stuff.

Re: The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe

#916

Post by billti »

godelski wrote: post #689
nntwozz wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to beat on my own drum but as a mac convert from the days of Tiger I saw the writing on the wall from miles away. Still on iOS 18 and macOS 15 (Sequoia). I was a day one upgrader up until now, never had any regrets but this time things seemed very different. It's worrisome but all is not lost, I'll start sweating for real if next year's releases don't improve things substantially.

My phone updated on me and yesterday it took me 10 minutes to figure out how to listen to my voice mail. Like seriously, how do we go from clicking on the name calling to clicking on the name to see the voicemail left by that specific caller and no others

This is the most disappointing aspect of the slide in quality for me.

I working in software and "build features" for a living, and over the years I've come to prioritize reliability, performance, and an intuitive experience over all else. No matter how good the feature set is, if it crashes, is painfully slow, or I can't figure out how to use it, then I don't want it.

Apple used to have that focus, but seems to have lost it of late.

Re: The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe

#917

Post by danaris »

MarleTangible wrote: post #813
danaris wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the departure of Alan Dye and his replacement with someone (whose name I have temporarily forgotten) who comes from an actual UI design background, I am very optimistic that the next few iterations of macOS and iOS will actually start to improve the UI situation.

I still think Alan Dye was secretly fired. When you live in a bubble and everybody around you is propping you up, you think everything is fine and dandy, but users don't care about your or anybody's feelings. Dye didn't bring something that users didn't know they needed, he brought chaos to the entire ecosystem, and he's the only Apple executive folks are willing to talk garbage about.

I mean, it feels like it would make some sense, and honestly I'd love for it to be true—but everything I've heard, from people who know Apple much better than me and/or have inside sources, is that not only was he not secretly fired, his departure blindsided the C-suite.

If Cook and his other senior staff had recognized the problems Dye was causing and wanted him gone, what possible motivation would they have to make his firing secret? How could it possibly serve them better to have it look like they were chumps?

Re: The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe

#918

Post by kcplate »

This is the first UX issue I have seen since moving to MacOS 26 that I have been able to reliably recreate and haven’t been able to just attribute to a subjective opinion. I never knew about before this post mainly because any window resizing I do is via rectangle. It’s definitely a flaw they need to address.

Re: The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe

#919

Post by cestith »

starkparker wrote: post #341
Saline9515 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux isn't in position regarding display/UI. It doesn't handles HiDPI (e.g 4K) screen uniformly, leading to a lot of blurry apps depending on the display abstraction used (Wayland/X11) and compositor (GNOME, KDE, etc, all behave differently). Let's not even talk about the case when you have monitors that have different DPI, something that is handled seamlessly by MacOS, unlike Linux where it feels like a d20 roll de…

Every 4K external display I've connected to every M1- and M2-series Mac running macOS has a known flickering issue with Display Stream Compression that Apple knows about and has been unable or unwilling to fix. The only reliable fixes are to either disable that DisplayPort feature if your monitor supports it, or to disable GPU Dithering using a paid third-party tool (BetterDisplay). Either that or switch to Asahi, wh…

I use two 4k displays with an M1 Pro MBP. They work without any flickering. They’re using HDMI rather than DisplayPort.

I’m also, to get the two external displays without them being mirrored, using a docking station and a display driver from Silicon Motion called macOS InstantView.

This is of course not ideal if you need DP and DSC.

Re: The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe

#920

Post by fluoridation »

AlanYx wrote: post #755
dfunckt wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What feels plausible to me is changing the underlying 19x19 px control would break layout of many existing apps, and the design team was hell bent that window corners had to be that round. I’d say it’s simply form over function, and that likely a meta-level argument about user empowerment or whatnot won.

There's also the problem that not every window in Tahoe has the same corner radius. Some people thought this was laziness/lack of polish or a bug, but Alan Dye confirmed on a podcast that it was intentional. So then they're left with a conundrum: do they adjust the 19x19 region on a per-window basis, depending on the per-window corner radius, or do they stick with one standard drag region? Probably it should be the f…

That's like asking, "if the title bar can have different sizes, should we make the hot area for moving the window also of different sizes?" The answer to both questions is "obviously yes!" The shape of the thing and how it responds to user input do not match by coincidence.
Post reply on HN