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The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe

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Re: The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe

#991

Post by adi_kurian »

seec wrote: post #985
danans wrote: post #461

Overlapping windows seem like a dated skeumorphic paradigm at this point. I almost never want to see just part of a window. For a long time, I've found that either full screen or tiling (driven by keyboard shortcuts) is a far less frustrating a way to interact with windows, so I almost never use window-resizing. Window resizing is also horrendous when you try to do it with a touchpad.

Agreed. The problem is that native window management is pretty bad in macOS. And the 3rd party tools solving the problem aren't that great on top of being expensive sometimes. Apple could fix it, but instead they made overlapping windows for iPadOS, which is even dumber considering the smaller display area. I think it doesn't matter what they do; part of their clientele is fully captive, another part is only there fo…

I think there are some pretty awesome third party tools. I am incredibly happy with my setup.

BetterTouchTool + Alt Tab + TaskBar is my setup.

All apps used with any frequency mapped to keyboard shortcuts, mostly using right side CMD key. CMD C Chrome, CMD V VS Code, CMD T Terminal, CMD F Figma, CMD S Slack, CMD E Edge, CMD OPT A Activity MTR, CMD OPT CTRL F Firefox and not that many more.

And then for windows, it's left side CMD OPT ENTER maximize, CMD OPT LEFT left screen, etc etc. And then others for quadrants. If I need to multiwindow, it's rarely more than 3 things, and most of the time it's just 2.

Having alt tab mean cmd tab is windows style is huge. Many of these things aren't directly related to window management but I find myself not thinking about it at all, when I used to think about it all the time with Macs.

iOS on iPad has split screen mode now. It's pretty decent. Wouldn't defend it tho.

Re: The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe

#992

Post by seec »

adi_kurian wrote: post #991
seec wrote: post #985

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. The problem is that native window management is pretty bad in macOS. And the 3rd party tools solving the problem aren't that great on top of being expensive sometimes. Apple could fix it, but instead they made overlapping windows for iPadOS, which is even dumber considering the smaller display area. I think it doesn't matter what they do; part of their clientele is fully captive, another part is only there fo…

I think there are some pretty awesome third party tools. I am incredibly happy with my setup. BetterTouchTool + Alt Tab + TaskBar is my setup. All apps used with any frequency mapped to keyboard shortcuts, mostly using right side CMD key. CMD C Chrome, CMD V VS Code, CMD T Terminal, CMD F Figma, CMD S Slack, CMD E Edge, CMD OPT A Activity MTR, CMD OPT CTRL F Firefox and not that many more. And then for windows, it's…

Alt Tab is alright, but it's not as smooth as native Windows window management. It always has a lot of overlays/orphaned/invisible windows hanging out in there.

Something like that really needs to be implemented at the OS level to be trully competent.

TaskBar is cool but I'm not a fan of needing to have something like a dock constantly taking vertical space while we have the menu bar on top. After years of using both, I think Microsoft decision to bundle both into a single taskbar is just much better. And the menu bar is annoying when you use multiple monitors.

I personally use Moom for windows layout, which gives you something close to PowerToys and is pretty decent. Still, it is an added utility app that you have to pay for; Apple should ship it with the OS at this point.

iPadOS is almost irrelevant for productivity anyway; there are too many flaws and limitations, and all the software are expensive subscriptions. My point is that they had a blank slate to come up with something better but still decided to just copy what they already had, which completely defeats the purpose of having a newer platform/OS.

In the end, many of Apple's UI decisions looked good when computers were simpler, but nowadays they show their limitations heavily. Windows has many architectural flaws and not as good software for some niches, but the workflow feels better.

Re: The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe

#993

Post by seec »

danans wrote: post #990
seec wrote: post #985

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. The problem is that native window management is pretty bad in macOS. And the 3rd party tools solving the problem aren't that great on top of being expensive sometimes. Apple could fix it, but instead they made overlapping windows for iPadOS, which is even dumber considering the smaller display area. I think it doesn't matter what they do; part of their clientele is fully captive, another part is only there fo…

> Agreed. The problem is that native window management is pretty bad in macOS. And the 3rd party tools solving the problem aren't that great on top of being expensive sometimes. Linux desktops have great ground-up support for tiling window management, whether as an optional behavior (Gnome/KDE/ChromeOS), or strict tile enforcement (i3/xMonad). > I think it doesn't matter what they do; part of their clientele is fully…

Yeh, Linux desktops are pretty good nowadays; the problem is just software support. If commercial software were easier to make/sell for Linux, that would be great.

There are not a lot of technologists left, and they are dominated by the crowd anyway. Apple used to cater more to people who really liked computers, but now they try to sell to everyone, so the objectives have changed a lot, sadly.

Re: The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe

#994

Post by [deleted] »

m0llusk wrote: post #347
crazygringo wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate your frustration, but at the same time what is Apple supposed to do? If it's affecting only a tiny number of users, and you just happen to be an unlucky one, and they don't know how to reproduce it, and you can't help them reproduce it, then what? I think they just have to wait until somebody (such as yourself) is able to figure out with some kind of logging what is happening. E.g. the first question to…

> ... what is Apple supposed to do? ... This seems like an example of a situation that modern machine learning could help with. Take bug reports permissively and look through all of them for patterns. Loss of focus should be the kind of thing that would stand out and could be analyzed for similarities and recurring features. Making sense of large amounts of often vague and rambling reports has been a problem for a lo…

[deleted]

Re: The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe

#995

Post by msephton »

bluenose69 wrote: post #915

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…

Is this the fairly new window tiling option? Do you have it enabled?

Re: The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe

#996

Post by msephton »

leptons wrote: post #884
jesse_dot_id wrote: post #867

Great article. I put a Teams meeting on my second monitor. I put Teams on my first monitor. I minimize Teams to look at something in a browser on the first monitor. The Teams meeting on the second monitor minimizes, too. Mac window management UX is dogshit in a lot of different ways. There are a lot of problems that I either have to just deal with, or try to find some third party app to solve in lieu of Apple actuall…

>Apple actually caring about UX again I doubt Apple ever really cared about UX. It took Apple 24 years after Microsoft's Windows 2.0 introduced resizing a window from any edge, for Apple to finally implement it in MacOS Lion in 2011. Apple UX is ridiculous. If they cared about UX, they'd throw out their "HIG", hire some competent people, and start over. Why is the first item on the first menu of every software progra…

I'd say they have plenty of competent people, the problem is management and process.

Re: The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe

#998

Post by Perepiska »

frumplestlatz wrote: post #783
Perepiska wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked for a company with a large website. The designers were elite and worked in a darkroom on expensive Apple equipment. At some point, it turned out that users couldn't see a certain color on the website because it could be seen on an Apple monitor, but not on a mass-market laptop's TFT screen.

To be fair to those designers, color reproduction is a really hard problem, and shitty monitors have terrible color reproduction. You want your designers to have accurate color reproduction for obvious reasons, but they should be testing their work on shitty monitors, too.

They were denied any attempts to put them on mass market laptops.

Re: The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe

#999

Post by cpt_sobel »

two_handfuls wrote: post #968
cpt_sobel wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had the same issue while using external mouse and keyboard, so I definitely don't touch the touchpad.

But was the touchpad disabled at the time? Phantom touches could happen even if your hand is not near the touchpad.

My hand was at least 40cm away from the touchpad, no it wasn't disabled.

Re: The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe

#1000

Post by iLemming »

bsder wrote: post #242
iLemming wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the most annoying things after installing Tahoe for me, that for no good reason an ordinary app would randomly lose its focus. In the midst of my typing. This is unbelievably preposterous and I just can't stop hating Apple for this crap. How the fuck this is acceptable? I just have no words. What makes it even worse that I couldn't even complain about it on their support pages - they just keep removing my comm…

> how am I suppose to make it "more constructive"? Obviously by shutting the hell up, you ungrateful serf. The beatings will continue until morale improves. Seriously, though, if you want this to stop, people like you are going to have to start voting with their wallets. I finally pulled the plug on macOS a couple years ago for Linux, and I haven't been unhappy about it. However, I did make a point of buying a laptop…

> people like you are going to have to start voting with their wallets.

You think I CHOSE to be miserable? Sorry, I have kids, and you know, they don't exactly live on dog food, but even that costs money. My job requires me to use a Mac. And please don't tell me to "find a better job". I've been programming for over twenty years, only once I was given a clearance to pick "whatever kind of machine you want". For my personal computing I do use Linux.

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