6 ms·

superfocused utilities to provide inexplicably missing functionality in macOS are a time honored tradition, but this may be the absolute peak of that genre of a

superfocused utilities to provide inexplicably missing functionality in macOS are a time honored tradition, but this may be the absolute peak of that genre of app

weberer 2y ago
My nomination for that would go to AltTab.
- krferriter 2y ago
  AltTab and Rectangle bring productivity on macOS up to an acceptable level. I assume anyone using macOS without them is in a constant state of frustration.
  - Lawand 2y ago
    The only extra thing needed is a Windows-style Taskbar such as the one I recently published :) https://lawand.io/taskbar https://lawand.io/taskbar
  - Brajeshwar 2y ago
    I bought Rectangle Pro because I liked Rectangle. The Pro came with the added benefit of assigning multiple custom window sizes easily without tinkering with the obscure Keys mapping.
  - nolongerthere 2y ago
    Someone gifted me a MacBook a few years ago, I was floored at the usability nightmare the OOTB MacOS experience is. Especially after being inundated with nonstop articles about how superior Macs are by every single tech reporter/blogger my entire childhood. I assumed MacOS was the pinnacle of OS UX, a very big letdown to learn it was far behind Windows in countless ways.
    - bangaroo 2y ago
      i mean, as a long-time user who's experienced a ton of ups and downs in the the macOS world, defected to linux briefly, and returned... it is still the best OOTB experience of any computer i've ever owned. the windows experience of 2024 is very similar to the experience of buying a gateway 2000 in the 90s to me. there's tons of bloatware, ads all over the OS, you're constantly being prompted to buy Onedrive and Office (what the hell?) a lot of the Things i've gotten used to on macOS that windows doesn't have, I miss a lot (consistent shortcut keys across apps fro all vendors, the speed and reliability of spotlight as an app launcher/switcher, the ease of previewing files in the OS without launching separate applications, the fact that for all intents and purposes you're in a *nixlike environment and have basically the full suite of tools available to you first class.) every time I go back to my windows 11 desktop after an upgrade I'm baffled by some other weird addition to the OS that I didn't ask for and don't want. In a way, I kind of appreciate that macOS tends to evolve slowly and doesn't do a lot of experimentation. When there's multiple valid ways of solving a problem, they'll leave it to utilities to provide those options. I kinda am okay with that. I used to think apple was extremely opinionated but it seems more and more like their philosophy with macOS is "leave it to the users to solve this problem." i'd also argue there's a ton of windows features missing, which extremely confusingly i have to add manually by installing powertoys (which means microsoft actively builds the solutions to these problems and then just chooses to distribute them in this bizarre, out-of-band way? it makes no sense.) I won't deny there's a bunch of obvious stuff that i cannot understand - window snapping being a key thing, they've gone all in on their weird full-screen approach, which I don't vibe with. The fact that I need to buy an app (bartender) to hide icons in my menu bar in the year 2024 is pretty bonkers to me, and I cannot understand what motivates the complete lack of management tools for this, especially given how out of control it can get on a company-managed machine. finder is in need of a lot of love across the board. i'm also baffled by some of the stuff they choose to include - mission control is one of the single most confusing features they've ever added to the OS and i still have zero understanding of what the intent behind it was. i guess all this to say i feel like having a lot of experience with macOS, i much prefer opening a clean mac to opening a clean windows machine (linux obviously is its own can of worms where it can't really be evaluated by these standards) and i can't at all agree that UX-wise it's a letdown.
  - fingerlocks 2y ago
    Command backtick cycles windows by app. Long-press green window dot while holding option for window sizing control. Not frustrated, hust rtfm.
  - fmbb 2y ago
    I don’t use those tools and am not in a state of constant frustration. I use the Amethyst tiling window manager and multiple desktops.
- dpcx 2y ago
  Having never heard of AltTab, I looked it up. I'm still not sure what it does that Cmd+Tab doesn't do.
  - ocrow 2y ago
    It's quite configurable, allowing different key combinations for different window arrangement functions, but the most useful one is that it allows you to bring a single window from another application to the top without rearranging the rest of the stack. This is useful if you are switching back and forth between windows from two different apps each of which has several other windows open, for example a browser and a text editor.
  - weberer 2y ago
    There is no way to map Cmd+Tab to Alt+Tab in MacOS. Which makes for an extremely frustrating experience in muscle memory when alternating between your work Mac and your personal Linux/Windows machines. This was the biggest grievance to me. But the Cmd+Tab behavior is also incapable of switching between multiple open windows of the same program. So if you have two Firefox Windows open, you can't switch between them with Cmd+Tab. Cmd+Tab also has the annoying behavior of listing programs that are "running" but do not have any open windows. I still can't for the life of me figure out how this would be useful to someone.
    - deadlocked 2y ago
      Oh god that last one drives me up the wall. It entirely defeats the purpose of using a keyboard shortcut to switch applications if you have to move the mouse to open a window anyway. It's beyond me why MacOS wouldn't automatically restore the most recently minimised window, the way literally every other DE does.
biftek 2y ago
As opposed to what? Linux barely has functioning wifi, bluetooth, audio, and video, and Windows also has countless utilities to decrapify the OS. It's not specific to Mac just a different flavor.
- culi 2y ago
  Agreed. I see a lot of people upset at Apple coming up short on many basic things, but I was a Windows user for decades and found that to increasingly be the case with Windows as well. I wonder if people simply have higher expectations from Apple because of its "polished" presentation. Windows is known to be less polished but (used to) be more easily customizable and less of a walled garden (imo all that's changing now so there's really no reason to use Windows any more). People are cool with Windows being less polished because its understood that you're supposed to make it your own. After ClassicStartMenu and a number of other important utilities being flagged by Windows Defender or simply not working anymore and after start bar advertisements and un-overrideable keyboard shortcuts to open the Windows Store I didn't see what Windows had left to offer besides legacy compatibility
- freedomben 2y ago
  How long has it been since you used a Linux distro? Fedora has had all those things functioning out of the box for many, many years (at least 10+ for wifi, audio, video, 5+ for bluetooth), as has plenty of other distros. And if you think you have to decrapify your linux install, then you're probably using the wrong distro for you. There are plenty (most) that don't crapify.
  - bangaroo 2y ago
    i don't agree with most of the above comment but they did specifically call out windows as the OS that needs the crap extracted
bakkoting 2y ago
I wrote one of those! https://github.com/bakkot/MenuBarVolume https://github.com/bakkot/MenuBarVolume I still cannot imagine why Apple decided that you shouldn't have a visible volume indicator in the menu bar when you have headphones connected. I mean, really?

superfocused utilities to provide inexplicably missing functionality in macOS are a time honored tradition, but this may be the absolute peak of that genre of app

weberer 2y ago

My nomination for that would go to AltTab.

krferriter 2y ago
AltTab and Rectangle bring productivity on macOS up to an acceptable level. I assume anyone using macOS without them is in a constant state of frustration.
- Lawand 2y ago
  The only extra thing needed is a Windows-style Taskbar such as the one I recently published :) https://lawand.io/taskbar https://lawand.io/taskbar
- Brajeshwar 2y ago
  I bought Rectangle Pro because I liked Rectangle. The Pro came with the added benefit of assigning multiple custom window sizes easily without tinkering with the obscure Keys mapping.
- nolongerthere 2y ago
  Someone gifted me a MacBook a few years ago, I was floored at the usability nightmare the OOTB MacOS experience is. Especially after being inundated with nonstop articles about how superior Macs are by every single tech reporter/blogger my entire childhood. I assumed MacOS was the pinnacle of OS UX, a very big letdown to learn it was far behind Windows in countless ways.
  - bangaroo 2y ago
    i mean, as a long-time user who's experienced a ton of ups and downs in the the macOS world, defected to linux briefly, and returned... it is still the best OOTB experience of any computer i've ever owned. the windows experience of 2024 is very similar to the experience of buying a gateway 2000 in the 90s to me. there's tons of bloatware, ads all over the OS, you're constantly being prompted to buy Onedrive and Office (what the hell?) a lot of the Things i've gotten used to on macOS that windows doesn't have, I miss a lot (consistent shortcut keys across apps fro all vendors, the speed and reliability of spotlight as an app launcher/switcher, the ease of previewing files in the OS without launching separate applications, the fact that for all intents and purposes you're in a *nixlike environment and have basically the full suite of tools available to you first class.) every time I go back to my windows 11 desktop after an upgrade I'm baffled by some other weird addition to the OS that I didn't ask for and don't want. In a way, I kind of appreciate that macOS tends to evolve slowly and doesn't do a lot of experimentation. When there's multiple valid ways of solving a problem, they'll leave it to utilities to provide those options. I kinda am okay with that. I used to think apple was extremely opinionated but it seems more and more like their philosophy with macOS is "leave it to the users to solve this problem." i'd also argue there's a ton of windows features missing, which extremely confusingly i have to add manually by installing powertoys (which means microsoft actively builds the solutions to these problems and then just chooses to distribute them in this bizarre, out-of-band way? it makes no sense.) I won't deny there's a bunch of obvious stuff that i cannot understand - window snapping being a key thing, they've gone all in on their weird full-screen approach, which I don't vibe with. The fact that I need to buy an app (bartender) to hide icons in my menu bar in the year 2024 is pretty bonkers to me, and I cannot understand what motivates the complete lack of management tools for this, especially given how out of control it can get on a company-managed machine. finder is in need of a lot of love across the board. i'm also baffled by some of the stuff they choose to include - mission control is one of the single most confusing features they've ever added to the OS and i still have zero understanding of what the intent behind it was. i guess all this to say i feel like having a lot of experience with macOS, i much prefer opening a clean mac to opening a clean windows machine (linux obviously is its own can of worms where it can't really be evaluated by these standards) and i can't at all agree that UX-wise it's a letdown.
- fingerlocks 2y ago
  Command backtick cycles windows by app. Long-press green window dot while holding option for window sizing control. Not frustrated, hust rtfm.
- fmbb 2y ago
  I don’t use those tools and am not in a state of constant frustration. I use the Amethyst tiling window manager and multiple desktops.
dpcx 2y ago
Having never heard of AltTab, I looked it up. I'm still not sure what it does that Cmd+Tab doesn't do.
- ocrow 2y ago
  It's quite configurable, allowing different key combinations for different window arrangement functions, but the most useful one is that it allows you to bring a single window from another application to the top without rearranging the rest of the stack. This is useful if you are switching back and forth between windows from two different apps each of which has several other windows open, for example a browser and a text editor.
- weberer 2y ago
  There is no way to map Cmd+Tab to Alt+Tab in MacOS. Which makes for an extremely frustrating experience in muscle memory when alternating between your work Mac and your personal Linux/Windows machines. This was the biggest grievance to me. But the Cmd+Tab behavior is also incapable of switching between multiple open windows of the same program. So if you have two Firefox Windows open, you can't switch between them with Cmd+Tab. Cmd+Tab also has the annoying behavior of listing programs that are "running" but do not have any open windows. I still can't for the life of me figure out how this would be useful to someone.
  - deadlocked 2y ago
    Oh god that last one drives me up the wall. It entirely defeats the purpose of using a keyboard shortcut to switch applications if you have to move the mouse to open a window anyway. It's beyond me why MacOS wouldn't automatically restore the most recently minimised window, the way literally every other DE does.

biftek 2y ago

As opposed to what? Linux barely has functioning wifi, bluetooth, audio, and video, and Windows also has countless utilities to decrapify the OS. It's not specific to Mac just a different flavor.

culi 2y ago
Agreed. I see a lot of people upset at Apple coming up short on many basic things, but I was a Windows user for decades and found that to increasingly be the case with Windows as well. I wonder if people simply have higher expectations from Apple because of its "polished" presentation. Windows is known to be less polished but (used to) be more easily customizable and less of a walled garden (imo all that's changing now so there's really no reason to use Windows any more). People are cool with Windows being less polished because its understood that you're supposed to make it your own. After ClassicStartMenu and a number of other important utilities being flagged by Windows Defender or simply not working anymore and after start bar advertisements and un-overrideable keyboard shortcuts to open the Windows Store I didn't see what Windows had left to offer besides legacy compatibility
freedomben 2y ago
How long has it been since you used a Linux distro? Fedora has had all those things functioning out of the box for many, many years (at least 10+ for wifi, audio, video, 5+ for bluetooth), as has plenty of other distros. And if you think you have to decrapify your linux install, then you're probably using the wrong distro for you. There are plenty (most) that don't crapify.
- bangaroo 2y ago
  i don't agree with most of the above comment but they did specifically call out windows as the OS that needs the crap extracted

bakkoting 2y ago

I wrote one of those! https://github.com/bakkot/MenuBarVolume https://github.com/bakkot/MenuBarVolume I still cannot imagine why Apple decided that you shouldn't have a visible volume indicator in the menu bar when you have headphones connected. I mean, really?