Comment by jimrandomh
14 hours ago
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?
The animation for the full-screen case serves a useful purpose: drawing the eye to the window in the preview.
The non-fullscreen (desktop) case uses an animation for the same purpose, locating the current app window in a sea of others.
So what would the preview be in the swipe-from-desktop case? A preview of the window-sea, or the desktop as is? What should the animation be? I suspect those questions are why they chose to just name the desktop.
I think it would be more consistent if the tab based preview only existed for the desktop window-sea and transitioned to the actual space previews when swiping between spaces.
> 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
Does it work nowadays? Back in High Sierra days whenever I tried turning this off it did absolutely nothing and still reordered my shit.
1 reply →
Ah thanks!
The setting is "Automatically rearrange Spaces based on most recent use" which explains why the behaviour felt so intermittent.
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 #.
Windows has had the rename feature for ages and I don't know why Apple can't just copy that. They've copied plenty of other stuff, why stick with the weirdly restrictive desktop naming scheme?