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The single menu bar design breaks down very quickly once you start using a large display. Evolve to multiple large displays and it is an absolute mess. The on

The single menu bar design breaks down very quickly once you start using a large display. Evolve to multiple large displays and it is an absolute mess. The only option you have is to enable the toolbar on every screen, which starts to be laughable. I have used Windows setups with as many as 50 screens (command and control center). Having each application exist within its own window with all relevant menus in that window is, by far, a superior approach in these settings. Even with three large monitors, using a mouse to fly across that screen space to reach a menu is just a pain. Imagine a system consisting of 25 x 4 screens. It would be a nightmare. Shortcuts? Someone else said MacOS lacks discoverability. It’s true. Tooltips are almost nowhere to be found and lots of applications have no shortcuts. I have watched non-expert users in fear of clicking a button because they have no clue what it does. The single menu and single mouse button idea worked well on an old Mac with a single 9 in screen. It works fine on laptops. The minute the display grows in size and multiple displays are used the approach breaks down very quickly. If you own a multi-monitor Mac setup (we have several) and have enabled the menu bar on all screens, you already understand how broken that concept has become. If it was not you would only have one menu bar with your three large screens.

qubitcoder 5y ago
I'm not sure I fully understand the workflow here. I use three large 4k monitors with macOS, and it's straightforward for the most part. Then again, I basically never use the menu bar, since keyboard shortcuts are so consistent across apps. I just keep the dock on the primary display. The only occasional pain point I encounter is when apps like Zoom automatically switch to "full screen mode". There's also the option in Mission Control for "When switching to an application, switch to a Space with open windows for the application". If that feature is turned off, then you could, for example, have Chrome on _every_ desktop. Then it's just a matter of Cmd+tab to Chrome, and Cmd+n to open a new window on whichever display/desktop has the current focus. For window management, I've found BetterSnapTool to be essential. It provides the typical window snapping from Windows. Better yet, you can setup keyboard shortcuts to quickly snap a window to the left side, right side, maximize, or move it to the next monitor. The shortcuts I use mimic Vim bindings, so it's easy to remember [1]. With caps locks remapped to Control in the Keyboard preferences, moving and re-sizing "windows" across multiple displays is fast & easy. But I'm probably missing something with your particular use-case. [0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bettersnaptool/id417375580?mt=12 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bettersnaptool/id417375580?mt=... [1] https://imgur.com/a/YUufemN https://imgur.com/a/YUufemN
- robomartin 5y ago
  All of our Macs have a utility installed to remap the keyboard to make it match a PC to the extent possible. When you use multiple platforms with some frequency it is a real pain to have to deal with MacOS idiosyncrasies. What's interesting is that Apple explicitly chose to ignore what I will go-ahead and call the de-facto standard established across pretty much every desktop GUI by a range of vendors. I have worked on Solaris, Irix, IBM OS2, Amiga OS (owned an original machine signed by the development team), Linux, Windows and MacOS. The odd duck is anything Apple made. No reason for it whatsoever. Proof? Billions of non-engineers around the world do not seem to have any issues whatsoever operating a Windows machine, which inherits from all of the standards I mentioned above. The gist of the thread was to somehow characterize Macs as easier and intuitive to use. That simply isn't and has not been the case for a very long time. Expert users, engineers, coders cannot be the test subjects for this evaluation. You just said that a tool you use is easy to remember because the shortcuts mimic VIM bindings. That is beyond foreign to average or below-average users like my mother, father, uncle, the local doctor, teacher, restaurant employee, etc. No issues with the average user running MacOS on a single small screen. The abstraction works well there. The problems start once you expand beyond that. I was recently involved in a display characterization project where we had somewhere around eight 4K+ displays attached to a PC. We also evaluated Apple's Pro Display XDR connected as the second display on an Apple laptop (I forget which one). Using the PC (running Windows) to address every display, run calibration tools on each one and run custom characterization code was an absolute breeze. Doing the same with the Apple XDR was an ordeal. And, to make things worse, using the touchpad to navigate across the entire canvas was just horrific. I do like Macs. I just don't think they live up to the hype. Easy and cool to use for unsophisticated users on a single screen up to a point. The problem with not making users learn anything is that they will always remain naive users. Imagine if everyone was forced to use a GUI text editor with simple controls and you did not have the option to use VIM. That's the difference. One assumes the user is an idiot. The other considers the idea that users can actually do more than point and click with a single button on a single menu bar. Not trying to be nasty at all. I just think Apple takes things to an undesirable extreme at times. They carry this through to the iPhone, where you now have such overloading on controls that nobody knows what they do. I lost track, I think we got up to triple-clicking the home button? And no camera shutter button (no, the volume button isn't a good solution, as the many pictures of my left foot can attest). Anyhow, good technology. I just don't agree with the choices they seem to make again and again.
muthuraj57 5y ago
Also it is one of the main reason "focus follow mouse" feature couldn't be implemented in Mac OS. I use multi-monitor setup and I used Ubuntu for my personal computer before Covid, but now started using my office Mac for everything and I hate that Mac doesn't have this option. I typed in wrong window more times than I would like to admit because of this stupid singe menu bar design.
- samatman 5y ago
  In one way, 'focus' already follows mouse in macOS. I can mouse over to a window and start scrolling, so mouse focus follows the mouse. And we don't want "OS focus" to follow the mouse! That would pop windows to the front, change the menu bar, and other unfortunate consequences: if I were mousing up toward the menu and accidentally crossed another window, I'd get the wrong menu. What we want is for keyboard focus to also follow the mouse, and there's not actually any inherent reason why this can't happen. It's just that they're tightly coupled by the implementation, to the point where an extension can't un-couple them. The lack of (keyboard) focus-follows-mouse is the big fly in my macOS ointment, it annoys me whenever I'm on my widescreen, which is at least half of the time. I do think it would be possible to implement a usable f-f-m which still worked the way macOS does with respect to menus, which windows get priority, and so on. It would require uncoupling some things under the hood, which would probably affect the API in an incompatible way, so I don't expect to ever see it happen unfortunately.

qubitcoder 5y ago

I'm not sure I fully understand the workflow here. I use three large 4k monitors with macOS, and it's straightforward for the most part. Then again, I basically never use the menu bar, since keyboard shortcuts are so consistent across apps. I just keep the dock on the primary display. The only occasional pain point I encounter is when apps like Zoom automatically switch to "full screen mode". There's also the option in Mission Control for "When switching to an application, switch to a Space with open windows for the application". If that feature is turned off, then you could, for example, have Chrome on _every_ desktop. Then it's just a matter of Cmd+tab to Chrome, and Cmd+n to open a new window on whichever display/desktop has the current focus. For window management, I've found BetterSnapTool to be essential. It provides the typical window snapping from Windows. Better yet, you can setup keyboard shortcuts to quickly snap a window to the left side, right side, maximize, or move it to the next monitor. The shortcuts I use mimic Vim bindings, so it's easy to remember [1]. With caps locks remapped to Control in the Keyboard preferences, moving and re-sizing "windows" across multiple displays is fast & easy. But I'm probably missing something with your particular use-case. [0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bettersnaptool/id417375580?mt=12 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bettersnaptool/id417375580?mt=... [1] https://imgur.com/a/YUufemN https://imgur.com/a/YUufemN

robomartin 5y ago
All of our Macs have a utility installed to remap the keyboard to make it match a PC to the extent possible. When you use multiple platforms with some frequency it is a real pain to have to deal with MacOS idiosyncrasies. What's interesting is that Apple explicitly chose to ignore what I will go-ahead and call the de-facto standard established across pretty much every desktop GUI by a range of vendors. I have worked on Solaris, Irix, IBM OS2, Amiga OS (owned an original machine signed by the development team), Linux, Windows and MacOS. The odd duck is anything Apple made. No reason for it whatsoever. Proof? Billions of non-engineers around the world do not seem to have any issues whatsoever operating a Windows machine, which inherits from all of the standards I mentioned above. The gist of the thread was to somehow characterize Macs as easier and intuitive to use. That simply isn't and has not been the case for a very long time. Expert users, engineers, coders cannot be the test subjects for this evaluation. You just said that a tool you use is easy to remember because the shortcuts mimic VIM bindings. That is beyond foreign to average or below-average users like my mother, father, uncle, the local doctor, teacher, restaurant employee, etc. No issues with the average user running MacOS on a single small screen. The abstraction works well there. The problems start once you expand beyond that. I was recently involved in a display characterization project where we had somewhere around eight 4K+ displays attached to a PC. We also evaluated Apple's Pro Display XDR connected as the second display on an Apple laptop (I forget which one). Using the PC (running Windows) to address every display, run calibration tools on each one and run custom characterization code was an absolute breeze. Doing the same with the Apple XDR was an ordeal. And, to make things worse, using the touchpad to navigate across the entire canvas was just horrific. I do like Macs. I just don't think they live up to the hype. Easy and cool to use for unsophisticated users on a single screen up to a point. The problem with not making users learn anything is that they will always remain naive users. Imagine if everyone was forced to use a GUI text editor with simple controls and you did not have the option to use VIM. That's the difference. One assumes the user is an idiot. The other considers the idea that users can actually do more than point and click with a single button on a single menu bar. Not trying to be nasty at all. I just think Apple takes things to an undesirable extreme at times. They carry this through to the iPhone, where you now have such overloading on controls that nobody knows what they do. I lost track, I think we got up to triple-clicking the home button? And no camera shutter button (no, the volume button isn't a good solution, as the many pictures of my left foot can attest). Anyhow, good technology. I just don't agree with the choices they seem to make again and again.

muthuraj57 5y ago

Also it is one of the main reason "focus follow mouse" feature couldn't be implemented in Mac OS. I use multi-monitor setup and I used Ubuntu for my personal computer before Covid, but now started using my office Mac for everything and I hate that Mac doesn't have this option. I typed in wrong window more times than I would like to admit because of this stupid singe menu bar design.

samatman 5y ago
In one way, 'focus' already follows mouse in macOS. I can mouse over to a window and start scrolling, so mouse focus follows the mouse. And we don't want "OS focus" to follow the mouse! That would pop windows to the front, change the menu bar, and other unfortunate consequences: if I were mousing up toward the menu and accidentally crossed another window, I'd get the wrong menu. What we want is for keyboard focus to also follow the mouse, and there's not actually any inherent reason why this can't happen. It's just that they're tightly coupled by the implementation, to the point where an extension can't un-couple them. The lack of (keyboard) focus-follows-mouse is the big fly in my macOS ointment, it annoys me whenever I'm on my widescreen, which is at least half of the time. I do think it would be possible to implement a usable f-f-m which still worked the way macOS does with respect to menus, which windows get priority, and so on. It would require uncoupling some things under the hood, which would probably affect the API in an incompatible way, so I don't expect to ever see it happen unfortunately.