> 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.

• manwe150

  today at 2:25 AM

  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?)

  • syabro

    today at 3:05 AM

    but the damage of notifications is almost zero compared to keylogger IMHO

    • mrpippy

      today at 3:45 AM

      Right, that’s why you get a simpler yes/no dialog for notifications, and a conplex “navigate to this settings pane and click a separate button” flow for a keylogger

    • Nursie

      today at 5:25 AM

      Depends on what you allow and what your level of sophistication is.

      My mother recently had "There antivirus notifications taking over half the screen, do I need to click on them and renew Norton?"

      She'd been somewhere and done something that had allowed an unscrupulous site to flood her with alerts directing her to give payment information to a scam site pretending to be antivirus renewal.

      When I finally got over there (she doesn't live on the same continent) I went in and disabled notifications on all of her installed browsers.

      As far as I'm concerned the whole 'let this website notify you' feature is an antipattern and yet another example of browser overreach.

    • greazy

      today at 3:17 AM

      Notification requests add to decision fatigue, which can lead to bad things.

• joshspankit

  today at 3:07 AM

  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

  • somat

    today at 4:16 AM

    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.

  • tikhonj

    today at 4:20 AM

    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.

  • refactor_master

    today at 4:12 AM

    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?

  • thfuran

    today at 3:17 AM

    What does that actually mean?

    • rmunn

      today at 3:28 AM

      See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonneville_Salt_Flats — the salt flats are extremely flat (as the name implies), and because of all the salt, no vegetation can survive. Look at the pictures: there are no trees, no grass, no hiding places at all. Anyone standing (or even lying prone) on the salt flats is visible to anyone else for miles around.

      GP was saying that systems should be "transparent enough that a compromised system is obvious". I'm not entirely convinced that that's possible (On Trusting Trust should have taught us that compromised systems can create places for the compromise to hide), which means that the salt flats analogy is not a great analogy, IMHO. But at least now you understand the analogy.

• kdheiwns

  today at 4:27 AM

  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.

  • bartvk

    today at 5:25 AM

    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.

  • deafpolygon

    today at 5:40 AM

    I get notifications that an item has added itself to your login items.

• klodolph

  today at 2:22 AM

  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.

  • xp84

    today at 2:51 AM

    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.

    • zuhsetaqi

      today at 5:09 AM

      They are not all treated the same. Microphone and even Location or Local Network can be permitted direktly with the dialog.

    • klodolph

      today at 2:56 AM

      Honestly, I think the permissions model for desktop and laptop computers is way too permissive to begin with, I think it just kinda sucks and doesn’t do its job. Apple is kind of fixing it but there is a long way to go.

      There have been alarm bells ringing in my head for a long time with all these settings, and the fact that they’re buried in the settings app gives me a lot of peace of mind. I’ll click through a lot of boxes and alerts and grant permissions that I shouldn’t. I’m SUPER glad that I won’t accidentally grant, you know, full disk access or accessibility to an app just by clicking on a box that appears at startup.

      I remember back in the bad old days when I was constantly making extra user accounts just to run some program. Kinda sucked. Hard truth is, you sometimes want to run code that you don’t fully trust.

• js2

  today at 3:13 AM

  > 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...

  • jlarocco

    today at 4:15 AM

    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.

    • valleyer

      today at 5:58 AM

      I've had SIP disabled for years, across many updates.

    • pjmlp

      today at 5:05 AM

      The power user market was never that big for Apple since Mac Classic came to be, that was the target market, the "idiots".

      Desktop power users were on the Acorn, Amiga, Atari and PC.

      As NeXT "acquired" Apple, Linux users thought OS X was the UNIX experience they were looking for, and since they were never part of Apple culture, keep getting their expectations wrong.

      • thewebguyd

        today at 5:24 AM

        Apple also kind of accidentally won the power user/developer market. When macbooks became synonymous with SV devs, Windows sucked for everything that wasn't Win32 development, and Linux on the desktop wasn't quite there yet (workable, but no where near the state its in today). Your only other choice was mac. It was UNIX, could dual boot windows if you needed it, so it checked the boxes is nice looking hardware (this was around 2008-2012 era, PC hardware at the time was complete crap).

        They never set out to build the ultimate power user machine, their target was still general consumers. They just happened to have the right product at the right time when everything else just failed to compete.

        Had desktop linux been in a better state, or had MS built WSL earlier, things might look a lot different today.

        • linguae

          today at 5:54 AM

          Apple did openly court Unix users during the early days of Mac OS X. As a teenager during this era, Macs of this era were my dream machines due to Mac OS X, and I was so happy to buy an 2006 MacBook the summer after my freshman year of college with money earned from a summer research internship.

          Here's a Titanium PowerBook G4 ad that says "Sends other Unix boxes to /dev/null": https://www.reddit.com/r/vintageunix/comments/b4kojo/sends_o...

          Here's a snapshot of the software solutions page for the aluminum PowerBook G4 from November 2004, proudly touting Unix and even X11:

          https://web.archive.org/web/20041126011836/http://www.apple....

          Some quotes from the Power Mac G5 page (https://web.archive.org/web/20041126015955/http://www.apple....) from the same era:

          "With the Power Mac G5, a researcher can now run both productivity applications and high-performance UNIX applications on a single system. Mac OS X Panther includes 64-bit optimized system math, vector and image libraries that take maximum advantage of the 64-bit G5 processor."

          There was also a cluster in Virginia made of Power Mac G5s, which Apple also touted.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_X_(supercomputer)

        • pjmlp

          today at 5:36 AM

          Or even had they acquired Be instead.

          Microsoft had "WSL" earlier, only badly.

          The only reason I started with Linux at home back in 1995, was the half hearted UNIX subsystem on Windows NT.

          Had they been serious about it I am sure GNU/Linux would never taken off.

          As shown by Apple sales of folks buying POSIX instead.

• FireBeyond

  today at 2:21 AM

  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.

• ebbi

  today at 2:37 AM

  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.

  • josho

    today at 4:32 AM

    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 #.

• willtemperley

  today at 3:09 AM

  > 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.

  • jimrandomh

    today at 4:08 AM

    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?

    • willtemperley

      today at 5:06 AM

      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.

  • fragmede

    today at 3:15 AM

    that's a setting you can turn off. settings -> desktops and spaces -> reorder spaces

    • willtemperley

      today at 3:25 AM

      Ah thanks!

      The setting is "Automatically rearrange Spaces based on most recent use" which explains why the behaviour felt so intermittent.

    • today at 4:21 AM

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?

p9wl: A 9P wayland compositor: https://12e.iwp9.org/papers/p9wl.pdf

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRx75piIlxo

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...

• wodenokoto

  today at 5:29 AM

  Is the video still around? Share a link!

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.

> 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.

• keyle

  today at 3:52 AM

  Yeah okay. But at least we have decent font rendering.

• regexorcist

  today at 3:45 AM

  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.

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.

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).

• ido

  today at 3:43 AM

  Funnily enough when Aqua was new i remember thinking Platinum looked so much better.

  • wpm

    today at 4:40 AM

    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.

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/

• AbuAssar

  today at 5:53 AM

  We can do this natively in macos, isn’t 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.)

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.

• xp84

  today at 2:29 AM

  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.

  • skydhash

    today at 4:03 AM

    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.

• chamomeal

  today at 3:23 AM

  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??

• sgustard

  today at 5:12 AM

  Tried this? defaults write com.apple.dock expose-animation-duration -float 0.05; killall Dock

• coolmitch

  today at 2:13 AM

  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

> 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.

DockDoor does this and a lot more. Its also open source https://dockdoor.net/

• egypturnash

  today at 3:23 AM

  I just checked out DockDoor and I could not find anything related to multiple desktops in it at all.

• WaltPurvis

  today at 3:22 AM

  Maybe I just missed it, but I don't see where DockDoor has anything at all to do with spaces.

• johnwheeler

  today at 4:49 AM

  But we're not talking about Dock Door. Respect the Maker by giving him his time.

  • today at 5:02 AM

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.

• rafaeltorres

  today at 3:52 AM

  I think this behavior can be changed in System Settings > Desktop & Dock > Automatically Rearrange Spaces based on most recent use (turn it off)

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)

You can also assign hot keys to each desktop and then this grid layout is irrelevant anyway

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

The last good MacOS was System 6. Change my mind :D

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.

I loved spaces. It was so awesome. I tried stage manager the other day and died inside. Immediately turned it off.

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

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

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

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."

• antran22

  today at 3:48 AM

  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

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.

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

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!

• drfloyd51

  today at 4:15 AM

  I want to use full screen apps. But they are not in the command-tab order. So… no good.

• ranebo

  today at 2:18 AM

  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.

  • OberstKrueger

    today at 3:36 AM

    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.

> 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.

• ibash

  today at 2:09 AM

  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)

  • behnamoh

    today at 2:16 AM

    > 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.

    • LostMyLogin

      today at 2:18 AM

      Their chips are quality and the hardware itself is still some of the best. Which is what I believe they were designed insinuating.

• xp84

  today at 2:33 AM

  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.