4 ms·

(You probably know this, but just in case: the rationale for having the menu on the top is specifically for apps that are not maximized, because the mouse movem

(You probably know this, but just in case: the rationale for having the menu on the top is specifically for apps that are not maximized, because the mouse movement to get to the top is much faster than that for accurately clicking a hotspot in the middle of the screen)

mrob 3y ago
True when you're using a 512x342 resolution screen and a mechanical ball mouse like the original Macintosh, but less certain with modern hardware.
- acdha 3y ago
  It’s always easier not to make fine grained control motions. Even with a touchpad not having to stop precisely means the motion requires less thought.
- MR4D 3y ago
  Technically it’s always true. On a Mac the menu bar is always at the top. Because of that, the menu bar is at the logical end of mouse movement (it’s like a virtual wall, which the mouse can’t go beyond). Because of this design, you can “slam” the mouse against that invisible barrier and it will stop where you need it (at least in the Y axis). “Slamming” the mouse is always faster than trying to move it to an arbitrary point on the screen because there is no need to slow down the pointer on the screen. It just stops immediately.
  - mrob 3y ago
    That's only true for the corners. For the edge you're only constraining one axis of motion. And modern screens generally have wider aspect ratio than the original Macintosh, exacerbating the problem of unconstrained X-axis motion.
    - kaba0 3y ago
      One axis of freedom is still better than two, in this case.
      - mrob 3y ago
        Fitt's law[0] says difficulty of movement is a function of both accuracy and distance. Macintosh-style menu bars reduce the accuracy required but increase the distance. When distances were always small, this was a clear win. Now that we have large wide-screen monitors, it may not be. The real correct solution is pie menus[1], which reduce both accuracy and distance requirements regardless of screen size. Blender has pie menus and it's one of the reasons its UI is so fast to use once you've learned it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_menu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_menu
  - spookie 3y ago
    Yeah, it does make sense. That's also the reason for the close button or start menu to be at a corner, at least on Windows derivatives. Of course, this clashes with the menubar placement on Mac, if they were placed the same way.
    - MR4D 3y ago
      But Microsoft even messed that up. The original start button was not in the corner - it was near the corner. Literally just a few pixels removed. That tiny mistake made it much harder and you couldn’t “slam and click” the start button (which annoyed me to no end). Also, the order of the window buttons for close, maximize, and minimize are incorrectly ordered, so a mistake causes you to click the opposite of what you actually want.
  - steve1977 3y ago
    NeXTSTEP did it best. You could bring up a copy of the menu by right-clicking on the desktop. No movement and no accuracy required.
flohofwoe 3y ago
On one hand that reason makes sense, but on the other hand I never found that to be a problem when using menus attached to windows. I need to aim for buttons in the middle of the screen all the time, and that's not slower just because the mouse doesn't bounce against a screen edge. I also hardly find myself actually bouncing against the screen edge when using macOS menus. IMHO the bigger problem on Mac is the weird 'application centric' window system behaviour instead of the much more intuitive 'window centric' behaviour of Windows (and most Linux desktops). For instance, "Alt-Tab" flips through applications on macOS, and it's possible for applications to be running even though they have no windows open, and in that case they just present a "naked" menu bar which I find utterly confusing. The whole thing feels like a dead-end UX experiment from the early 90's. I'm mostly using the "3-finger-swipe" on macOS now to directly pick a window instead of tabbing though, but the main reason for that is not that it's better, it's just better than the weird macOS Alt-Tab behaviour. PS: this sounds like I just switched from Windows to Mac, but I made that switch more than a decade ago, and it still feels "wrong" ;)
- jwells89 3y ago
  The issue with window-centric behavior, I find, is that lacking the logical grouping of application-based, it scales badly. Alt-tab for example becomes increasingly unusable as the number of open windows increases. The fact that the taskbar has grouped windows by applications by default since XP/Vista hints at this scalability problem, with the taskbar quickly getting similarly unusable without the grouping.
  - spookie 3y ago
    This is mitigated via workspaces. Not sure how Win/Mac does it, but that's how I work on Linux desktops.
    - clan 3y ago
      Works reasonably well on Windows: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/multiple-desktops-in-windows-36f52e38-5b4a-557b-2ff9-e1a60c976434 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/multiple-desktop... I can never remember the (easy) shortcuts so this is helpful: https://learn.microsoft.com/da-dk/windows/powertoys/shortcut-guide https://learn.microsoft.com/da-dk/windows/powertoys/shortcut... From PowerToys: https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys (Which also have the (in this context) useful FancyZones)
alpaca128 3y ago
And yet I'm still slower at this specific thing on Mac OS because I always first have to make sure the right window is focused or I'm in the wrong context menu. Meanwhile on per-window menus that's guaranteed. Also those buttons are the same size as almost all other buttons in the system, it's not difficult to hit them reliably. Edit: also if Apple cares so much about this, why do they make the close/minimize buttons so tiny?
- CharlesW 3y ago
  > Edit: also if Apple cares so much about this, why do they make the close/minimize buttons so tiny? I think daily users graduate to ⌘W and ⌘M (which are all-app standards) fairly quickly, while power users graduate to the window manager they prefer. > …I'm still slower at this specific thing on Mac OS because I always first have to make sure the right window is focused… You might find this useful: https://hazeover.com/ https://hazeover.com/
steve1977 3y ago
Although I wonder if still works out so well with 34“ ultrawide monitors (which Apple doesn’t make and therefore doesn’t care about of course).

mrob 3y ago

True when you're using a 512x342 resolution screen and a mechanical ball mouse like the original Macintosh, but less certain with modern hardware.

acdha 3y ago
It’s always easier not to make fine grained control motions. Even with a touchpad not having to stop precisely means the motion requires less thought.
MR4D 3y ago
Technically it’s always true. On a Mac the menu bar is always at the top. Because of that, the menu bar is at the logical end of mouse movement (it’s like a virtual wall, which the mouse can’t go beyond). Because of this design, you can “slam” the mouse against that invisible barrier and it will stop where you need it (at least in the Y axis). “Slamming” the mouse is always faster than trying to move it to an arbitrary point on the screen because there is no need to slow down the pointer on the screen. It just stops immediately.
- mrob 3y ago
  That's only true for the corners. For the edge you're only constraining one axis of motion. And modern screens generally have wider aspect ratio than the original Macintosh, exacerbating the problem of unconstrained X-axis motion.
  - kaba0 3y ago
    One axis of freedom is still better than two, in this case.
    - mrob 3y ago
      Fitt's law[0] says difficulty of movement is a function of both accuracy and distance. Macintosh-style menu bars reduce the accuracy required but increase the distance. When distances were always small, this was a clear win. Now that we have large wide-screen monitors, it may not be. The real correct solution is pie menus[1], which reduce both accuracy and distance requirements regardless of screen size. Blender has pie menus and it's one of the reasons its UI is so fast to use once you've learned it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_menu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_menu
- spookie 3y ago
  Yeah, it does make sense. That's also the reason for the close button or start menu to be at a corner, at least on Windows derivatives. Of course, this clashes with the menubar placement on Mac, if they were placed the same way.
  - MR4D 3y ago
    But Microsoft even messed that up. The original start button was not in the corner - it was near the corner. Literally just a few pixels removed. That tiny mistake made it much harder and you couldn’t “slam and click” the start button (which annoyed me to no end). Also, the order of the window buttons for close, maximize, and minimize are incorrectly ordered, so a mistake causes you to click the opposite of what you actually want.
- steve1977 3y ago
  NeXTSTEP did it best. You could bring up a copy of the menu by right-clicking on the desktop. No movement and no accuracy required.

flohofwoe 3y ago

On one hand that reason makes sense, but on the other hand I never found that to be a problem when using menus attached to windows. I need to aim for buttons in the middle of the screen all the time, and that's not slower just because the mouse doesn't bounce against a screen edge. I also hardly find myself actually bouncing against the screen edge when using macOS menus. IMHO the bigger problem on Mac is the weird 'application centric' window system behaviour instead of the much more intuitive 'window centric' behaviour of Windows (and most Linux desktops). For instance, "Alt-Tab" flips through applications on macOS, and it's possible for applications to be running even though they have no windows open, and in that case they just present a "naked" menu bar which I find utterly confusing. The whole thing feels like a dead-end UX experiment from the early 90's. I'm mostly using the "3-finger-swipe" on macOS now to directly pick a window instead of tabbing though, but the main reason for that is not that it's better, it's just better than the weird macOS Alt-Tab behaviour. PS: this sounds like I just switched from Windows to Mac, but I made that switch more than a decade ago, and it still feels "wrong" ;)

jwells89 3y ago
The issue with window-centric behavior, I find, is that lacking the logical grouping of application-based, it scales badly. Alt-tab for example becomes increasingly unusable as the number of open windows increases. The fact that the taskbar has grouped windows by applications by default since XP/Vista hints at this scalability problem, with the taskbar quickly getting similarly unusable without the grouping.
- spookie 3y ago
  This is mitigated via workspaces. Not sure how Win/Mac does it, but that's how I work on Linux desktops.
  - clan 3y ago
    Works reasonably well on Windows: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/multiple-desktops-in-windows-36f52e38-5b4a-557b-2ff9-e1a60c976434 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/multiple-desktop... I can never remember the (easy) shortcuts so this is helpful: https://learn.microsoft.com/da-dk/windows/powertoys/shortcut-guide https://learn.microsoft.com/da-dk/windows/powertoys/shortcut... From PowerToys: https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys (Which also have the (in this context) useful FancyZones)

alpaca128 3y ago

And yet I'm still slower at this specific thing on Mac OS because I always first have to make sure the right window is focused or I'm in the wrong context menu. Meanwhile on per-window menus that's guaranteed. Also those buttons are the same size as almost all other buttons in the system, it's not difficult to hit them reliably. Edit: also if Apple cares so much about this, why do they make the close/minimize buttons so tiny?

CharlesW 3y ago
> Edit: also if Apple cares so much about this, why do they make the close/minimize buttons so tiny? I think daily users graduate to ⌘W and ⌘M (which are all-app standards) fairly quickly, while power users graduate to the window manager they prefer. > …I'm still slower at this specific thing on Mac OS because I always first have to make sure the right window is focused… You might find this useful: https://hazeover.com/ https://hazeover.com/

steve1977 3y ago

Although I wonder if still works out so well with 34“ ultrawide monitors (which Apple doesn’t make and therefore doesn’t care about of course).