8 ms·

Remove the Notch

50 points by omarfarooq 5y ago

TillE 5y ago
It's really interesting that the notch was basically only an option on a Mac laptop. It doesn't work at all with Windows or KDE. It almost works on Gnome. But with macOS, the menu bar has been there since the very beginning, and the center of the bar has been increasingly empty as resolutions increased. A fortunate coincidence. The notch is here to stay, until good cameras get a lot smaller. It just makes a ton of sense as a solution.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  Gnome Phosh has gained an option to cope with screen notches by shifting the top bar clock away from the cutout area, so that it remains visible. Presumably, Gnome-Shell will be doing the same on these devices.
- drumhead 5y ago
  Why didnt Apple just strip the camera out entirely and just let users connect one with a thunderbolt cable or a dongle. After all Apple users seemed happy enough with dongles when they had fewer ports on laptops.
nathancahill 5y ago
Now how will the coffee shop folks know that I have the greatest newness?
tatorzot 5y ago
But does it exclude the bar from being populated _under_ the notch? I feel like that is a greater sin.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- sp332 5y ago
  For reference, this is how the notch works with menus and status bar items. https://twitter.com/SnazzyQ/status/1453143798251339778 https://twitter.com/SnazzyQ/status/1453143798251339778
  - tatorzot 5y ago
    Yep! That was the set of tweets I was referencing. It allows items behind the notch, and it's not just iStats.
- Tagbert 5y ago
  Yes, that is a bug in apps that have not been updated yet
  - sp332 5y ago
    https://twitter.com/bjango/status/1453171506263982087 https://twitter.com/bjango/status/1453171506263982087 & https://twitter.com/bjango/status/1453194728506216457 https://twitter.com/bjango/status/1453194728506216457 indicate that this uses the normal APIs and there isn't an obvious "update" that could be made to behave differently.
smoldesu 5y ago
I thought this was a petition asking Apple to get rid of it, I was almost excited for a moment.
- jstx1 5y ago
  They'll remove it in 3-5 years and congratulate themselves for listening to people.
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    I wish I had that kind of courage.
    - robbyking 5y ago
      Objectively they do - they rolled back years of minimalist design on the new MBP: thicker body, more ports, HDMI, card reader, etc.
      - smoldesu 5y ago
        whoosh
  - kartoshechka 5y ago
    they gonna put the camera on bottom like earlier xps models, and then in 3-5 more years put it back on top
GreedCtrl 5y ago
I thought this feature was built in, but maybe not? All I can find is https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212842 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212842 which seems to be on a per-app basis.
- salamandersauce 5y ago
  Apple's solution is per-app and when you go full screen otherwise you can't avoid it.
qntty 5y ago
Does anybody know if the notch is an obstacle for the cursor? Does the mouse pass through the notch or does it need to go around?
- wlesieutre 5y ago
  Passes through
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    Unless you have a menubar that spans across the notch, in which case the behavior changes for some reason to teleport your cursor across the notch. Mind you that this is not the same behavior for statusbar icons for whatever reason, they will reside underneath the notch (yet still accessible for) unless the aforementioned global menu expands beyond the notch, in which case it just starts hiding random statusbar icons until it fits.
    - david422 5y ago
      > behavior changes for some reason to teleport your cursor across the notch Which was always the cardinal sin in mac os HIG - never move the mouse.
      - cassianoleal 5y ago
        It doesn't though. You still have to move it yourself, only instead of it going underneath the notch, it teleports across. Not automatically. You need to move it.
    - wlesieutre 5y ago
      "Some reason" being so that moving from a menu to the adjacent menu with the notch in between is the same short mouse movement as between other adjacent menus, instead of having a longer move through the dead space of the notch. I tried one in the Apple Store but didn't think to check any software with a >50% full menubar to see if that feels weird or not. If they hadn't done this, someone would be complaining these menus are supposed to be 10 pixels apart, but I have to move my mouse 100 pixels instead. If it bugs you, hit cmd-I on the application and put it in the no-notch mode.
tommoor 5y ago
FWIW this is also quite nice on non-notch macbooks – it hides the small triangle of visible background in the top corners of windows.
chadlavi 5y ago
There's just no pleasing people. "Here's more screen real estate, but it's not contiguous." "No! I hate you! This is an abomination! I will black it out and make it useless." If they hadn't made any camera updates people would also be ticked about that. Edit: I thought people were using this to push their menubar down below the level of the notch and creating black dead zones on the left and right of the notch. But I still think it's silly and picayune for people to quibble about the color of the menu bar.
- joenathanone 5y ago
  I can't help but thinking that there is an option in between those two choices.
  - jedberg 5y ago
    What exactly would be between "we put a screen next to the camera" and "we put a bezel next to the camera"?
    - picture 5y ago
      we put a small bezel next to the camera
    - joenathanone 5y ago
      Punch hole cameras are a thing now in smartphones, would be better than a big block. I just feel like this was the wrong compromise. Not that my opinion matters, I bought the Surface Laptop Studio like the MS cuck that I am, which is full of bad compromises itself.
- ljm 5y ago
  It's just that Apple will have you think that nobody has ever developed a laptop screen with a smaller bezel, and thus the revolutionary and innovative approach is to just obstruct the display. The macbook has basically gone from having a comically huge bezel to something people will consider a nuisance. Dell did similar with the XPS 13 when they put the camera lens on the bottom corner of the screen, and it wasn't too long before they sorted that one out.
chungy 5y ago
I hoped this would be a campaign to stop the notch insanity on phones. Give us the full screen back! (I have a OnePlus 7 Pro -- I bought it precisely because it doesn't have that nonsense.)
- sp332 5y ago
  If your phone had a front-facing camera, you never had the use of the full front area. (Unless it was one of the weird ones with a pop-up camera!) A notch lets you use those odd-shaped blank spaces at the top of your phone for junk like a clock, and gives you more space for apps.
  - chungy 5y ago
    Besides that the notch is aesthetically displeasing, it's also impractical when you end up with more notifications than can even fit in the area left over. And yeah my phone is one of the "weird" ones with a pop-up camera. Solves the problem nicely.
    - Tagbert 5y ago
      If you mean the app icons in the menu bar, if you have a lot of them you should get either Bartender or Vanilla. They do a good job of hiding most of those icons until you need them and you can reveal them with a click.
  - zamadatix 5y ago
    I've had phones with pop-out, hole punch, notch, and full bar cameras, even one without any front facing camera at all. Hole punch struck the best balance IMO as it allows simple design, a decent camera, and takes up a small enough amount of space that it's not really jarring to just fullscreen content like it isn't there at all. For the new MacBooks I'm happy they at least did something other than full bar but I don't think the solution is the be all end all. For wishful thinking quality behind screen cameras would be the ultimate win in my book if anyone can pull it off properly without limiting other things too much.
alexeiz 5y ago
Free?! You can easily charge $15 for this. The notch is so fugly, people will readily pay to get rid of it.
soneil 5y ago
hah, it works on a regular M1 sans-notch. I used to use obsidianmenubar.com for this many moons ago, glad to see a replacement.
vortico 5y ago
I wonder what API call it uses to make the menubar black.
- sushiburps 5y ago
  They're modifying the current desktop image, adding a rectangle of black the size of the menu bar along the top. Menu bar transparency takes care of the rest.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
bradfitz 5y ago
But where's the app to _add_ a fake notch for old Macs?
- command_tab 5y ago
  https://imadethis.app/notch-pro https://imadethis.app/notch-pro
clairity 5y ago
i'd have much rather that apple remove the camera entirely to support a nearly bezel-less, notchless screen. then for folks who want a camera, apple could have added a smart connector and magnets near the top back of the lid to clip on a camera when needed. it would have been a real win for privacy[0], and they can do their little trick of excessively marking up accessories to boost revenue. it's even better than a physical on-off switch, since 'off' literally means off. the camera could then be thicker, which means no need to compromise on image quality due to the physical limitations of the bezel/lid. [0]: unlike the theater of their 'privacy report' (in beta), which doesn't let you block any of the trackers they surface.
- TillE 5y ago
  What percentage of laptops do you think are sold without a webcam? Maybe 0.01%? Probably less.
arthurcolle 5y ago
The iPhone 6S Plus is able to have landscape mode home icons, which they "accidentally" had to deprecate to support the stupid notch on future iPhones. This was a horrible degradation that was obviously meant to guide people to iPad sales if they want a portable machine instead of using an iPhone with a bluetooth keyboard. It's frustrating to spend so much money on a company that literally shits on it's professional class of customers/users. Now, they are introducing a notch on computers for literally no good reason. Apps like the one shown in OP are honestly sad. Nice work making it but this isn't a good long term thing to need to have. I don't know what to say, Apple might just be a lost cause. Too bad I have spent 10K on computers since 2015 because finally they reintroduce ports and all the shit the spent half a decade saying we would "move beyond" - hopefully there is a class action lawsuit for selling shit that is in retrospect extremely unusable. Tired of this, it's pretty fucked up
SNosTrAnDbLe 5y ago
If you are doing some user facing work and the notch is actually a problem, you can always use an external monitor and the notch will go away.
seba_dos1 5y ago
That's not the only way to hide the notch: https://twitter.com/jsngr/status/1453341112635166720 https://twitter.com/jsngr/status/1453341112635166720

50 points by omarfarooq 5y ago

It's really interesting that the notch was basically only an option on a Mac laptop. It doesn't work at all with Windows or KDE. It almost works on Gnome. But with macOS, the menu bar has been there since the very beginning, and the center of the bar has been increasingly empty as resolutions increased. A fortunate coincidence. The notch is here to stay, until good cameras get a lot smaller. It just makes a ton of sense as a solution.

zozbot234 5y ago
Gnome Phosh has gained an option to cope with screen notches by shifting the top bar clock away from the cutout area, so that it remains visible. Presumably, Gnome-Shell will be doing the same on these devices.
drumhead 5y ago
Why didnt Apple just strip the camera out entirely and just let users connect one with a thunderbolt cable or a dongle. After all Apple users seemed happy enough with dongles when they had fewer ports on laptops.

nathancahill 5y ago

Now how will the coffee shop folks know that I have the greatest newness?

tatorzot 5y ago

But does it exclude the bar from being populated _under_ the notch? I feel like that is a greater sin.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
sp332 5y ago
For reference, this is how the notch works with menus and status bar items. https://twitter.com/SnazzyQ/status/1453143798251339778 https://twitter.com/SnazzyQ/status/1453143798251339778
- tatorzot 5y ago
  Yep! That was the set of tweets I was referencing. It allows items behind the notch, and it's not just iStats.
Tagbert 5y ago
Yes, that is a bug in apps that have not been updated yet
- sp332 5y ago
  https://twitter.com/bjango/status/1453171506263982087 https://twitter.com/bjango/status/1453171506263982087 & https://twitter.com/bjango/status/1453194728506216457 https://twitter.com/bjango/status/1453194728506216457 indicate that this uses the normal APIs and there isn't an obvious "update" that could be made to behave differently.

smoldesu 5y ago

I thought this was a petition asking Apple to get rid of it, I was almost excited for a moment.

jstx1 5y ago
They'll remove it in 3-5 years and congratulate themselves for listening to people.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  I wish I had that kind of courage.
  - robbyking 5y ago
    Objectively they do - they rolled back years of minimalist design on the new MBP: thicker body, more ports, HDMI, card reader, etc.
    - smoldesu 5y ago
      whoosh
- kartoshechka 5y ago
  they gonna put the camera on bottom like earlier xps models, and then in 3-5 more years put it back on top

GreedCtrl 5y ago

I thought this feature was built in, but maybe not? All I can find is https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212842 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212842 which seems to be on a per-app basis.

salamandersauce 5y ago
Apple's solution is per-app and when you go full screen otherwise you can't avoid it.

qntty 5y ago

Does anybody know if the notch is an obstacle for the cursor? Does the mouse pass through the notch or does it need to go around?

wlesieutre 5y ago
Passes through
- smoldesu 5y ago
  Unless you have a menubar that spans across the notch, in which case the behavior changes for some reason to teleport your cursor across the notch. Mind you that this is not the same behavior for statusbar icons for whatever reason, they will reside underneath the notch (yet still accessible for) unless the aforementioned global menu expands beyond the notch, in which case it just starts hiding random statusbar icons until it fits.
  - david422 5y ago
    > behavior changes for some reason to teleport your cursor across the notch Which was always the cardinal sin in mac os HIG - never move the mouse.
    - cassianoleal 5y ago
      It doesn't though. You still have to move it yourself, only instead of it going underneath the notch, it teleports across. Not automatically. You need to move it.
  - wlesieutre 5y ago
    "Some reason" being so that moving from a menu to the adjacent menu with the notch in between is the same short mouse movement as between other adjacent menus, instead of having a longer move through the dead space of the notch. I tried one in the Apple Store but didn't think to check any software with a >50% full menubar to see if that feels weird or not. If they hadn't done this, someone would be complaining these menus are supposed to be 10 pixels apart, but I have to move my mouse 100 pixels instead. If it bugs you, hit cmd-I on the application and put it in the no-notch mode.

tommoor 5y ago

FWIW this is also quite nice on non-notch macbooks – it hides the small triangle of visible background in the top corners of windows.

chadlavi 5y ago

There's just no pleasing people. "Here's more screen real estate, but it's not contiguous." "No! I hate you! This is an abomination! I will black it out and make it useless." If they hadn't made any camera updates people would also be ticked about that. Edit: I thought people were using this to push their menubar down below the level of the notch and creating black dead zones on the left and right of the notch. But I still think it's silly and picayune for people to quibble about the color of the menu bar.

joenathanone 5y ago
I can't help but thinking that there is an option in between those two choices.
- jedberg 5y ago
  What exactly would be between "we put a screen next to the camera" and "we put a bezel next to the camera"?
  - picture 5y ago
    we put a small bezel next to the camera
  - joenathanone 5y ago
    Punch hole cameras are a thing now in smartphones, would be better than a big block. I just feel like this was the wrong compromise. Not that my opinion matters, I bought the Surface Laptop Studio like the MS cuck that I am, which is full of bad compromises itself.
ljm 5y ago
It's just that Apple will have you think that nobody has ever developed a laptop screen with a smaller bezel, and thus the revolutionary and innovative approach is to just obstruct the display. The macbook has basically gone from having a comically huge bezel to something people will consider a nuisance. Dell did similar with the XPS 13 when they put the camera lens on the bottom corner of the screen, and it wasn't too long before they sorted that one out.

chungy 5y ago

I hoped this would be a campaign to stop the notch insanity on phones. Give us the full screen back! (I have a OnePlus 7 Pro -- I bought it precisely because it doesn't have that nonsense.)

sp332 5y ago
If your phone had a front-facing camera, you never had the use of the full front area. (Unless it was one of the weird ones with a pop-up camera!) A notch lets you use those odd-shaped blank spaces at the top of your phone for junk like a clock, and gives you more space for apps.
- chungy 5y ago
  Besides that the notch is aesthetically displeasing, it's also impractical when you end up with more notifications than can even fit in the area left over. And yeah my phone is one of the "weird" ones with a pop-up camera. Solves the problem nicely.
  - Tagbert 5y ago
    If you mean the app icons in the menu bar, if you have a lot of them you should get either Bartender or Vanilla. They do a good job of hiding most of those icons until you need them and you can reveal them with a click.
- zamadatix 5y ago
  I've had phones with pop-out, hole punch, notch, and full bar cameras, even one without any front facing camera at all. Hole punch struck the best balance IMO as it allows simple design, a decent camera, and takes up a small enough amount of space that it's not really jarring to just fullscreen content like it isn't there at all. For the new MacBooks I'm happy they at least did something other than full bar but I don't think the solution is the be all end all. For wishful thinking quality behind screen cameras would be the ultimate win in my book if anyone can pull it off properly without limiting other things too much.

alexeiz 5y ago

Free?! You can easily charge $15 for this. The notch is so fugly, people will readily pay to get rid of it.

soneil 5y ago

hah, it works on a regular M1 sans-notch. I used to use obsidianmenubar.com for this many moons ago, glad to see a replacement.

vortico 5y ago

I wonder what API call it uses to make the menubar black.

sushiburps 5y ago
They're modifying the current desktop image, adding a rectangle of black the size of the menu bar along the top. Menu bar transparency takes care of the rest.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

bradfitz 5y ago

But where's the app to _add_ a fake notch for old Macs?

command_tab 5y ago
https://imadethis.app/notch-pro https://imadethis.app/notch-pro

clairity 5y ago

i'd have much rather that apple remove the camera entirely to support a nearly bezel-less, notchless screen. then for folks who want a camera, apple could have added a smart connector and magnets near the top back of the lid to clip on a camera when needed. it would have been a real win for privacy[0], and they can do their little trick of excessively marking up accessories to boost revenue. it's even better than a physical on-off switch, since 'off' literally means off. the camera could then be thicker, which means no need to compromise on image quality due to the physical limitations of the bezel/lid. [0]: unlike the theater of their 'privacy report' (in beta), which doesn't let you block any of the trackers they surface.

TillE 5y ago
What percentage of laptops do you think are sold without a webcam? Maybe 0.01%? Probably less.

arthurcolle 5y ago

The iPhone 6S Plus is able to have landscape mode home icons, which they "accidentally" had to deprecate to support the stupid notch on future iPhones. This was a horrible degradation that was obviously meant to guide people to iPad sales if they want a portable machine instead of using an iPhone with a bluetooth keyboard. It's frustrating to spend so much money on a company that literally shits on it's professional class of customers/users. Now, they are introducing a notch on computers for literally no good reason. Apps like the one shown in OP are honestly sad. Nice work making it but this isn't a good long term thing to need to have. I don't know what to say, Apple might just be a lost cause. Too bad I have spent 10K on computers since 2015 because finally they reintroduce ports and all the shit the spent half a decade saying we would "move beyond" - hopefully there is a class action lawsuit for selling shit that is in retrospect extremely unusable. Tired of this, it's pretty fucked up

SNosTrAnDbLe 5y ago

If you are doing some user facing work and the notch is actually a problem, you can always use an external monitor and the notch will go away.

seba_dos1 5y ago

That's not the only way to hide the notch: https://twitter.com/jsngr/status/1453341112635166720 https://twitter.com/jsngr/status/1453341112635166720