7 ms·

I don't understand how MacOS is constently praised for its UI while half the comments here mention a third party app just to make it usable. Maybe it's just me

I don't understand how MacOS is constently praised for its UI while half the comments here mention a third party app just to make it usable. Maybe it's just me, but I owned a Mac for over 5 years and I could never wrap my head around how MacOS handles windows and open apps.

throwk8s 4y ago
All depends on what one is used to. On Linux I've had to fight with window borders so narrow by default (on whatever Ubuntu Studio uses) that they practically couldn't be resized. You had to aim at like one pixel. I read somewhere that a window could be resized by holding Alt and clicking with the middle mouse button... but on a Mac you never need to hold down keys and have a three-button mouse to do something that basic.
- bmitc 4y ago
  > but on a Mac you never need to hold down keys and have a three-button mouse to do something that basic That's really not true at all, even for that exact thing. macOS still has very small clickable areas for resizing a window. Unless an app has focus, you don't even get the little two-sided arrows. And apps that are in dark mode basically all blend together because macOS either has no borders or like 1 pixel wide since macOS relies on shadows delineating windows, which only works for windows that are primarily light colors.
- david422 4y ago
  Ugg, I hate that. On Mac OS as well. Windows 8 had something like a 10px border that looked great. Tried to do the same on linux - modify some defaults - and it worked for a while until... it stopped working and I haven't been able to fix it. But seriously - just make that configurable! Then everybody can be happy with their own settings. But no.... the new hotness is no usability for anybody.
cuddlybacon 4y ago
Because those like me who don't install any of those apps don't have anything to share on HN. Showing that you have a nearly default desktop isn't interesting except when people are claiming that no one does that.
- microtonal 4y ago
  I completely agree. I have used macOS since 2007 and the only thing I have really used as an extension is Alfred in place of Spotlight (although nowadays I am just using Spotlight). I am very happy with the UI as it is (on Linux I used everything from WindowMaker, KDE, GNOME, to tiling window managers). Also I have many friends and family members who use macOS and I think none of them have third-party programs installed to modify the UI. So, you won't see them posting here about the extensions that they use.
  - carl_dr 4y ago
    https://www.rectangleapp.com https://www.rectangleapp.com and https://www.raycast.com/ https://www.raycast.com/ are game changers. They are the only two apps I use which change/improve macOS’ behaviour, I can’t live without them. And Raycast actually has the Rectangle functionality built in, although I prefer the separate app, there are some ‘defaults write’ values I can change on the command line that I like (to give me a wider bottom margin on my screen - I stick Silicio in the corner of my screen for instance.) Give them both a go.
MarcelOlsz 4y ago
I have a few quality of life apps that take me a couple minutes to set up on a new machine. I spent like 2 months debugging bluetooth problems on my arch machine. Don't even mention Windows in my presence.
millzlane 4y ago
There are so many bugs in the OS and I just work around them. Two recent ones I can think of: Issue 1 is: Shift+click selection doesn't work in Finder's Icon view. To reproduce: In finder select the "icons" view. Click on the first item, Hold shift, and while holding shit then click on the tenth item. Expected behavior is to select Items 1-10 including ten. Workaround: Switch to list view. Issue 2: Lock screen keyboard shortcut doesn't work when mission control is activated. To reproduce: Open mission control via app or hot corner. Press Control+Command+Q to lock screen. Screen won't lock. Workaround: Deactivate mission control view before locking screen. Yea...it's dumb. But in the words of the late great Steve Jobs, 'don't hold it that way'. I get that apple is different. But sometimes it just seems counterintuitive.
- NovemberWhiskey 4y ago
  I don't think "Issue 1" is a bug; icon view isn't necessarily ordered so it doesn't have meaningful range selection.
- microtonal 4y ago
  To reproduce: In finder select the "icons" view. Click on the first item, Hold shift, and while holding shit then click on the tenth item. I don't think that's a bug. The icon view does not have an inherent ordering, since you can just drag icons around. What is supposed to be the range to select if you have an unordered view. Issue 2: Lock screen keyboard shortcut doesn't work when mission control is activated. That looks like a bug. Interestingly, it does work on the new external Apple keyboards when you press the key that also has Touch ID.
  - Tagbert 4y ago
    Still, icon view is usually a grid of icons, there is an implied order there, also you can set the sort order to any number of properties. I’m not particularly bothered by this, but it seems like you should be able to select a range of icons with shift-click like any other list of items.
- pvg 4y ago
  The first one is not a bug, it's designed like that. Icons in icon view can be positioned arbitrarily and have no order. You can't easily extend the selection with shift clicking because in that view, it's not obvious what that gesture is supposed to be extending beyond the thing being clicked on. It's worked like that since MacOS Classic.
Teever 4y ago
Have you ever noticed that you can't cut and paste files with right click or the drop down menu in OSX? It's been a few years since I've used OSX, but every version I've ever tried has this intentional bug. I say intentional because when I first got a mac in the 10.4 days I noticed that 'cut' was greyed out in the menu so I thoughtfully filed a bug report. To their credit they did answer the bug report several years later but they explained that they would not fix this as it is desired behaviour. Baffling.
- sxg 4y ago
  I think this may be a misunderstanding on your part (no disrespect). Cut/paste works slightly differently on macOS compared to Windows. There's no actual concept of "cut". You just "copy" whatever files you want. When you're ready to paste, you can hit Cmd+V to "paste" or Cmd+alt+V to "paste and remove the original file(s)". The benefit is that you don't have to decide whether you want to just "copy" or "cut" before you're ready to "paste", which makes a lot of sense if you're not coming from a Windows background. But yes, migrating from Windows to macOS makes this feel confusing.
  - Teever 4y ago
    Now how do I do this with a mouse? (I already know the answer, but I'm curious if you do. It isn't very discoverable.)
    - carl_dr 4y ago
      Drag while holding option?
      - Teever 4y ago
        With only a mouse. Imagine you're using the only computer that you'd want your mother to use.
    - sxg 4y ago
      Drag and drop from one folder to another is how I would do it with a mouse only. Is there another way?
throwmeariver1 4y ago
I know very few people on any desktop os that don’t use plugins or third party apps to customize their experience but it’s only when macOS is discussed that it gets painted as something outrageous.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
teucris 4y ago
I use computers for media production, Chrome, and VS Code. Considering macOS is a Unix with a UX that is more or less targeted to creative types, it means that I don’t have to do anything other than installing a few apps and homebrew to get a system that does 99.9% of what I want. macOS then becomes a mouse cursor and a few touchpad gestures. The UX customizations I configure are in the programs I use, not the OS. macOS’s UI therefore provides the least friction.
rsync 4y ago
The answer is that people confuse operating system with operating environment. OSX is a wonderful operating system - which is to say, it’s Unix but I can print things and use WiFi properly. I can edit a pdf, etc. OSX is, in many ways, an absurd operating environment. If you need any proof of this, just click the little green dot in the upper left of an open window…
- NovemberWhiskey 4y ago
  >If you need any proof of this, just click the little green dot in the upper left of an open window… It goes full-screen - isn't that an expected outcome?
  - oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
    Personally, I would find it far, far more useful if it maximised the window rather than full-screening it. At the very least, having it configurable would be nice.
    - NovemberWhiskey 4y ago
      If you want the application to make the window as large as useful w.r.t its current content (which was the old behavior) you can Option-Click.
    - bandris 4y ago
      Holding the option key allows exactly that. Menu item is called 'Zoom' for some reason.
      - oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
        Hmm.. that doesn't quite do what I'm after — make it the full size of the screen. It looks like it's similar to the old macOS behaviour that made the window 'as big as its contents'.
        4y ago
oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
Personally, I find macOS superior in its UI overall, but that doesn't mean it's flawless. Apple has made some very strange decisions and is painfully reluctant to row back on them. Keyboard support, in particular, is woeful.
- D-Coder 4y ago
  Moving to double-clicking a folder replaces the open folder and _moves everything around_... argh! I want a visual UI to leave things just where I put them, dammit! Not to mention 30 years of muscle memory when they implemented that — without any System Pref to restore the old way.
boopmaster 4y ago
A number of the other comments explain how to configure the UI to allow for similar functionality; e.g… with 3 finger drag. I found the article to be a little odd… awing at 3rd party apps basically replicating baked in features. Although to be fair I am super meticulous in going through the accessibility and gesture features to get the UI feel just right for my tastes. MacOS, to me, feels like a clunker out of the box.
Tagbert 4y ago
Resizing windows is a weakness of Mac OS. It mostly retains the original fully manual method of dragging the edges of individual windows which is a fiddle process. There are some methods like mentioned in the original post, but that is about it. For that reason there are dozens of third-party tools, many free, that people use and like for their particular ways of working. It would be nice if Apple were to look at these and implement a basic verion of one or more of them in the OS. The “stoplight buttons” on windows are part of a very opinionated solution to window management that works from some people but is a complete mess if you don’t like full-screen apps. I would prefer if we had the option to convert the full-screen button to a maximize window button. Double-clicking on the window header is close. The other thing that Windows users complain about it that closing a window doesn’t close the app. That one is just a confusion because they are used to how Windows windows. The Mac OS convention of keeping the app active is not wrong, it’s just a different approach and the kind of conceptual change that users need to make when they switch OSs.
- maleldil 4y ago
  Closing the window and not closing the app is great and one of my favourite things from switching to macOS from Windows. At the same time, the Zoom thing is ridiculous. Some apps do the right thing (e.g., Firefox), while some leave you scratching your head (Finder). Ctrl + Opt + Return is the only reason I have Rectangle installed.
diegof79 4y ago
My two preferred macOS UX features (compared to other OSs) are: - Respect for the user: macOS doesn’t show many confirmation messages, notifications, or ad-like things. Apple promotes products in the AppStore or shows you the usual “What’s new” during a new install. But, overall is very respectful, and that includes notifications about OS upgrades. By contrast, Windows is noisy. It asks for confirmation about everything, it has trial crapware in their home editions, and decides to install an OS update without asking in the worst possible moment. - It just works (at least for the hardware I use). This is my main complain with Linux DEs. I know it improved a lot, but I still have memories of trying to make the Synaptic trackpad driver work or playing with xrandr to use multiple monitors during a presentation. About the hidden shortcuts… well discoverability should be better. But, is also fun to discover those tricks.
vlunkr 4y ago
It feels like they're just being stubborn with the window management. Like they chose how it should all work ages ago, and they don't want to admit that some of the choices are bad. They drug their feet on right-click forever as well.
tinus_hn 4y ago
MacOS is perfectly usable without a way to move a window by clicking on it outside of the title bar.
- behnamoh 4y ago
  macOS is not usuable without a proper tiling window manager. You double click on a window and it enlarges, but doesn't take all of the screen. Seriously, wtf?
  - tinus_hn 4y ago
    You fail to understand the difference between ‘usable’ and ‘works according to my exotic preferences’. If you ‘need’ a tiling window manager, MacOS is not for you, Apple is never going to add one and is only going to cripple attempts by third parties to do so.
    - behnamoh 4y ago
      You fail to understand the difference between owning an OS and merely using it the way Apple intended. macOS is notorious for poor handling of windows, I don't need to explain that.
      - tinus_hn 4y ago
        No, MacOS is an opinionated OS, well known for the droves of armchair UI designers smugly criticizing it while they keep buying the hardware. It has been that way since forever. You’re holding it wrong.

throwk8s 4y ago

All depends on what one is used to. On Linux I've had to fight with window borders so narrow by default (on whatever Ubuntu Studio uses) that they practically couldn't be resized. You had to aim at like one pixel. I read somewhere that a window could be resized by holding Alt and clicking with the middle mouse button... but on a Mac you never need to hold down keys and have a three-button mouse to do something that basic.

bmitc 4y ago
> but on a Mac you never need to hold down keys and have a three-button mouse to do something that basic That's really not true at all, even for that exact thing. macOS still has very small clickable areas for resizing a window. Unless an app has focus, you don't even get the little two-sided arrows. And apps that are in dark mode basically all blend together because macOS either has no borders or like 1 pixel wide since macOS relies on shadows delineating windows, which only works for windows that are primarily light colors.
david422 4y ago
Ugg, I hate that. On Mac OS as well. Windows 8 had something like a 10px border that looked great. Tried to do the same on linux - modify some defaults - and it worked for a while until... it stopped working and I haven't been able to fix it. But seriously - just make that configurable! Then everybody can be happy with their own settings. But no.... the new hotness is no usability for anybody.

cuddlybacon 4y ago

Because those like me who don't install any of those apps don't have anything to share on HN. Showing that you have a nearly default desktop isn't interesting except when people are claiming that no one does that.

microtonal 4y ago
I completely agree. I have used macOS since 2007 and the only thing I have really used as an extension is Alfred in place of Spotlight (although nowadays I am just using Spotlight). I am very happy with the UI as it is (on Linux I used everything from WindowMaker, KDE, GNOME, to tiling window managers). Also I have many friends and family members who use macOS and I think none of them have third-party programs installed to modify the UI. So, you won't see them posting here about the extensions that they use.
- carl_dr 4y ago
  https://www.rectangleapp.com https://www.rectangleapp.com and https://www.raycast.com/ https://www.raycast.com/ are game changers. They are the only two apps I use which change/improve macOS’ behaviour, I can’t live without them. And Raycast actually has the Rectangle functionality built in, although I prefer the separate app, there are some ‘defaults write’ values I can change on the command line that I like (to give me a wider bottom margin on my screen - I stick Silicio in the corner of my screen for instance.) Give them both a go.

MarcelOlsz 4y ago

I have a few quality of life apps that take me a couple minutes to set up on a new machine. I spent like 2 months debugging bluetooth problems on my arch machine. Don't even mention Windows in my presence.

millzlane 4y ago

There are so many bugs in the OS and I just work around them. Two recent ones I can think of: Issue 1 is: Shift+click selection doesn't work in Finder's Icon view. To reproduce: In finder select the "icons" view. Click on the first item, Hold shift, and while holding shit then click on the tenth item. Expected behavior is to select Items 1-10 including ten. Workaround: Switch to list view. Issue 2: Lock screen keyboard shortcut doesn't work when mission control is activated. To reproduce: Open mission control via app or hot corner. Press Control+Command+Q to lock screen. Screen won't lock. Workaround: Deactivate mission control view before locking screen. Yea...it's dumb. But in the words of the late great Steve Jobs, 'don't hold it that way'. I get that apple is different. But sometimes it just seems counterintuitive.

NovemberWhiskey 4y ago
I don't think "Issue 1" is a bug; icon view isn't necessarily ordered so it doesn't have meaningful range selection.
microtonal 4y ago
To reproduce: In finder select the "icons" view. Click on the first item, Hold shift, and while holding shit then click on the tenth item. I don't think that's a bug. The icon view does not have an inherent ordering, since you can just drag icons around. What is supposed to be the range to select if you have an unordered view. Issue 2: Lock screen keyboard shortcut doesn't work when mission control is activated. That looks like a bug. Interestingly, it does work on the new external Apple keyboards when you press the key that also has Touch ID.
- Tagbert 4y ago
  Still, icon view is usually a grid of icons, there is an implied order there, also you can set the sort order to any number of properties. I’m not particularly bothered by this, but it seems like you should be able to select a range of icons with shift-click like any other list of items.
pvg 4y ago
The first one is not a bug, it's designed like that. Icons in icon view can be positioned arbitrarily and have no order. You can't easily extend the selection with shift clicking because in that view, it's not obvious what that gesture is supposed to be extending beyond the thing being clicked on. It's worked like that since MacOS Classic.

Teever 4y ago

Have you ever noticed that you can't cut and paste files with right click or the drop down menu in OSX? It's been a few years since I've used OSX, but every version I've ever tried has this intentional bug. I say intentional because when I first got a mac in the 10.4 days I noticed that 'cut' was greyed out in the menu so I thoughtfully filed a bug report. To their credit they did answer the bug report several years later but they explained that they would not fix this as it is desired behaviour. Baffling.

sxg 4y ago
I think this may be a misunderstanding on your part (no disrespect). Cut/paste works slightly differently on macOS compared to Windows. There's no actual concept of "cut". You just "copy" whatever files you want. When you're ready to paste, you can hit Cmd+V to "paste" or Cmd+alt+V to "paste and remove the original file(s)". The benefit is that you don't have to decide whether you want to just "copy" or "cut" before you're ready to "paste", which makes a lot of sense if you're not coming from a Windows background. But yes, migrating from Windows to macOS makes this feel confusing.
- Teever 4y ago
  Now how do I do this with a mouse? (I already know the answer, but I'm curious if you do. It isn't very discoverable.)
  - carl_dr 4y ago
    Drag while holding option?
    - Teever 4y ago
      With only a mouse. Imagine you're using the only computer that you'd want your mother to use.
  - sxg 4y ago
    Drag and drop from one folder to another is how I would do it with a mouse only. Is there another way?

throwmeariver1 4y ago

I know very few people on any desktop os that don’t use plugins or third party apps to customize their experience but it’s only when macOS is discussed that it gets painted as something outrageous.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

teucris 4y ago

I use computers for media production, Chrome, and VS Code. Considering macOS is a Unix with a UX that is more or less targeted to creative types, it means that I don’t have to do anything other than installing a few apps and homebrew to get a system that does 99.9% of what I want. macOS then becomes a mouse cursor and a few touchpad gestures. The UX customizations I configure are in the programs I use, not the OS. macOS’s UI therefore provides the least friction.

rsync 4y ago

The answer is that people confuse operating system with operating environment. OSX is a wonderful operating system - which is to say, it’s Unix but I can print things and use WiFi properly. I can edit a pdf, etc. OSX is, in many ways, an absurd operating environment. If you need any proof of this, just click the little green dot in the upper left of an open window…

NovemberWhiskey 4y ago
>If you need any proof of this, just click the little green dot in the upper left of an open window… It goes full-screen - isn't that an expected outcome?
- oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
  Personally, I would find it far, far more useful if it maximised the window rather than full-screening it. At the very least, having it configurable would be nice.
  - NovemberWhiskey 4y ago
    If you want the application to make the window as large as useful w.r.t its current content (which was the old behavior) you can Option-Click.
  - bandris 4y ago
    Holding the option key allows exactly that. Menu item is called 'Zoom' for some reason.
    - oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
      Hmm.. that doesn't quite do what I'm after — make it the full size of the screen. It looks like it's similar to the old macOS behaviour that made the window 'as big as its contents'.
      - 4y ago

oneeyedpigeon 4y ago

Personally, I find macOS superior in its UI overall, but that doesn't mean it's flawless. Apple has made some very strange decisions and is painfully reluctant to row back on them. Keyboard support, in particular, is woeful.

D-Coder 4y ago
Moving to double-clicking a folder replaces the open folder and _moves everything around_... argh! I want a visual UI to leave things just where I put them, dammit! Not to mention 30 years of muscle memory when they implemented that — without any System Pref to restore the old way.

boopmaster 4y ago

A number of the other comments explain how to configure the UI to allow for similar functionality; e.g… with 3 finger drag. I found the article to be a little odd… awing at 3rd party apps basically replicating baked in features. Although to be fair I am super meticulous in going through the accessibility and gesture features to get the UI feel just right for my tastes. MacOS, to me, feels like a clunker out of the box.

Tagbert 4y ago

Resizing windows is a weakness of Mac OS. It mostly retains the original fully manual method of dragging the edges of individual windows which is a fiddle process. There are some methods like mentioned in the original post, but that is about it. For that reason there are dozens of third-party tools, many free, that people use and like for their particular ways of working. It would be nice if Apple were to look at these and implement a basic verion of one or more of them in the OS. The “stoplight buttons” on windows are part of a very opinionated solution to window management that works from some people but is a complete mess if you don’t like full-screen apps. I would prefer if we had the option to convert the full-screen button to a maximize window button. Double-clicking on the window header is close. The other thing that Windows users complain about it that closing a window doesn’t close the app. That one is just a confusion because they are used to how Windows windows. The Mac OS convention of keeping the app active is not wrong, it’s just a different approach and the kind of conceptual change that users need to make when they switch OSs.

maleldil 4y ago
Closing the window and not closing the app is great and one of my favourite things from switching to macOS from Windows. At the same time, the Zoom thing is ridiculous. Some apps do the right thing (e.g., Firefox), while some leave you scratching your head (Finder). Ctrl + Opt + Return is the only reason I have Rectangle installed.

diegof79 4y ago

My two preferred macOS UX features (compared to other OSs) are: - Respect for the user: macOS doesn’t show many confirmation messages, notifications, or ad-like things. Apple promotes products in the AppStore or shows you the usual “What’s new” during a new install. But, overall is very respectful, and that includes notifications about OS upgrades. By contrast, Windows is noisy. It asks for confirmation about everything, it has trial crapware in their home editions, and decides to install an OS update without asking in the worst possible moment. - It just works (at least for the hardware I use). This is my main complain with Linux DEs. I know it improved a lot, but I still have memories of trying to make the Synaptic trackpad driver work or playing with xrandr to use multiple monitors during a presentation. About the hidden shortcuts… well discoverability should be better. But, is also fun to discover those tricks.

vlunkr 4y ago

It feels like they're just being stubborn with the window management. Like they chose how it should all work ages ago, and they don't want to admit that some of the choices are bad. They drug their feet on right-click forever as well.

tinus_hn 4y ago

MacOS is perfectly usable without a way to move a window by clicking on it outside of the title bar.

behnamoh 4y ago
macOS is not usuable without a proper tiling window manager. You double click on a window and it enlarges, but doesn't take all of the screen. Seriously, wtf?
- tinus_hn 4y ago
  You fail to understand the difference between ‘usable’ and ‘works according to my exotic preferences’. If you ‘need’ a tiling window manager, MacOS is not for you, Apple is never going to add one and is only going to cripple attempts by third parties to do so.
  - behnamoh 4y ago
    You fail to understand the difference between owning an OS and merely using it the way Apple intended. macOS is notorious for poor handling of windows, I don't need to explain that.
    - tinus_hn 4y ago
      No, MacOS is an opinionated OS, well known for the droves of armchair UI designers smugly criticizing it while they keep buying the hardware. It has been that way since forever. You’re holding it wrong.