alt Hacker NewsmacOS needs its grid back
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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.
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...
> 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.
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?
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).
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.
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):
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.
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.
> 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.
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.)
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.
DockDoor does this and a lot more. Its also open source https://dockdoor.net/
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 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.
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 wish there were a way to sandbox apps with more granularity.
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.
It’s also open source if you want to customize it for your own preferences (pinned apps, custom keybinds, etc)
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.
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.
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
You can also assign hot keys to each desktop and then this grid layout is irrelevant anyway
I loved spaces. It was so awesome. I tried stage manager the other day and died inside. Immediately turned it off.
p9wl: A 9P wayland compositor: https://12e.iwp9.org/papers/p9wl.pdf
The last good MacOS was System 6. Change my mind :D
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
isn't this just what 3-finger upswipe does???
Snow Leopard was peak OS X
how do u write the "llms dont care about ux" paragraph then link to your app site that exemplifies llm ux
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."
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
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!
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 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.
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
> 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.