> 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 mini sysadmin adventure where you prove, every time, that you're sophisticated enough to deserve an exception to the padded-cell walled garden mode they've sealed off 'for your safety.'
As a complete nerd, you'd think maybe I'd like that I can prove my skills like this, but it comes off as deeply disrespectful to me as the user that I can't disable this.
What's my solution to prevent grandma or a 10-year-old from clicking "Allow full filesystem access and keylogging" to an executable she downloaded from facebook-security-center-and-password-verification-cgi-bin-ab383 dot xyz? IDK, that's their problem, but they should offer a way for those of us who aren't clueless to turn whatever it is off.
> As a complete nerd, you'd think maybe I'd like that I can prove my skills like this, but it comes off as deeply disrespectful to me as the user that I can't disable this.
You seem to have understood the problem. But then you didn't follow. If there was a way to disable this, first thing that the grandma would do is watch a video how to disable that and lose security from then on.
Of course it is not perfect, but their approach here is really decent. And also, if you find yourself needing to go through that often I think that's not a good sign security-wise.
Their approach is not decent. There should be some kind of master key to get full admin access. Leaving al the keys in the hand of a mega corporation is asking for trouble.
It's gone so far that even tech people now think that having root access to a mobile device is somehow scary. Well guess what that root access is still there for the manufacturer. It needs it for stuff like updates. It just shields you from having any kind of input or visibility on what is going on.
you really underestimate the will of people to not change anything that annoys them about their OS. they will click 1 million times a popup away before even considering that it could be resolved indefinitely by an option change. i think Apple's system works well to keep the average user safe.
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?)
>On the flip side, many websites ask if I want to allow notifications
One of the first things I disable on any new Firefox setup. I want zero notifications from websites (or in general, one of the objective improvements of Windows 10 over Windows 7 is that you can just disable notifications entirely, while disabling balloon alerts in Windows 7 was a huge battle that never fully worked)
This particular permission is pernicious, ponder for a picosecond the possibilities:
It’s used for writing keyloggers.
That’s it. It’s the permission that lets you write a keylogger. It SHOULD NOT be just a click away. It should require some extra song and dance, because this is an especially dangerous permission, and the extra friction is justified.
All the permissions are treated the same way though. Microphone access. Screen sharing access. etc. Yes, all could be used to spy on you in evil ways, but the replacement of a straightforward "Want to grant this app the following permissions?" with these stupid little spelunks through the garbage app that is Settings irritates me every time.
Apple should throw this whole thing out and replace it with first-launch lists of permissions, with toggles for each. This app 'Zoom' wants "Record the screen, microphone, camera." Then you're done and you don't have to keep searching for it in little lists and relaunching it.
That is a solution. But the underlying problem is that they didn't go far enough. There's no good reason to bundle arbitrary screen recording with window snapshots, or bundle arbitrary keylogging with hotkey activation. Just off the top of my head:
For previews, Apple could provide an API for this very common task. The OS can provide the images, and they could be sampled at refresh rate that makes it unusable for arbitrary recording.
For key chords, they could repurpose the emoji key, which is currently not available for external binding, to effectively allow capture only following that magic sequence. The OS should manage this centrally, allowing a program to define its commands and then delivering only the command without the specific associated keys presses. We get the benefit of centralized management with deconfliction, too, which is a real pain on macos as it stands.
I don't know if these solve every problem, but they solve some. There are probably better ways. Apple has plenty of smart programmers. The product team needs to let them solve the problems that they surely know bother their professional users.
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 tell you. Thought you deleted the app from your Applications folder? If you didn't check your login items, there's probably some little script that deeply installed itself and it'll reinstall it in the background during your next startup.
Adobe is the fucking worst with this. Their Creative Cloud spyware keeps enabling itself and reinstalling itself so long as you use photoshop. And it'll constantly find ways to turn itself back on. Steam also adds itself to login items, which is fucking annoying because you'll reboot and be hit in the face with game ads. At least it respects your decision when you turn it off, but login items should be opt in, never opt out.
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.
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
From the time of very early viruses, malware has spent effort modifying the tools that make the system transparent to lie to you. So your approach demands that there must be things that are absolutely impossible to change. I have yet to see a system where that is actually true.
I agree, however the fundamental problem here is that transparent systems are on the far side of the axis from user focused systems, think about it, the whole point of building a user interface is to hide and remove choice from the user, to change the system from "A steady hand with a magnetic needle" to "point and grunt" the whole point is to build a shiny facade that hides the inner working of the machine. So while you and I and many other people like to see the machine, the inner workings whirling around in grandiose majesty. Millions of man hours have been spent hiding that stuff away keeping it from view, pretending it does not exist. And thus the transparency of our computing environments have suffered correspondingly to this focus on hiding things.
That seems ≈impossible in a world where you're running arbitrary, Turing-complete code. A modern consumer machine can do so many different things—often a bunch at a time—that there is always a massive amount of space to hide bad behavior.
There might be some way to design a system from the ground up to avoid this problem (some kind of declarative, capability-based security?), but retrofitting that onto an existing behemoth of a system does not really work.
If I log into my system it's safe. If someone reads my password off my screen post-it and logs into my system it's quite thoroughly compromised. How would you demonstrate which of the two sessions are compromised, during the act?
Ironically, my first thought was using Automator or AutoHotKey (there's a different one for macOS I think? But you get the point) to just identify those dialogs and click yes/allow/whatever.
Even though a bunch of the responses are "well you don't want a keylogger" when the first solutions I can think of are also (potential) keyloggers. :)
Making the prompts understandable helps a lot when it comes to preventing your grandma from installing a keylogger. I don't mind the setting not being obvious exactly because people who don't know computers shouldn't be tricked into toggling them.
But it is funny to see the daily barrage of permission prompts fly through when macOS made an entire ad ridiculing Vista for half the popups and permissions macOS requires these days.
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.
And then one that grinds my gears, perhaps more than it should: there's no way to change the default browser without explicit user action or consent.
But do that and the very next thing that happens when you try to open a browser or a link in an email?
"Your browser has been changed from Safari to Chrome. Would you like to use Safari or keep using Chrome?" and for a little salt, the default is "Use Safari".
Prior to MacOS 10.11, Mission Control was good: you would swipe up with four fingers and it would show you a preview of all of your spaces. Then in 10.11, for no discernable reason, they changed it to suck: rather than showing you a preview, the bar just says "Desktop 1", "Desktop 2", etc until you mouse over it; the practical effect is that using spaces is disorienting and requires memorization.
Some third-party software pretends to restore this functionality, but they do it by repositioning the mouse to simulate a hover, which introduces a delay and doesn't integrate correctly with the animation. Someone wrote a patch that works by disabling SIP and injecting code (https://github.com/briankendall/forceFullDesktopBar), but eventually stopped maintaining it.
A decade later, I doubt anyone at Apple remembers that this bit of user interface used to be good.
> rather than showing you a preview, the bar just says "Desktop 1", "Desktop 2"
I never noticed that behaviour because I only use mission control in full-screen mode. If you swipe up with three (or four) fingers from a full-screen window the previews are visible immediately. I have no idea why we need a different preview for desktop vs full screen however.
The part of this UX that annoys me is the spaces get re-ordered for no apparent reason. I usually have a few IDE windows open and it's tiring to have to double-check the window hasn't moved.
The full-screen mode handling might be a clue about what went wrong: if you swipe up from a space that contains a full screen app, it has an animation where the app goes into a slot in the preview strip, but that animation doesn't make sense visually for a non-full-screen space. So, perhaps someone was implementing that animation, didn't want to implement an alternate animation for the non-fullscreen case, and decided to minimize the preview strip instead? And because this was after Steve Jobs had died, there was no one left in charge of UX to explain why that was a bad idea?
> If you swipe up with three (or four) fingers from a full-screen window the previews are visible immediately.
Previews are also visible immediately if you set Mission Control as a hot-corner action. In never see the title-only spaces — i forgot it even did that until this discussion.
I also wish I could name the Spaces. "Desktop N" is pretty useless.
Agree! That "Desktop 1", "Desktop 2" view is so annoying, and given we have higher res monitors now, it serves no purpose if the intention was to save space.
Wouldn't it be great to have them named "Design", "Dev", "Productivity", "Games". Or whatever makes sense given your needs, instead of simply desktop #.
Yes, and I'd go a step further: OSes in general need a concept of a 'project' or 'task' or whatever, which a) cuts across apps and b) integrates deeply with windowing and spaces.
Multitasking and context switching has been increasing for years, instant messaging boosted them again, and agent-based workflows are only going to push further in that direction. The OS needs to support that, and it's not an app-level concern: I use the same apps in each of my tasks.
IDEs can help with this of course: they tend to have workspace/project primitives and can restore code and terminal contexts from those. But there's always a bunch of other connected stuff that can't be linked: web pages (some IDEs are starting to manage those too), agents which don't reside in the IDE, relevant chats with colleagues, project management apps and so on.
This is clearly an OS-level concern, not an app-level concern.
Some of the iPad experiments with alternative window organisation looked kind of promising, but they’re just not powerful or intuitive enough IMO.
I’m convinced that the biggest threat to good UIs are the majority of professional UI designers. Think of it this way… Half of all UI designers are below the median. These people chose UI design as a career. You don’t advance your career by simply defending the status quo year after year. To advance you need to design something new. So, you do. You do whether whatever was there before is working well or not. Because what are you going to do, sit on your hands year after year? And because half of all UI designers are below the median, a new UI design has even odds of being a step backwards. And then you’re on stage yammering about Liquid Glass at an Apple launch event. One thing that makes me sad is that a lot of designers seem to focus on visuals and don’t seem to understand anything about usability. How many designers entering the workforce know what Fitts’s Law is, for instance? How many designers were standing in the breach against all of Liquid Glass’s usability issues, most of which were quite obvious? Honestly, with rare exceptions, the designers are the issue.
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 idioms into proofs-of-concept in the early 2010s.
While linear window management is clearly not to everyone's taste, I still think it's a valid idea! It was heartening to see this launch and its reception, as I'm actually working on something in the same area right now...
I genuinely could not believe it when they took away vertical spaces. Having to jump over extra screens made the feature useless to me. I stopped using it. It's impractical.
My current "WM workflow"/window management keyboard shortcuts is:
neovim → tmux → Ghostty → Rectangle → OS
so moving to the left window/pane is (depending on the "nesting level"):
ctrl+h, ctrl+a + {number}, cmd + [, option-ctrl-left, ??
This is what happens when you spend years overthinking / fighting the walled garden UX. The sad part is that I'm kinda OK with this at this stage (besides 1-2 days a year, when my mental faculties are lowered and I decide to _fix it_).
A global fzf / rectangle / alfred shortcut for all "windows and panes" would be great.
Unfortunately, at this stage, my overthinking/poor ux induced psychosis reached the point where I control Claude using voice and a Playdate console with a crank and I'm day dreaming about just looking at the pane I need and making a click sound with my mouth to select it (like Neddy in Adventure time).
> besides 1-2 days a year, when my mental faculties are lowered and I decide to _fix it_
God this is so recognizable, it's truly at my lowest moments that I decide I need a new terminal emulator and spend 6 hours in a brew install rabbit hole. The worst thing is that I'm still using Warp of all things
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).
To be fair, so are many other UIs. Windows 95-style boxy buttons and bevels make the content look organized. Every possible action gets its button that looks like a button. You often see the total set of available actions by looking at a toolbar. You don't need to second-guess whether some piece of content itself is clickable / editable or not.
Also, everything has excessive padding now. Modern Windows control panel UIs often feel like a multicolumn wall of text with lots of empty space and a few switches dropped in, and to fit the same amount if options as the older UI they had to either hide some toggles because "known needs them anymore" or introduce extra intermediary navigation steps. As a result the new Control Panel feels bloated and less useful.
That is correct. Platinum still looks fantastic, carefully hewn out of the HIG. Early Aqua is a bit ostentatious and at the very least indulgent. Still better than the fucking flat-slop plus glarse vomit we have to put up with now.
This fixes a dozens-of-times-per-day annoyance for me.
The grid is good, but even better is the instant virtual display switching.
Nowhere is the death-by-a-thousand-paper-cuts annoyance of modern macOS worse than having to hit Ctrl→→→→→→→ and suffer those repeated animations, over and over.
It's every action on Mac and iOS that does this, and it has been increasing in intrusiveness for a decade. I can't be sure why they do it, but it comes off as though their visual designers are immature, thinking we want to see their impressive animations not just in a demo, not just in a tutorial that we go through once, where we are meant to grasp the relationships between the things, but over and over again, all day long, for decades.
I freaking don't. One time was plenty. I don't want any animation. And the "reduce animation" feature's implementation is a slap in the face: all the delay -- that part is non-negotiable apparently -- but with blurry crossfades instead.
I'm using cwm (x11) without a compositor (never noticed tearing). And it's so nice when everything is not trying to be cute with shadows, animations and round corners. Animation only makes sense when there's a direct action that controls it (like when swapping spaces or hovering) or the system wanting to inform us (notifications). And it's better be fast. Otherwise it's just visual effects that quickly become tiring after a few days.
It is absolutely, positively mind boggling that you have to sit through those animations. And key presses don’t even take effect if your new desktop until the animation is done. It’s just lunacy.
How does a company with infinite resources and talented designers come up with shit like that??
I've also switched to Instant Space Switcher, it is soo good! Previously I used BetterMouse for only this feature but they made the space switching worse in later versions (slower, on-par with the default macOS speed).
You can also do Ctrl-UpArrow then click the space you want. This isn't instant, but it might be a little better than repeatedly cycling through each desktop, especially if you have a lot of them. Turning off "Automatically rearrange Spaces based on most recent use" is also a must IMO.
Personally, I only open one app per desktop and just use Command-Tab. If you hold Command after Command-Tab, you can select an app with having to cycle through all of them.
> 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 to late 1990's) was the grid virtual desktops feature. So I've had gridded virtual desktops for longer than twenty years. Fvwm2's configuration has been tweaked and adjusted slightly along the way, but at no time did a corporate designer decide that I no longer should have a feature I had previously been using.
Proprietary software does not have your interests at heart, it has its stock price or next quarters sales numbers at heart, nothing more.
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.
> 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.
The great Gnome 3 rollout did this for me... to be fair I guess that was a decision of the distributions, but it was in concert with the developers who decided to make a hard changeover, EOL the gnome 2 line there and then, and (deliberately?) scupper the possibility of installing both 2 and 3 on the same system.
Either way it sucked and that pushed me to Xfce, which I still use on linux. But it goes to show it can happen in FOSS.
Like GridLion, there are a handful of macOS space organizers that attempt to confine specific apps to specific spaces.
What would be most helpful for my workflow is something slightly different. I need to be able to launch specific browser profiles/windows in these workspaces. One space with all of the tabs for project X, another space with all of the tabs for project Y, and then another with all of the tabs for project Z. These might be in different browser profiles.
I don't see how I can achieve this under the common per-app paradigm of macOS space organizers unless macOS has some notion of Windows/Linux style shortcuts whereby command line arguments can specify the exact things that need to be in the browser window.
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):
It's too bad we can't mix and match parts of releases as desired. If I could have OS X 10.9 Mavericks (last Aqua release) with 10.6 Spaces and modern macOS integration features (Continuity, etc) I'd be in heaven.
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.
I would. I love linux desktop, but the apple hardware just smokes anything else. I've had a little success with asahi, but not enough to let me switch.
I use KDE at home after leaving OS X when it became clear Apple became more interested in mobile OSes than desktop OSes, and using various combos of Linux and Windows for a bit. Gotta agree. Powerful, customizatable, and predictable at the same time.
Questions for those who like the grid layout of virtual desktops - how does it (or should it?) interact with multi monitor setups? Feels like this would break or at least compromise the spatial metaphor.
- Each monitor has own grid?
- The VD 'spans' the pair of monitors?
- VDs only on one monitor?
- The monitors form a fixed 'window' into the grid?
I have a separate grid on each screen. Each with different grid sizes. I have a 3x3 grid on my main display a 2x2 grid on my display to the left and leave my laptop display with no grid constantly locked to my works video conference application.
It works well for me, but as you can see from the comments everyone is different :)
I remember the 2x2 grid in Ubuntu 12 being the best desktop UI I had ever used.
The current Gnome workspaces with a single row are a huge step backwards in terms of productivity. It must be easier for beginners, but it frustrates me every single day.
If you're attached to Gnome, this won't be a solution, but if you're willing to consider other options, KDE allows configuring the number of virtual desktops and their arrangement.
> Apparently what I wanted was a Merchant of Record. Someone to handle purchases, taxes and refunds. There seems to be three main companies providing this service: Paddle, GumRoad and Lemon Squeezy.
I've used Lemon Squeezy a couple years back, but after the acquisition I feel they've gone downhill. It's been a month since I submitted my product for review and I'm still waiting.
Stripe also has a MoR service now, I was able to set it up and ready to sell in a few hours
Thank you,
Great description.
I have a similar feeling while on my work computer for switching between windows. For some reason when the number of windows are too much, full screen task switching is slowdowns (its not a case my personal work)
So i made taskbar.ahmetozer.org my be it helps.
> [In my day job working with LLMs] The bulk of my time is spent reviewing
This is depressing. I've been out of the field since Covid (after decade_s of work) and basically have to get back to work since kitty is gone, but this is definitely what I signed up for when I started on this career in software engineering.
If I'm gonna be reviewing all day, I'd rather manage humans rather than LLMs. How is it affecting managing engineering teams?
If the thing that you enjoy about programming is writing code, you can have the LLM write code in the style you like. If you enjoyed getting to explore and understand a system, an LLM can help you do that quicker, too.
"Use LLM without thinking" won't get you substantially useful results.
> Textmate (and its revolutionary text-snippets) were the catalyst to my migration
Hooo damn TextMate snippets, that brings back memories. Hard to convey how hyped I was to use these. That is also what drove me to Mac at that time. I remember writing hundreds of those snippets for every possible C++ construct, and <tab> to fill in variable name, type, loop counters and so on.
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.
Gonna reply guy here because this is a paid thing. Agree with the author. Exposé was amazing. Here's an open alternative that I built, completely keyboard driven: https://github.com/peterp/cmdcmd/
There is no way I could have been as productive as I was on a 13" MBP back in the early 2010's without Spaces. I still vividly remember losing it [0] and spent a few years using various apps to re-implement the old-style spaces. The 2D -> 1D change is what killed it for me. I had amazing muscle memory of where everything was. Center screen is my browser, going left took my to my code editors, going right took me to my terminal, going down to my database GUI tool, and up for reference (second browser or photoshop design).
I never had to think about where things were, I didn't feel constrained on my tiny screen with no external monitoring, things were good. And now it's been over a decade and while I've "replaced" spaces with multiple external monitors I still think about it from time to time.
I watch people use (fight) the current "spaces" and I just shake my head thinking of what we lost and how Fisher-Price the new version is. Spaces used to be a power tool, now it's a shadow of its former self IMHO.
I remember some very old Windows shell app, Dashboard, by Starfish software, I think. It run under Windows 3.1, possibly replacing Program Manager, and it had a neat virtual desktop feature with tiny pictograms of several desktops for you to switch and drag mini-windows between them. Combined with other capabilities it was a true gem. (But somehow in Windows 95 the updated version started to feel less useful and I eventually abandoned it. Maybe it was the effect of moving between systems and a typical reinstall-to-clean-up routine that was common those days.)
I've been using macs since the Classic. I have used macs because the OS was rarely a limiting factor in my productivity. In fact, everything has always been made unobtrusive. Presently, there is misdirected focus at Apple. Most consumers will not have known better. But, that complacency has never been the way apple managed to innovate to be so ahead.
Apple has a strange habit of making the first version excellent, then finding ways to degrade the experience. The grid pattern of spaces is definitely one; Spotlight, as it appeared in Tiger, is another.
I was a linux user for some time in my youth, then corporate appeared and with that the locked windows Thinkpads, the MacOS's and such. I am finally back in Linux at home and I find it so amazing, and all my video games work too!
Using that app, if I cmd+tab from one space to another, will I see 0 (and I mean zero) animation whatsoever? The exact same behaviour as if I were switching between two apps on the same space? Because that's what I need to go anywhere near Spaces, and that's what seems impossible.
I just installed it, but I can't get it to switch spaces, or show the grid overlay. It just beeps at me with the "you can't do that" beep. When I click "Add Desktop", it says "Could Not Add Desktop" and "GridLion could not read the current Spaces for this display."
This is a M1 macbook air. I really want to try this.
A bit of self-promotion here, but coming from Windows/Linux land I got used to having the taskbar at the bottom and never really liked the Dock. I love my Mac, and I know folks who have been using macOS for decades swear by it, but this is one UI feature from other OSes that I would have liked to see in macOS.
One major issue is that the Dock cannot filter apps between Spaces, so I built boringBar[0] for this. It frees up real estate taken up by the Dock and makes it much easier to figure out what goes where.
I do understand the need for an app switcher on the Mac, though. It has the same problem I faced: it is very app-centric rather than window-centric. Switching between windows is nigh impossible on a Mac without third-party apps, unless you like using the three-finger swipe up gesture. I have never been able to switch quickly between windows using Mission Control.
You could call it hyperspace in an homage to that old 10.6-era application which customized spaces. (Also I just realized why Apple called it called mission control, it allows you to organize spaces).
Also this is basically a replacement for the zombie TotalSpaces 3
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."
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
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.
They are, but it's nuanced. If you have one app with a single window, it will always be selectable via Cmd+Tab, even if it's full-screened. If you have an app with multiple windows, one of which is full-screened, and you select a non-full-screened window from that same app, you won't be able to return to the full-screened window using Cmd+Tab. Which kinda makes sense, since Cmd+Tab cycles apps, not windows.
As long as useful idiots keep circling the block in queues to buy the next version of their apple product, nothing will change. This will only get shittier.
Many parts of the LLM care about UX, and you unlock it with your feedback loop, which is a good way to unlock it but one of many ways.
One way to show that LLMs care about UX is to have one tutor you about UX. If they weren't trained to care about it, they couldn't do a decent job. But I've asked dozens of questions about UX to LLMs and they have a great deal of insight.
I don't get the use of the spatial layout here. A line may be cruder but if you're going full swordfish hackerman mode why are you caring about grid geography at all? Bind each to a hotkey. The only time you're swiping is when you're lost.
Like what competitive player uses scroll wheel weapon switching in Quakelike games? Nobody
Visual memory is really powerful and maps far more easily onto human brain’s experience of navigating the world. So it’s easier for many people to imagine and organise around a grid.
> The next CEO of Apple is someone that cares about quality. (As evidenced by how good the hardware is)
I think it's important "what quality" they care about. Tim Cook cared about supply chain quality, and honestly he did an amazing job, but he didn't care much about software, vision of Apple, etc.
The current guy didn't ever once show a sign he cared about anything but 'Number Go Up'[1] so I don't see how anyone could be worse for those of us who care about the actual product than he was.
[1] to be clear, I stipulate Cook is indeed the world champion of Number Go Up. Nobody Number Goed Up more than Cook did. For Ternus to do Number Go Up to the same multiplier Cook did, I think he'd have to acquire all the other companies in the world.
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
> 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 mini sysadmin adventure where you prove, every time, that you're sophisticated enough to deserve an exception to the padded-cell walled garden mode they've sealed off 'for your safety.'
As a complete nerd, you'd think maybe I'd like that I can prove my skills like this, but it comes off as deeply disrespectful to me as the user that I can't disable this.
What's my solution to prevent grandma or a 10-year-old from clicking "Allow full filesystem access and keylogging" to an executable she downloaded from facebook-security-center-and-password-verification-cgi-bin-ab383 dot xyz? IDK, that's their problem, but they should offer a way for those of us who aren't clueless to turn whatever it is off.
> As a complete nerd, you'd think maybe I'd like that I can prove my skills like this, but it comes off as deeply disrespectful to me as the user that I can't disable this.
You seem to have understood the problem. But then you didn't follow. If there was a way to disable this, first thing that the grandma would do is watch a video how to disable that and lose security from then on.
Of course it is not perfect, but their approach here is really decent. And also, if you find yourself needing to go through that often I think that's not a good sign security-wise.
Their approach is not decent. There should be some kind of master key to get full admin access. Leaving al the keys in the hand of a mega corporation is asking for trouble.
It's gone so far that even tech people now think that having root access to a mobile device is somehow scary. Well guess what that root access is still there for the manufacturer. It needs it for stuff like updates. It just shields you from having any kind of input or visibility on what is going on.
you really underestimate the will of people to not change anything that annoys them about their OS. they will click 1 million times a popup away before even considering that it could be resolved indefinitely by an option change. i think Apple's system works well to keep the average user safe.
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Could make it disable-able only from the terminal in recovery mode. That one would be too hard / bothersome to fend off most cases I feel like
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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?)
>On the flip side, many websites ask if I want to allow notifications
One of the first things I disable on any new Firefox setup. I want zero notifications from websites (or in general, one of the objective improvements of Windows 10 over Windows 7 is that you can just disable notifications entirely, while disabling balloon alerts in Windows 7 was a huge battle that never fully worked)
but the damage of notifications is almost zero compared to keylogger IMHO
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This particular permission is pernicious, ponder for a picosecond the possibilities:
It’s used for writing keyloggers.
That’s it. It’s the permission that lets you write a keylogger. It SHOULD NOT be just a click away. It should require some extra song and dance, because this is an especially dangerous permission, and the extra friction is justified.
All the permissions are treated the same way though. Microphone access. Screen sharing access. etc. Yes, all could be used to spy on you in evil ways, but the replacement of a straightforward "Want to grant this app the following permissions?" with these stupid little spelunks through the garbage app that is Settings irritates me every time.
Apple should throw this whole thing out and replace it with first-launch lists of permissions, with toggles for each. This app 'Zoom' wants "Record the screen, microphone, camera." Then you're done and you don't have to keep searching for it in little lists and relaunching it.
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That is a solution. But the underlying problem is that they didn't go far enough. There's no good reason to bundle arbitrary screen recording with window snapshots, or bundle arbitrary keylogging with hotkey activation. Just off the top of my head:
For previews, Apple could provide an API for this very common task. The OS can provide the images, and they could be sampled at refresh rate that makes it unusable for arbitrary recording.
For key chords, they could repurpose the emoji key, which is currently not available for external binding, to effectively allow capture only following that magic sequence. The OS should manage this centrally, allowing a program to define its commands and then delivering only the command without the specific associated keys presses. We get the benefit of centralized management with deconfliction, too, which is a real pain on macos as it stands.
I don't know if these solve every problem, but they solve some. There are probably better ways. Apple has plenty of smart programmers. The product team needs to let them solve the problems that they surely know bother their professional users.
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 tell you. Thought you deleted the app from your Applications folder? If you didn't check your login items, there's probably some little script that deeply installed itself and it'll reinstall it in the background during your next startup.
Adobe is the fucking worst with this. Their Creative Cloud spyware keeps enabling itself and reinstalling itself so long as you use photoshop. And it'll constantly find ways to turn itself back on. Steam also adds itself to login items, which is fucking annoying because you'll reboot and be hit in the face with game ads. At least it respects your decision when you turn it off, but login items should be opt in, never opt out.
I try to always install with Homebrew. Because then you can uninstall with the --zap option, for example:
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.
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I get notifications that an item has added itself to your login items.
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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
From the time of very early viruses, malware has spent effort modifying the tools that make the system transparent to lie to you. So your approach demands that there must be things that are absolutely impossible to change. I have yet to see a system where that is actually true.
I agree, however the fundamental problem here is that transparent systems are on the far side of the axis from user focused systems, think about it, the whole point of building a user interface is to hide and remove choice from the user, to change the system from "A steady hand with a magnetic needle" to "point and grunt" the whole point is to build a shiny facade that hides the inner working of the machine. So while you and I and many other people like to see the machine, the inner workings whirling around in grandiose majesty. Millions of man hours have been spent hiding that stuff away keeping it from view, pretending it does not exist. And thus the transparency of our computing environments have suffered correspondingly to this focus on hiding things.
That seems ≈impossible in a world where you're running arbitrary, Turing-complete code. A modern consumer machine can do so many different things—often a bunch at a time—that there is always a massive amount of space to hide bad behavior.
There might be some way to design a system from the ground up to avoid this problem (some kind of declarative, capability-based security?), but retrofitting that onto an existing behemoth of a system does not really work.
If I log into my system it's safe. If someone reads my password off my screen post-it and logs into my system it's quite thoroughly compromised. How would you demonstrate which of the two sessions are compromised, during the act?
What does that actually mean?
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Ironically, my first thought was using Automator or AutoHotKey (there's a different one for macOS I think? But you get the point) to just identify those dialogs and click yes/allow/whatever.
Even though a bunch of the responses are "well you don't want a keylogger" when the first solutions I can think of are also (potential) keyloggers. :)
Making the prompts understandable helps a lot when it comes to preventing your grandma from installing a keylogger. I don't mind the setting not being obvious exactly because people who don't know computers shouldn't be tricked into toggling them.
But it is funny to see the daily barrage of permission prompts fly through when macOS made an entire ad ridiculing Vista for half the popups and permissions macOS requires these days.
Bring back the "Unix expert" checkbox from NeXTstep?
It got restrictive enough that I jumped to Linux with Hyprland and just configured everything the way I actually want
True, I started with Omarchy, but then changed everything to my liking. It's so much nicer if you can change your OS by changing some dotfiles, and don't get distracted by all the nonsense of new features that macOS and Windows are adding. I wrote about my journey https://www.ssp.sh/blog/macbook-to-arch-linux-omarchy/ and what I learned after 8 months: https://www.ssp.sh/blog/linux-omarchy-the-good-bad-and-fixab...
This is the reason I stopped bothering with MacOS, also. Linux just works.
> but they should offer a way for those of us who aren't clueless to turn whatever it is off.
I'm not sure if it's what you're asking for, but you can disable SIP:
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/disabling...
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.
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You can make the vast majority of them go away by rebooting into recovery mode, running Terminal and then executing:
csrutil disable
nvram boot-args="amfi_get_out_of_my_way=0x1"
I really wouldn't recommend doing either, but you do you.
And then one that grinds my gears, perhaps more than it should: there's no way to change the default browser without explicit user action or consent.
But do that and the very next thing that happens when you try to open a browser or a link in an email?
"Your browser has been changed from Safari to Chrome. Would you like to use Safari or keep using Chrome?" and for a little salt, the default is "Use Safari".
Prior to MacOS 10.11, Mission Control was good: you would swipe up with four fingers and it would show you a preview of all of your spaces. Then in 10.11, for no discernable reason, they changed it to suck: rather than showing you a preview, the bar just says "Desktop 1", "Desktop 2", etc until you mouse over it; the practical effect is that using spaces is disorienting and requires memorization.
Some third-party software pretends to restore this functionality, but they do it by repositioning the mouse to simulate a hover, which introduces a delay and doesn't integrate correctly with the animation. Someone wrote a patch that works by disabling SIP and injecting code (https://github.com/briankendall/forceFullDesktopBar), but eventually stopped maintaining it.
A decade later, I doubt anyone at Apple remembers that this bit of user interface used to be good.
> rather than showing you a preview, the bar just says "Desktop 1", "Desktop 2"
I never noticed that behaviour because I only use mission control in full-screen mode. If you swipe up with three (or four) fingers from a full-screen window the previews are visible immediately. I have no idea why we need a different preview for desktop vs full screen however.
The part of this UX that annoys me is the spaces get re-ordered for no apparent reason. I usually have a few IDE windows open and it's tiring to have to double-check the window hasn't moved.
The full-screen mode handling might be a clue about what went wrong: if you swipe up from a space that contains a full screen app, it has an animation where the app goes into a slot in the preview strip, but that animation doesn't make sense visually for a non-full-screen space. So, perhaps someone was implementing that animation, didn't want to implement an alternate animation for the non-fullscreen case, and decided to minimize the preview strip instead? And because this was after Steve Jobs had died, there was no one left in charge of UX to explain why that was a bad idea?
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> If you swipe up with three (or four) fingers from a full-screen window the previews are visible immediately.
Previews are also visible immediately if you set Mission Control as a hot-corner action. In never see the title-only spaces — i forgot it even did that until this discussion.
I also wish I could name the Spaces. "Desktop N" is pretty useless.
that's a setting you can turn off. settings -> desktops and spaces -> reorder spaces
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Agree! That "Desktop 1", "Desktop 2" view is so annoying, and given we have higher res monitors now, it serves no purpose if the intention was to save space.
I loathe that I can't even rename the desktops.
Wouldn't it be great to have them named "Design", "Dev", "Productivity", "Games". Or whatever makes sense given your needs, instead of simply desktop #.
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Yes, and I'd go a step further: OSes in general need a concept of a 'project' or 'task' or whatever, which a) cuts across apps and b) integrates deeply with windowing and spaces.
Multitasking and context switching has been increasing for years, instant messaging boosted them again, and agent-based workflows are only going to push further in that direction. The OS needs to support that, and it's not an app-level concern: I use the same apps in each of my tasks.
IDEs can help with this of course: they tend to have workspace/project primitives and can restore code and terminal contexts from those. But there's always a bunch of other connected stuff that can't be linked: web pages (some IDEs are starting to manage those too), agents which don't reside in the IDE, relevant chats with colleagues, project management apps and so on.
This is clearly an OS-level concern, not an app-level concern.
Some of the iPad experiments with alternative window organisation looked kind of promising, but they’re just not powerful or intuitive enough IMO.
I make a version of this happen with Aerospace on macOS.
Thrilled to see it's FOSS.
https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace
Oh nice, looks awesome, I will give it a go!
I’m convinced that the biggest threat to good UIs are the majority of professional UI designers. Think of it this way… Half of all UI designers are below the median. These people chose UI design as a career. You don’t advance your career by simply defending the status quo year after year. To advance you need to design something new. So, you do. You do whether whatever was there before is working well or not. Because what are you going to do, sit on your hands year after year? And because half of all UI designers are below the median, a new UI design has even odds of being a step backwards. And then you’re on stage yammering about Liquid Glass at an Apple launch event. One thing that makes me sad is that a lot of designers seem to focus on visuals and don’t seem to understand anything about usability. How many designers entering the workforce know what Fitts’s Law is, for instance? How many designers were standing in the breach against all of Liquid Glass’s usability issues, most of which were quite obvious? Honestly, with rare exceptions, the designers are the issue.
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 idioms into proofs-of-concept in the early 2010s.
While linear window management is clearly not to everyone's taste, I still think it's a valid idea! It was heartening to see this launch and its reception, as I'm actually working on something in the same area right now...
PaperWM is the closest to this approach. There's also a macOS port:
https://github.com/mogenson/PaperWM.spoon
Is the video still around? Share a link!
Ah, I remember that video, seeing it as the future of window control. Very nice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tf03YBxCyGI
Thank you for confessing!
I hate that design and what it has done to Gnome.
A grid was so much better.
I genuinely could not believe it when they took away vertical spaces. Having to jump over extra screens made the feature useless to me. I stopped using it. It's impractical.
WM psychosis time:
My current "WM workflow"/window management keyboard shortcuts is:
This is what happens when you spend years overthinking / fighting the walled garden UX. The sad part is that I'm kinda OK with this at this stage (besides 1-2 days a year, when my mental faculties are lowered and I decide to _fix it_).
A global fzf / rectangle / alfred shortcut for all "windows and panes" would be great.
Unfortunately, at this stage, my overthinking/poor ux induced psychosis reached the point where I control Claude using voice and a Playdate console with a crank and I'm day dreaming about just looking at the pane I need and making a click sound with my mouth to select it (like Neddy in Adventure time).
> besides 1-2 days a year, when my mental faculties are lowered and I decide to _fix it_
God this is so recognizable, it's truly at my lowest moments that I decide I need a new terminal emulator and spend 6 hours in a brew install rabbit hole. The worst thing is that I'm still using Warp of all things
> A global fzf
alttab.app recently went paid, but it'll do that
Thanks!
Just checked their site, but I don't see "jump to a tmux pane / browser tab" in the features there...
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).
To be fair, so are many other UIs. Windows 95-style boxy buttons and bevels make the content look organized. Every possible action gets its button that looks like a button. You often see the total set of available actions by looking at a toolbar. You don't need to second-guess whether some piece of content itself is clickable / editable or not.
Also, everything has excessive padding now. Modern Windows control panel UIs often feel like a multicolumn wall of text with lots of empty space and a few switches dropped in, and to fit the same amount if options as the older UI they had to either hide some toggles because "known needs them anymore" or introduce extra intermediary navigation steps. As a result the new Control Panel feels bloated and less useful.
Funnily enough when Aqua was new i remember thinking Platinum looked so much better.
That is correct. Platinum still looks fantastic, carefully hewn out of the HIG. Early Aqua is a bit ostentatious and at the very least indulgent. Still better than the fucking flat-slop plus glarse vomit we have to put up with now.
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The Window Manager is the one thing I would rip out of macOS and shove in KDE's Window Management features if I could, it drives me crazy.
This fixes a dozens-of-times-per-day annoyance for me.
The grid is good, but even better is the instant virtual display switching.
Nowhere is the death-by-a-thousand-paper-cuts annoyance of modern macOS worse than having to hit Ctrl→→→→→→→ and suffer those repeated animations, over and over.
It's every action on Mac and iOS that does this, and it has been increasing in intrusiveness for a decade. I can't be sure why they do it, but it comes off as though their visual designers are immature, thinking we want to see their impressive animations not just in a demo, not just in a tutorial that we go through once, where we are meant to grasp the relationships between the things, but over and over again, all day long, for decades.
I freaking don't. One time was plenty. I don't want any animation. And the "reduce animation" feature's implementation is a slap in the face: all the delay -- that part is non-negotiable apparently -- but with blurry crossfades instead.
I'm using cwm (x11) without a compositor (never noticed tearing). And it's so nice when everything is not trying to be cute with shadows, animations and round corners. Animation only makes sense when there's a direct action that controls it (like when swapping spaces or hovering) or the system wanting to inform us (notifications). And it's better be fast. Otherwise it's just visual effects that quickly become tiring after a few days.
It is absolutely, positively mind boggling that you have to sit through those animations. And key presses don’t even take effect if your new desktop until the animation is done. It’s just lunacy.
How does a company with infinite resources and talented designers come up with shit like that??
yes! it's the worst!
I've been using Instant Space Switcher (which got a small callout in tfa) as a targeted fix for this, and it's lifechanging
I've also switched to Instant Space Switcher, it is soo good! Previously I used BetterMouse for only this feature but they made the space switching worse in later versions (slower, on-par with the default macOS speed).
Here's the link if anyone is curious: https://github.com/jurplel/InstantSpaceSwitcher
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You can also do Ctrl-UpArrow then click the space you want. This isn't instant, but it might be a little better than repeatedly cycling through each desktop, especially if you have a lot of them. Turning off "Automatically rearrange Spaces based on most recent use" is also a must IMO.
Personally, I only open one app per desktop and just use Command-Tab. If you hold Command after Command-Tab, you can select an app with having to cycle through all of them.
> I only open one app per desktop
So what benefit do you get from multiple desktops?
Tried this? defaults write com.apple.dock expose-animation-duration -float 0.05; killall Dock
Yup. Doesn't work.
> 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 to late 1990's) was the grid virtual desktops feature. So I've had gridded virtual desktops for longer than twenty years. Fvwm2's configuration has been tweaked and adjusted slightly along the way, but at no time did a corporate designer decide that I no longer should have a feature I had previously been using.
Proprietary software does not have your interests at heart, it has its stock price or next quarters sales numbers at heart, nothing more.
Yeah okay. But at least we have decent font rendering.
so does linux since when infinality-lite was ported into fontconfig, harfbuzz, and friends.
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.
> I can't imagine having my workflow taken away from me
You never ever had a single software change its workflow?
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> 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.
The great Gnome 3 rollout did this for me... to be fair I guess that was a decision of the distributions, but it was in concert with the developers who decided to make a hard changeover, EOL the gnome 2 line there and then, and (deliberately?) scupper the possibility of installing both 2 and 3 on the same system.
Either way it sucked and that pushed me to Xfce, which I still use on linux. But it goes to show it can happen in FOSS.
Like GridLion, there are a handful of macOS space organizers that attempt to confine specific apps to specific spaces.
What would be most helpful for my workflow is something slightly different. I need to be able to launch specific browser profiles/windows in these workspaces. One space with all of the tabs for project X, another space with all of the tabs for project Y, and then another with all of the tabs for project Z. These might be in different browser profiles.
I don't see how I can achieve this under the common per-app paradigm of macOS space organizers unless macOS has some notion of Windows/Linux style shortcuts whereby command line arguments can specify the exact things that need to be in the browser window.
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/
Is it different from Rectangle? (I've been using it for ages)
looks pretty much identical!
We can do this natively in macos, isn’t it?
Yeah I guess, just a bit clunky I think. For $5 Magnet is awesome!
Yes, mostly, since macOS 15
No. Mac window management is inexplicably awful.
Nice to see I'm not alone in missing old Spaces.
It's too bad we can't mix and match parts of releases as desired. If I could have OS X 10.9 Mavericks (last Aqua release) with 10.6 Spaces and modern macOS integration features (Continuity, etc) I'd be in heaven.
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.
I would. I love linux desktop, but the apple hardware just smokes anything else. I've had a little success with asahi, but not enough to let me switch.
I use KDE at home after leaving OS X when it became clear Apple became more interested in mobile OSes than desktop OSes, and using various combos of Linux and Windows for a bit. Gotta agree. Powerful, customizatable, and predictable at the same time.
Seriously, it's honestly pathetic at how little Microsoft and Apple have pushed UX in the past two decades.
Something like quickshell-overview feels so smooth and delicious compared to the painful use of virtual desktops on Windows/MacOS.
[0]: https://github.com/Shanu-Kumawat/quickshell-overview
Questions for those who like the grid layout of virtual desktops - how does it (or should it?) interact with multi monitor setups? Feels like this would break or at least compromise the spatial metaphor.
- Each monitor has own grid?
- The VD 'spans' the pair of monitors?
- VDs only on one monitor?
- The monitors form a fixed 'window' into the grid?
- Something else?
I have a separate grid on each screen. Each with different grid sizes. I have a 3x3 grid on my main display a 2x2 grid on my display to the left and leave my laptop display with no grid constantly locked to my works video conference application.
It works well for me, but as you can see from the comments everyone is different :)
I have a Kwin plugin so my laptop is always the same, but my external monitor is a grid. Iirc by default, KDE makes them all share the same grid
The same applies to Linux.
I remember the 2x2 grid in Ubuntu 12 being the best desktop UI I had ever used.
The current Gnome workspaces with a single row are a huge step backwards in terms of productivity. It must be easier for beginners, but it frustrates me every single day.
If you're attached to Gnome, this won't be a solution, but if you're willing to consider other options, KDE allows configuring the number of virtual desktops and their arrangement.
[dead]
> Apparently what I wanted was a Merchant of Record. Someone to handle purchases, taxes and refunds. There seems to be three main companies providing this service: Paddle, GumRoad and Lemon Squeezy.
I've used Lemon Squeezy a couple years back, but after the acquisition I feel they've gone downhill. It's been a month since I submitted my product for review and I'm still waiting.
Stripe also has a MoR service now, I was able to set it up and ready to sell in a few hours
Interesting, but I will prefer more unified and i3 style way for that I use aerospace and many other tools which give me such experience https://github.com/lanycrost/home_is_everywhere
Thank you, Great description. I have a similar feeling while on my work computer for switching between windows. For some reason when the number of windows are too much, full screen task switching is slowdowns (its not a case my personal work) So i made taskbar.ahmetozer.org my be it helps.
> [In my day job working with LLMs] The bulk of my time is spent reviewing
This is depressing. I've been out of the field since Covid (after decade_s of work) and basically have to get back to work since kitty is gone, but this is definitely what I signed up for when I started on this career in software engineering.
If I'm gonna be reviewing all day, I'd rather manage humans rather than LLMs. How is it affecting managing engineering teams?
> If I'm gonna be reviewing all day...
I think the point is:
Pre-LLM: 1. think, 2. write code & check, 3. review.
LLM: 1. think, 2. write prompt, <LLM writes code quickly>, 3. review.
If the thing that you enjoy about programming is writing code, you can have the LLM write code in the style you like. If you enjoyed getting to explore and understand a system, an LLM can help you do that quicker, too.
"Use LLM without thinking" won't get you substantially useful results.
> Textmate (and its revolutionary text-snippets) were the catalyst to my migration
Hooo damn TextMate snippets, that brings back memories. Hard to convey how hyped I was to use these. That is also what drove me to Mac at that time. I remember writing hundreds of those snippets for every possible C++ construct, and <tab> to fill in variable name, type, loop counters and so on.
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.
I think this behavior can be changed in System Settings > Desktop & Dock > Automatically Rearrange Spaces based on most recent use (turn it off)
Gonna reply guy here because this is a paid thing. Agree with the author. Exposé was amazing. Here's an open alternative that I built, completely keyboard driven: https://github.com/peterp/cmdcmd/
There is no way I could have been as productive as I was on a 13" MBP back in the early 2010's without Spaces. I still vividly remember losing it [0] and spent a few years using various apps to re-implement the old-style spaces. The 2D -> 1D change is what killed it for me. I had amazing muscle memory of where everything was. Center screen is my browser, going left took my to my code editors, going right took me to my terminal, going down to my database GUI tool, and up for reference (second browser or photoshop design).
I never had to think about where things were, I didn't feel constrained on my tiny screen with no external monitoring, things were good. And now it's been over a decade and while I've "replaced" spaces with multiple external monitors I still think about it from time to time.
I watch people use (fight) the current "spaces" and I just shake my head thinking of what we lost and how Fisher-Price the new version is. Spaces used to be a power tool, now it's a shadow of its former self IMHO.
[0] Single row spaces is a joke, I won't use it
I remember some very old Windows shell app, Dashboard, by Starfish software, I think. It run under Windows 3.1, possibly replacing Program Manager, and it had a neat virtual desktop feature with tiny pictograms of several desktops for you to switch and drag mini-windows between them. Combined with other capabilities it was a true gem. (But somehow in Windows 95 the updated version started to feel less useful and I eventually abandoned it. Maybe it was the effect of moving between systems and a typical reinstall-to-clean-up routine that was common those days.)
I've been using macs since the Classic. I have used macs because the OS was rarely a limiting factor in my productivity. In fact, everything has always been made unobtrusive. Presently, there is misdirected focus at Apple. Most consumers will not have known better. But, that complacency has never been the way apple managed to innovate to be so ahead.
Apple has a strange habit of making the first version excellent, then finding ways to degrade the experience. The grid pattern of spaces is definitely one; Spotlight, as it appeared in Tiger, is another.
Vote with your money and time!
If you can, switch to Linux, choose the distro you like, and help make it better, in UI and whatnot.
I was a linux user for some time in my youth, then corporate appeared and with that the locked windows Thinkpads, the MacOS's and such. I am finally back in Linux at home and I find it so amazing, and all my video games work too!
I use Charmstone for spatial app switching - https://charmstone.app/
Not the same as full spaces, but it gives the same vibe of always having a particular app on a particular hotkey.
I try to limit my multi-tasking though, so I can imagine where full spaces would be useful.
I’ve been using a friend’s app switcher because cmd+tab was a bit too slow and not window oriented.
But this has been pretty nice for me.
https://mwitch.viraat.dev/
It’s also open source if you want to customize it for your own preferences (pinned apps, custom keybinds, etc)
> cmd+tab was a bit too slow
Using that app, if I cmd+tab from one space to another, will I see 0 (and I mean zero) animation whatsoever? The exact same behaviour as if I were switching between two apps on the same space? Because that's what I need to go anywhere near Spaces, and that's what seems impossible.
I just installed it, but I can't get it to switch spaces, or show the grid overlay. It just beeps at me with the "you can't do that" beep. When I click "Add Desktop", it says "Could Not Add Desktop" and "GridLion could not read the current Spaces for this display."
This is a M1 macbook air. I really want to try this.
A bit of self-promotion here, but coming from Windows/Linux land I got used to having the taskbar at the bottom and never really liked the Dock. I love my Mac, and I know folks who have been using macOS for decades swear by it, but this is one UI feature from other OSes that I would have liked to see in macOS.
One major issue is that the Dock cannot filter apps between Spaces, so I built boringBar[0] for this. It frees up real estate taken up by the Dock and makes it much easier to figure out what goes where.
I do understand the need for an app switcher on the Mac, though. It has the same problem I faced: it is very app-centric rather than window-centric. Switching between windows is nigh impossible on a Mac without third-party apps, unless you like using the three-finger swipe up gesture. I have never been able to switch quickly between windows using Mission Control.
[0] https://boringbar.app
Seems MacOS Snow Leopard is for the Apple people what Windows 7 is for Windows people.
You could call it hyperspace in an homage to that old 10.6-era application which customized spaces. (Also I just realized why Apple called it called mission control, it allows you to organize spaces).
Also this is basically a replacement for the zombie TotalSpaces 3
There's already an app called Hyperspace, it reclaims disk space through use of APFS features
> I’ve had feedback this name is terrible
GridLion is an excellent name
I loved spaces. It was so awesome. I tried stage manager the other day and died inside. Immediately turned it off.
Snow Leopard was peak OS X
You can also assign hot keys to each desktop and then this grid layout is irrelevant anyway
The article mentions that feature and how it doesn’t work for the author.
I wish there were a way to sandbox apps with more granularity.
Anything great starts with Japanese toilets
The last good MacOS was System 6. Change my mind :D
It might be nice to have more than 8 MB of memory available.
there is a project that makes macOS alt+tab look like windows grids (if anyone coming from there), its all something alt_tabs or something
yup, that's alt-tab : https://github.com/lwouis/alt-tab-macos I've been using it daily for last 3 years, it's awesome !
p9wl: A 9P wayland compositor: https://12e.iwp9.org/papers/p9wl.pdf
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRx75piIlxo
how do u write the "llms dont care about ux" paragraph then link to your app site that exemplifies llm ux
DockDoor does this and a lot more. Its also open source https://dockdoor.net/
I just checked out DockDoor and I could not find anything related to multiple desktops in it at all.
Maybe I just missed it, but I don't see where DockDoor has anything at all to do with spaces.
But we're not talking about Dock Door. Respect the Maker by giving him his time.
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."
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
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.
I want to use full screen apps. But they are not in the command-tab order. So… no good.
They are, but it's nuanced. If you have one app with a single window, it will always be selectable via Cmd+Tab, even if it's full-screened. If you have an app with multiple windows, one of which is full-screened, and you select a non-full-screened window from that same app, you won't be able to return to the full-screened window using Cmd+Tab. Which kinda makes sense, since Cmd+Tab cycles apps, not windows.
As long as useful idiots keep circling the block in queues to buy the next version of their apple product, nothing will change. This will only get shittier.
> LLMs don’t care about UX
Many parts of the LLM care about UX, and you unlock it with your feedback loop, which is a good way to unlock it but one of many ways.
One way to show that LLMs care about UX is to have one tutor you about UX. If they weren't trained to care about it, they couldn't do a decent job. But I've asked dozens of questions about UX to LLMs and they have a great deal of insight.
I don't get the use of the spatial layout here. A line may be cruder but if you're going full swordfish hackerman mode why are you caring about grid geography at all? Bind each to a hotkey. The only time you're swiping is when you're lost.
Like what competitive player uses scroll wheel weapon switching in Quakelike games? Nobody
Visual memory is really powerful and maps far more easily onto human brain’s experience of navigating the world. So it’s easier for many people to imagine and organise around a grid.
I do not like the grid. I can’t see what’s in it.
I am not so hopeful about the future of macOS given that the next CEO of Apple is a hardware guy, not a software person.
That’s one framing, here’s another:
The next CEO of Apple is someone that cares about quality. (As evidenced by how good the hardware is)
> The next CEO of Apple is someone that cares about quality. (As evidenced by how good the hardware is)
I think it's important "what quality" they care about. Tim Cook cared about supply chain quality, and honestly he did an amazing job, but he didn't care much about software, vision of Apple, etc.
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The current guy didn't ever once show a sign he cared about anything but 'Number Go Up'[1] so I don't see how anyone could be worse for those of us who care about the actual product than he was.
[1] to be clear, I stipulate Cook is indeed the world champion of Number Go Up. Nobody Number Goed Up more than Cook did. For Ternus to do Number Go Up to the same multiplier Cook did, I think he'd have to acquire all the other companies in the world.
isn't this just what 3-finger upswipe does???
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
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