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The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe

• DevKoala 9mo ago
  I have been using Rectangle and Spectacle before it. Wanting to resize windows like in this article isn't natural to me anymore.
  • paustint 9mo ago
    Same. Once in a while I end up on a screen share with someone and see that they have all these odd sized windows and they try to drag them around and resize them - drives me crazy!
• rsch 9mo ago
  At least it is not as bad as on Windows 11. There the resize area is inside or outside the visible frame depending on which side and which corner of the window.
• amarvashishth 9mo ago
  [dead]
• troupo 9mo ago
  From "Safari 15 on Mac OS, a user interface mess" https://morrick.me/archives/9368 https://morrick.me/archives/9368 from 5 years ago: --- start quote --- The utter user-interface butchery happening to Safari on the Mac is once again the work of people who put iOS first. People who by now think in iOS terms. People who view the venerable Mac OS user interface as an older person whose traits must be experimented upon, plastic surgery after plastic surgery, until this person looks younger. Unfortunately the effect is more like this person ends up looking… weird. These people look at the Mac’s UI and (that’s the impression, at least) don’t really understand it. Its foundations come from a past that almost seems inscrutable to them. Usability cues and features are all wrinkles to them. iOS and iPadOS don’t have these strange wrinkles, they muse. We must hide them. We’ll make this spectacular facelift and we’ll hide them, one by one. Mac OS will look as young (and foolish, cough) as iOS! --- end quote --- At the time it was only Safari that they wanted to "modernize". Now it's the full OS.
• recursivedoubts 9mo ago
  tribunals the cherry on top is the delay between the drag start and the window begining to resize
• jasonvorhe 9mo ago
  Of all the Linux features to copy, they chose this.
  • Nextgrid 9mo ago
    Shortly after Windows 10 came out I was joking that Microsoft finally made a Linux distribution (by replicating all the jankiness we usually associate with it). Now I guess it's Apple's turn.
  • Rygian 9mo ago
    Wait, they implemented Alt-Drag/Right drag?
    • chungy 9mo ago
      I believe the parent is referring to how GNOME 3.0 had some really bad resizing grabs. Single-pixel widths at the edges, and almost impossible to hit corners. Latter versions significantly improved it.
      • jasonvorhe 9mo ago
        Has been a major issue for me with Xfce and Gnome over the years, mostly just switched window managers.
        • jwrallie 9mo ago
          Xfce is just ridiculous, it has 1px thin area to grab, and last time I checked they just mentioned you should use alt right click instead.
          • ginko 9mo ago
            I was about to suggest Xfce as an example where window resizing is effortless due to the <super>+<right click> behavior. You can just grab the rough sector of a window to resize it. Any reason why you're not using it?
• MattDamonSpace 9mo ago
  Darkest before the dawn
  • herpdyderp 9mo ago
    Dawn of the year of the Linux desktop!
• VerifiedReports 9mo ago
  Apple's window management has always sucked, with the absurdly crippled resizing being a longstanding embarrassment. Into the 2000s, the only way you could resize a window on the Mac was to drag its lower-right corner. That is it. NO other corner, and no edge. So if the lower-right corner happened to be off-screen because the window was bigger than the screen, you were kind of screwed. You had to fiddle with the maximize & restore gumdrops to trick the OS into resizing the window to make that ONE corner accessible. Then you had to move the corner, then roll all the way up to the title bar and move the window, then roll back down to the corner... until you had the window sized and positioned as you wanted. When Apple grudgingly added proper window-resizing, it made it as obscure as possible. Since Apple remains ignorant of the value of window FRAMES, there is no obvious zone within which the resizing cursor should take effect. There is no visual target for the user. This has always made an important and fundamental part of a windowed GUI a ridiculous pain in the ass on Macs. And as the author here notes, it has gotten even worse. Not only will the window often refuse to resize, but you'll wind up activating whatever app lies behind the window you're trying to resize... hiding the one you were dealing with.
• lifetimerubyist 9mo ago
  i haven't resized a window with a mouse in almost a decade
  • chipheat 9mo ago
    Curious, how do you resize windows instead?
    • lifetimerubyist 9mo ago
      ....with a keyboard? on macos I use Rectangle, on linux I just use the built-in resizing keyboard shortcuts
      • dhosek 9mo ago
        I use rectangle on my mac for window resizing and generally keep most windows in the sizes that come by default with that.
      • CobrastanJorji 9mo ago
        "I downloaded a separate application to make resizing windows easier" is not a point in favor of MacOS's window resizing decisions.
        • spartanatreyu 9mo ago
          True, but macos x has never had good window resizing decisions.
        • lifetimerubyist 9mo ago
          I never said macOS has good window management.
    • Daneel_ 9mo ago
      On windows at least, I almost always use 'alt+space; x' to maximise windows, as well as winkey+left/right/up/down, which is really the only resizing I do. Having to use the mouse is a pain.
• signal11 9mo ago
  Tahoe is a macOS mis-step on par with Windows 8 or Windows Vista. If you’re from Apple and reading this, my feedback is pretty succinct: “I don’t recommend others upgrade. I wish I didn’t.” Luckily for Apple, Windows 11 is not exactly in a position to attract switchers. Let’s see if Apple can turn things around. iOS 8+ did improve on iOS 7’s worst bits.
  • GrowingSideways 9mo ago
    Can you interpret this comment for those of us that haven't used windows? All i can recall from "vista" is that it looked good
    • ianbutler 9mo ago
      MetroUI in Windows 8 was pretty universally panned. I thought it was pretty good on tablets and such, but it left a lot to be desired on desktops and hid a lot of functionality, it went too mobile for a lot of people's tastes. Disclaimer: I was one of the dozens who used a windows phone. The Nokia Lumia 920 was great, you can fight me.
      • stevage 9mo ago
        I think a lot of people liked the Windows mobile experience. Shame it didn't quite get enough market share.
        • Nextgrid 9mo ago
          Resetting the app ecosystem 3 fucking times by breaking app compatibility didn't help. Windows Phone 7 - Windows Phone 8 -> Windows (Phone?) 10.
          • deleted 9mo ago
            [deleted]
          • ulbu 9mo ago
• Xiol 9mo ago
  Another thing to add to the list of reasons why I'm not upgrading.
• AndrewSwift 9mo ago
  FWIW: option double click sny corner to make any window full-screen without going into full screen mode. Double click any side or corner to move it to the edge of the screen, and hold down option to make the effect symmetric.
  • euazOn 9mo ago
    Ah yes, the classic Apple move of hiding basic functionality behind obscure shortcuts. Thanks for the tip.
  • paustint 9mo ago
    Nice - I didn't know about that one! I just found out today that hovering over the green traffic light icon shows an arrange menu... but the "maximize" option there leaves some padding on all sides of the window - weird. I swear by https://rectangleapp.com/ https://rectangleapp.com/ - same outcome but with keyboard shortcuts instead of the mouse.
• phoronixrly 9mo ago
  That's genuine 2000s Linux experience there. Ironic that these days Linux provides a more refined and consistent UX than both MacOS and Windows.
• lynndotpy 9mo ago
  This post is very well presented and it highlights how absolutely bizarre the latest update was. The video demonstration was also very well done. I remember a few years ago, people complained when Apple merely made the entire operating system uglier. (Something about a gradient on the battery?) A lot of people would talk hyperbolically ("apple KILLED macos!"), and that's indistinguishable to an outsider when an update like this brings other people out of the woodwork to say, "Hey, these changes are genuinely bizarre and absurd, what happened?"
  • projektfu 9mo ago
    I especially liked the part with the hand trying to grab the plate. Perfect imagery.
    • 1f60c 9mo ago
      Me too, made me chuckle :)
    • danielecook 9mo ago
      I laughed at the animation quite hard - it’s the perfect analogy for the issue at hand!
      • g947o 9mo ago
        Pun intended?
    • isABaby 9mo ago
      The graphic actually helped me a lot to understand why you have to touch things to grab them, seeing as I am a 2-day-old baby.
      • irl_zebra 9mo ago
        imo this comment wasn't worth creating a new account for
• MyFirstSass 9mo ago
  Does anyone know if Stephen Lemay replacing Dye will potentially "save" the increasing mess that is OSX, at least UX wise, or is it more of a meaningless figurehead swap in a big org? Tahoe is tragically bad by almost every UX measure, and following various Apple subreddits i wonder if they just don't care anymore - since the majority of people are shocked by the amateurishness of both bugs and design choices in the latest update - this comes on top of literally every major bug being ignored from the alpha to releasing anyway then continuing to ignore feedback.
  • OGEnthusiast 9mo ago
    He will prevent it from getting much worse than it would have under another decade of Dye, but I don't think he can totally reverse the trend. I think this is just what happens to companies as they get older. Most of the people who pioneered the Human Interface Guidelines aren't at the company anymore, and management doesn't see much financial growth in Mac sales compared to AI and services.
    • MonkeyClub 9mo ago
      > compared to AI and services It's probably the services (Care, iCloud, Music, and even TV), Apple's AI isn't on the overall map at all compared to the competition.
    • coffeeling 9mo ago
      A lot of Apple's services revenue is Apple Store mobile games, AIUI.
  • diskzero 9mo ago
    I worked on Finder/TimeMachine/Spotlight/iOS at Apple from 2000-2007. I worked closely with Bas Ording, Stephen Lemay, Marcel van Os, Imran Chaudry, Don Lindsey and Greg Christie. I have no experience with any of the designers who arrived in the post-Steve era. During my time, Jony Ive didn't figure prominently in the UI design, although echoes of his industrial design appeared in various ways in the graphic design of the widgets. Kevin Tiene and Scott Forstall had more influence for better or worse, extreme skeumorphism for example. The UX group would present work to Steve J. every Thursday and Steve quickly passed judgement often harshly and without a lot of feedback, leading to even longer meetings afterward to try and determine course corrections. Steve J. and Bas were on the same wavelength and a lot of what Bas would show had been worked on directly with Steve before hand. Other things would be presented for the first time, and Steve could be pretty harsh. Don, Greg, Scott, Kevin would push back and get abused, but they took the abuse and could make in-roads. Here is my snapshot of Stephen from the time. He presented the UI ideas for the intial tabbed window interface in Safari. He had multiple design ideas and Steve dismissed them quickly and harshly. Me recollection was that Steve said something like No, next, worse, next, even worse, next, no. Why don't you come back next week with something better. Stephen didn't push back, say much, just went ok and that was that. I think Greg was the team manager at the time and pushed Steve for more input and maybe got some. This was my general observation of how Stephen was over 20 years ago. I am skeptical and doubtful about Stephen's ability to make a change unless he is facilitated greatly by someone else or has somehow changed drastically. The fact that he has been on the team while the general opinion of Apple UX quality has degraded to the current point of the Tahoe disaster is telling. Several team members paid dearly in emotional abuse under Steve and decided to leave rather than deal with the environment post Steve's death. Stephen is a SJ-era original and should have been able to push hard against what many of us perceive as very poor decisons. He either agreed with those decisions, or did not, and choose to go with the flow and enjoy the benefits of working at Apple. This is fine I guess. Many people are just fine going with the flow and not rocking the boat. It may be even easier when you have Apple-level comp and benefits. My opinon; unless Stephen gets a very strong push from other forces, I don't see that he has the will or fortitude to make the changes that he himself has approved in one way or another. Who will push him? Tim Cook, Craig Federighi, Eddy Cue, Phil Schiller? The perceived mess of Tahoe happened on the watch of all of these Apple leaders.
• afandian 9mo ago
  Question for people who have installed Tahoe. Of the regions in the article, which bring window focus / key window? Is it area clipped to the round rect? Or is it similarly weird? If there was a background window in that area outside the corner, would it receive the click event?
  • latexr 9mo ago
    > Of the regions in the article, which bring window focus Just did a quick test in a VM, and it seems all of them. I.e. if you could resize the window, clicking that space (even if empty) brings it into focus. But then I also tested on Sequoia and the same happens. It seems then that basically everything remained the same except for the visual presentation of the corner.
    • afandian 9mo ago
      Thanks for going to the effort! > everything remained the same except for the visual presentation of the corner This either seems very well-researched change, or very shallow one.
    • 1over137 9mo ago
      >It seems then that basically everything remained the same except for the visual presentation of the corner. Which just goes to show how holistic design is utterly lacking. They seem to think just swapping bitmaps is "UI redesign".
  • wiredpancake 9mo ago
    [dead]
• Aaargh20318 9mo ago
  Never noticed this change, but unlike the blogger I never try to grab the window inside the corner. I tend to aim for the edge itself.
• gatkinso 9mo ago
  Its not a great update and hopefully with Dye out they will make some changes, but personally I don't have this issue.
  • afandian 9mo ago
    Do you mean you don't observe the same thing? Or that it doesn't cause you difficulty?
    • gatkinso 9mo ago
      I observe the same thing but it doesn't cause me difficulty. I think I more or less aim for the edge, vs the inside or outside.
      • jonwinstanley 9mo ago
        Also, the cursor changes
    • wahnfrieden 9mo ago
      Most of the Tahoe and Liquid Glass related gripes are overstated or sometimes just against the idea of changing anything well-established
      • dajt 9mo ago
        I disagree. I generally don't get too upset by UI changes - having been programming since before Windows I've seen many of them - but LG is a loser. I upgraded my mac to Tahoe and I don't like any change to the UI that I have noticed. I upgraded my phone the other day, thinking it was just an update to whatever it already had, and ended up with LG on there and it is a disaster. I enabled the 'more opaque' feature and it did almost nothing. LG is an awful experiment IMO. I'd put it at worse than Vista (which I skipped) and Gnome 3 which didn't bother me because I don't expect anything from linux desktops. I also skipped Windows 8 so not sure about the ranking there. But I'd say it's that level of disaster.
      • 9mo ago
• internet2000 9mo ago
  That's funny. I perceive resizing windows as easier now, because the cursor change is more dramatic when it gets in the resizing area. Pre-Tahoe, the diagonal one in particular looked almost the same, except with an arrow end in the bottom. Now it splits into two triangles. I still operate off muscle memory, so it's not actually easier or harder, of course.
  • robomc 9mo ago
    Yeah the really misleading part of the screenshots in this article is that it doesn't show the "resize cursor", which basically makes this a non issue. Also, for anyone reading this who hates the general aesthetic, go into Accessibility and hit "reduce transparency". This has been a desirable setting for last few OSX versions.
• indymike 9mo ago
  After using Tahoe for a week, I've found I leave it in my bag. Window operations are painful and it feels like a bad try at a tablet os without a stylus or touch screen. Fortunately, my Mac is now the auxiliary laptop and I can do everything I need to do with my linux laptop.
• bikelang 9mo ago
  Should we crowdfund some billboards in Cupertino expressing how big a misstep we collectively think Tahoe/iOS 26/Liquid glAss was?
  • 1over137 9mo ago
    No. Direct that money to open source projects and let Apple ruin itself.
    • Nextgrid 9mo ago
      I think people wildly underestimate how expensive skilled software development, leadership and especially design is (considering even Apple can't apparently find good designers). The price of renting a billboard isn't going to cover more than a week's worth of those people's fees. Billboard-induced shame has actually much more chance of succeeding.
    • AlexandrB 9mo ago
      There's no relief in open source. I've watched Ubuntu and Gnome copy some of Apple and Microsoft's worst ideas over the last 20 years and somehow put an even worse spin on them. I fully expect to see "Gnome 52 - Liquid Sugar" or something in a couple of years.
      • akimbostrawman 9mo ago
        >There's no relief in open source. I've watched Ubuntu and Gnome copy some of Apple and Microsoft's worst ideas The whole point of FOSS is that a single groups decision or opinion do not dictated your computing. There are enough forks or alternatives.
    • akimbostrawman 9mo ago
      Proprietary software prisoners will do absolutely everything to appease there abusive prison guard except simply quit walking into the golden cage every morning.
  • Aeolun 9mo ago
• le_meer 9mo ago
  Aerospace is the answer :)
  • Avi-D-coder 9mo ago
    Yep, came here to say this. It's the only thing that makes macos useable.
  • dutchCourage 9mo ago
    I wish I found out about it earlier. Aerospace is a tiling window manager for MacOS. As someone who prefers keyboard navigation over mouse navigation, I can't recommend it enough.
  • noname120 9mo ago
    yabai too! I have fn + right-click set to resize window under cursor
• lateforwork 9mo ago
  This behavior is similar to Windows 11. You have to position the mouse just outside the window. It is non-intuitive and awful. These are problems humanity solved over 35 years ago (see NeXTSTEP). Why are these designers breaking basic features that worked for over 35 years?
  • CobrastanJorji 9mo ago
    This is probably not a coincidence. I can pretty much guarantee you a developer said something to a designer like "hey, most of this is outside the window, is that fine?" and the designer said back "well, I think so, but let's check what Windows did," and then they okayed the decision at least in part because Windows did it.
    • flohofwoe 9mo ago
      Which is all the more bizarre, because historically it was usually Windows which copied MacOS ;) That the roles got reversed became painfully clear when macOS copied the Windows Vista style popup mess for access permissions.
      • jeroenhd 9mo ago
        The macOS style popups are arguably worse. Windows Vista may have been plagued by programs assuming administrator access for everything but at least it isolated the security prompt. You can verify that you're interacting with a real UAC prompt (by pressing ctrl+alt+delete for instance, which can be configured to he required before approving a prompt). Any program can replicate the macOS security dialogs. You just have to hope that you can safely enter the password to your account into one, or activate TouchID when prompted.
  • 1over137 9mo ago
    History always repeats itself. The young generation always thinks the old generation was rubbish and they have nothing to learn from them and can do better.
• Lammy 9mo ago
  Compare to Aqua and Platinum where every resizable window/pane had a big square drag target clearly labeled as such with some diagonal lines: https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/system/managers/filemanager/macosx102-1-3.png https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/system/managers/filema... https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/system/managers/filemanager/macos80.png https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/system/managers/filema...
  • WillPostForFood 9mo ago
    Better in that it was clear, but worse that you had to resize from the bottom right. Made expanding to the left, or up, very annoying. I'd take the current situation over this.
    • Lammy 9mo ago
      True, but not a 1:1 comparison, because Classic Mac OS windows were much better at staying where you put them, even between sessions. John Siracusa wrote a lot about how this was missing from Mac OS X: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/
      • Wowfunhappy 9mo ago
        People also didn't regularly plug classic Macs into external monitors, changing the screen resolution temporarily. For this and many other reasons, I just don't think the paradigm would work today. It's philosophically smart but limiting in too many other ways.
        • Lammy 9mo ago
          Yeah that is also true. I have had that experience with certain CD-ROMs (maybe like two or three ever but has happened) on my PowerBook 2400c. If the authoring machine had a higher display resolution than my machine, and the author had the writable disc image's window open to a place outside my screen resolution, and the window positions got saved to the DesktopDB/DesktopDF, and the DesktopDB/DesktopDF got written to the CD-ROM, then it would open in the position outside my screen resolution every time my own DesktopDB/DesktopDF got erased. One particular artist's CD-ROM is completely outside of it which annoys me every time. Relevant TA: https://web.archive.org/web/20090625152558/http://support.apple.com/kb/TA46427 https://web.archive.org/web/20090625152558/http://support.ap...
• kenanfyi 9mo ago
  I have been using Moom for a long time for especially two things: - moving windows without holding from any particular position - resizing windows without grabbing a particular corner Life changing small things.
  • ervine 9mo ago
    I didn't realize it was moom giving me my "move app to other monitor" hotkey, and moom didn't launch on startup after upgrading to tahoe. I've been using that hotkey for years. That's when I realized there's no default hotkey for moving an app to an external monitor. That is absolutely wild. (Happy to be wrong)
    • kenanfyi 9mo ago
      I think there is an option in Keyboard Shortcuts to set a keybinding for moving to other displays, but it‘s not by default like in Windows. For this kind of stuff Raycast is more than enough though. I use its window management features extensively.
• CobrastanJorji 9mo ago
  I love how this information is produced. Succinct, excellent and simple visuals, clear argument, and a solid amount of sarcasm and cynicism to keep us entertained and to provide an air of senior technical person.
  • itopaloglu83 9mo ago
    MacOS always had its own quirks, but it had a good intuitive design that was well thought out. All the Apple engineers and other visual designers get quite defensive really quick when we mention that Tahoe really screwed things up, because it's more than just a transition into glass design, but a complete dismissal of design principles, to the point that the entire system is slowly becoming user hostile. Every critique of the 26 series can be explained like this article with really in depth design principles, which is already engraved in Apple design guidelines, but Apple itself just dismissed it all. Everything from being able to clearly distinguish UI elements, to general accessibility, to discoverability, everything got worse. Operating Systems are one of the most complicated systems we created, not because they're a collection of processes and thread, but because everything is built on top of them and creating something that's well thought out and stable, and intuitive is really hard. Designers just randomly creating visual elements just because it looks cool and not paying attention how people are going to use it is simply half assing the whole thing. That's still one of the reasons I believe Alan Dye was let go, fired in a sense, he had power over the company, but with that power he screwed things so much that we need to rediscover all the things related to usability in very high detail as if we're rediscovering the wheel, just so that we can get back to square one.
    • throwaway314155 9mo ago
      > All the Apple engineers and other visual designers get quite defensive really quick Is there evidence of this?
  • levocardia 9mo ago
    At a meta level, good design is a very useful tool for discussions about good design!
• kristopolous 9mo ago
  I swear, this reign of visual artists as dictators has to stop. I'm sure people noticed this issue internally and brought it up but some thing by some designer was seen as biblically sacred and overruled all reason. I've been at companies were you get severely punished... sometimes fired for subordination for fixing an obviously broken spec by a designer emperor. It's normal to be "I guess 2+2=5 here, whatever" as if the designer went in a tiny room, had a seance with the divine... Yo, newsflash, everyone makes mistakes. Failure is when you force them to stay uncorrected.
  • robbies 9mo ago
    I know enough people at Apple who are at the mercy of the overlord design teams, and it sounds exactly like what you described
    • kristopolous 9mo ago
      I've met some great designers as well. They usually come from more modest backgrounds. It's kinda the rule for programmes too. The ones that went to a small liberal arts school you've never heard of programming as their second career are usually more effective to work with then the Stanford/MIT crowd. The problems start I think, when you have an expectation that your collaborators are somehow either superhuman or subhuman and not peers. Humility and mutual respect gets things done.
      • deltaburnt 9mo ago
        This is a pretty discriminatory comment that I’ve honestly seen zero hint of in reality. And this is coming from someone who didn't go to a particularly prestigious school. I honestly rarely even find out what school my colleagues went to school. But the ones I know who did go to those prestigious schools are beyond humble.
        • kristopolous 9mo ago
          Not really. That's bad faith. I've worked at lots of places, probably hired about 200 engineers over my career so far and have noticed this pattern. I stopped looking at the educational background years ago in a fear that it would influence my bias either way. We shouldn't base someone's suitability at 40 upon what opportunities they were afforded at 17. I do have a somewhat prestigious pedigree btw. I removed it from my resume around 2010 and never looked back
• vjvjvjvjghv 9mo ago
  Windows is following the same path. In both it’s getting harder and harder to tell the window boundary and where to drag it resize.
• semiinfinitely 9mo ago
  I will never update to tahoe. if it becomes forced I'll switch to linux idgaf
• hermitcrab 9mo ago
  All that 'glass' eye candy is a sheer sign that looks is more important to Apple than usability. And I don't even care for how it looks.
  • asaddhamani 9mo ago
    The iOS compass redesign is particularly egregious
    • 1f60c 9mo ago
      I think you meant the Measure app, but yes. I hate it so much.
      • asaddhamani 9mo ago
        yes thats the one
• erickhill 9mo ago
  That egg scramble plate GIF is pure gold.
  • treetalker 9mo ago
    Yeah, but to be fair to Apple, the guy wasn't even trying to grab the shadow of the plate.
  • urbandw311er 9mo ago
    It’s a great analogy but I wish, in the video, he had been grabbing the plate and it somehow didn’t move. Then, when he grabbed the air outside of the plate it should have magically moved. That would have highlighted how crazy Tahoe is.
• jamesjyu 9mo ago
  I highly recommend Moves, which makes it possible to resize with a modifier key drag within any part of the window: https://mikkelmalmberg.com/moves https://mikkelmalmberg.com/moves
• ickelbawd 9mo ago
  I thought this was going to talk about the struggle of sizing windows to arbitrary widths. I often try to keep slack and my email windows side by side and Mac OS seems to go out of its way these days to frustrate my efforts and maximize the one window or the other. The resize corners grab area is also very frustrating though.
  • jonwinstanley 9mo ago
    I've used Rectangle for years so I can arrange windows more quickly. Not good for arbitrary sizes, more for set positions. https://rectangleapp.com/ https://rectangleapp.com/
    • Supermancho 9mo ago
      I install Rectangle App on any mac I use. The keybinds are convenient and the auto-sizing/tiling is pleasant as can be.
• thenaturalist 9mo ago
  This is so simple. This makes me angry.
• g947o 9mo ago
  Imagine Steve Jobs allowing this to happen.
  • katzenversteher 9mo ago
    "You're holding it wrong!"
• mbrumlow 9mo ago
  Idk. I don’t resize windows with the mouse at all. I use the key bindings to move to a tile position or fill screen. I almost always never use a mouse for more than maybe moving a tab to another window. So I am wondering, are people fighting using a Mac in the most effective way simply because of old patterns and habits?
  • flohofwoe 9mo ago
    Maybe you don't use the mouse because it just doesn't work as expected? ;) > So I am wondering, are people fighting using a Mac in the most effective way simply because of old patterns and habit "Most effective" doesn't mean "most intuitive". I don't want to learn keyboard shortcuts just to move or resize a window. That's the entire premise of graphical user interfaces.
  • eviks 9mo ago
    What if your needs aren't as simple and you want to increase the size just a bit to fit more text than the tile permits and you don't want to waste the whole screen for that?
• wetpaws 9mo ago
  [dead]
• charleszw 9mo ago
  That omelette does look delicious though.
• droopyEyelids 9mo ago
  I agree it makes using my computer worse, but I'd like to see how far Apple is willing to go here. They won't do perfectly circular windows, that would be crazy— but I think we all know they can go further than this.
  • stefanfisk 9mo ago
    I agree that a circle would be too much. But they could at least do a full squircle instead of this half assery so that we don’t have to look at those ugly flat sides. /s
• deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
• rajivjain 9mo ago
  My biggest peeve with macOS Tahoe is the App Launcher redesign. It seems like a clear regression in usability. By moving from a high-density, full-screen experience to a constrained, scrolling window, they’ve increased the interaction cost for launching apps via the mouse. It feels like a 'unification tax. Sacrificing desktop utility to align with non-Desktop modalilties. Does anyone see a functional upside here, or is this purely aesthetic consistency?
  • Ringz 9mo ago
    Yep. I hate it. Its easier to open the Finder and use the shortcut to open the application folder.
  • dajt 9mo ago
    I was shocked when I first hit this. I'm also confused as to why the settings app constrains the window size but I think it did that in the previous version too - not a justification! I complained about it to a team mate and he thought it was fine and I was weird for using the app launcher and not cmd-space. Although on Windows I always use win-r to run stuff. Tahoe UI changes and LG are such a mistake and Apple being Apple will probably just double down on it.
  • deafpolygon 9mo ago
    It’s consistency with the rest of Spotlight. I imagine they want to enhance it, but getting people to use it might be the first step.
  • data-ottawa 9mo ago
    I don't know why it's so laggy when you open it. First time you open and scroll it jitters and not all app icons are loaded, so they kind of chunk and overlap. You get worse icon pop-in if you add your app folder with grid view to the dock. These aren't stored on the network, so it's baffling they take so long to load the icons.
  • VerifiedReports 9mo ago
    The removal of Launchpad was an inexplicable blunder. The OS now provides no way to organize your applications. Why would I want my dev tools, audio apps, 3-D-modeling apps, and office apps all jumbled together? It's as if Apple is trying to catch up to Microsoft in the race to regress.
• deafpolygon 9mo ago
  I don’t have this issue at all. I have a very generous amount of space to grab the corner with and it changes mouse pointer to the diagonal arrow. Edit: despite all the negative feedback, I’m quite happy with Tahoe and I enjoy the visual changes. I think some of the subtler changes is more intuitive and Spotlight’s improvement is quite nice.
  • robrain 9mo ago
    Pleased that I'm not alone. The comments here suggest that I should just bin my Mac and buy a Linux-capable machine instead since MacOS is now "unusable", "heinous", "diabolical", "worst OS EVER". I updated, carried on enjoying the best desktop experience (IMHO). It's not perfect, but was and remains better than the alternatives for me. Very little "struggle".
• deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
• elcritch 9mo ago
  I'm hoping something like this takes off on FreeBSD: https://github.com/gershwin-desktop/gershwin-desktop https://github.com/gershwin-desktop/gershwin-desktop I've only owned macbook laptops but have run Linux at work since 2002. The lack of cohesion and non-stop changes in Linux is just as tiring and this MacOS Tahoe stuff. Gnome 3 cared just as little for users. FreeBSD + KDE Plasma is pretty good now, but lacks feeling and design.
  • liveoneggs 9mo ago
    that looks like xfce?
    • elcritch 9mo ago
      I think they took the window manager from it to make running gtk apps easier. Admittedly gershwin or similar have a long way to go, but gnustep has the basic design from openstep. There's another similar project but from the ground up.
    • pxc 9mo ago
      There's a superficial relationship because XFCE is often configured with a dock-like taskbar, but GNUstep is a GNU clone of Cocoa and the window manager from NeXTSTEP. It tries to mimic early macOS a bit more deeply.
• ubercow13 9mo ago
  Also the resize cursor is completely unreliable, the cursor often doesn't change to the resize one when the mouse is over the correct resize areg. So it's even harder to tell if your cursor is in the right place before clicking. If you click in the wrong place it can have frustrating consequences, like activating another window or even clicking something inside it.
  • re 9mo ago
    I have had issues with resizing Quick Look windows with their rounded corners on macOS for the last several major versions, well before Tahoe. The resize cursor indicator there also doesn't seem to appear at the correct location for the actual resize handles.
• userbinator 9mo ago
  Rounded corners are ironically symbolic of the dumbing-down that's affected the software industry. Instead of the sharp precision of 90-degree corners, we get vague curves that don't make sense anymore as though the corners have been worn away.
  • oneeyedpigeon 9mo ago
    I might even give Apple a tiny bit of credit if some designer had piped up at some point and said "you think we should square off the corners when the app is 'maximised'"? But, no, either nobody pointed out that the emperor wore no clothes, or they were ignored. (I say "maximised", even though that isn't the right term, because there is no right term. I don't mean 'full screen', since the borders are actually squared off properly in that mode, thank the lord; I mean 'full screen except for the global menu bar')
• titzer 9mo ago
  Tahoe is proof is that UX for desktop has finally jumped the shark. In all my years using computers I have never been so disappointed so profoundly by a 36 gigabyte operating system upgrade.
  • reddalo 9mo ago
    I'm so glad I haven't updated.
  • glkindlmann 9mo ago
    It may have jumped the shark, but it may be that now there's space for actual experimentation and innovation again. This talk from Scott Jenson (who worked at Apple in Human Interfaces) was thought-provoking and gave me a little optimism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fZTOjd_bOQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fZTOjd_bOQ
• areoform 9mo ago
  Apple is at the point where they need a Jobs-ian correction again. Steve Jobs would have had a fit over this product line. As '97 era Jobs put it, "The products suck! There's no sex in them anymore!" My modest proposal for Apple diehards (especially employees) is to feed all the data that exists on Jobs into a multi-modal model so that Apple can hear just how much their shit sucks from Jobs' digital ghost. A good starting point would be the https://stevejobsarchive.com/ https://stevejobsarchive.com/
  • DonHopkins 9mo ago
    >"The products suck! There's no sex in them anymore!" Enter "Lickable Pixels" -- the phrase that stuck to describe the Aqua era. Introducing Mac OS X's Aqua interface, Jobs said at Macworld in January 2000: "We made the buttons on the screen look so good you'll want to lick them." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_(user_interface) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_(user_interface) Then there was the red hot irresistibly sexy and well designed IBM Thinkpad TrackPoint -AKA- Keyboard Clitoris -AKA- Joy Button, and IBM's explicitly lascivious "So Hot, We Had To Make It Red" ad. https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/hodidb/so_hot_we_had_to_make_it_red/ https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/hodidb/so_hot_we_... Ted Selker, the inventor of the TrackPoint, told me the story of how that ad got written and refined by focus groups: He slyly suggested the slogan, and IBM's ad designers begrudgingly put it on the page in small text in the corner, below the photo and ad copy. Then they A/B tested it with the text a little bigger, then a bit bolder, then even higher, and it finally worked its way up to the top of the page in BIG HUGE BOLD TEXT! More about Ted's work: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34425576 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34425576 Ted Selker fondly reminds me of "Mr. Lossoff" the "Button Man" in "A Nero Wolfe Mystery” episode “The Mother Hunt”, where Archie drops in on "Mister Lossoff’s Distinguished Buttons” in the garment district of New York: https://youtu.be/h-QgWOSVKm4?t=724 https://youtu.be/h-QgWOSVKm4?t=724 He's totally THAT enthusiastic, a distinguished expert fiendishly obsessed with buttons! He even carries around a big bag of replacement Joy Buttons that he hands out for free like candy to anyone who’s worn theirs out. I know this from personal experience: Ted and his wife Ellen once ran into me working on my Thinkpad at some coffee shop in Mountain View, and Ted noticed my worn out Joy Button. He excused himself to run out to his car to fetch his Button Bag, while Ellen smiled at me and rolled her eyes up into her head and shrugged, and we hung out and talked until he got back. I really appreciated a nice new crisp one with fresh bumpy texture, because mine was totally worn down, and it made his day to get rid of a few. (I imagine their house has hoards of boxes and piles of bags full of them!) The common thread: design that makes you come. Back for more, that is. Buttons to lick till they click. Nubs to rub till they're bald. Products you touched obsessively until they're worn smooth. Tahoe gives us clownish corners we can't even grab. Apple dropped the ball -- and frankly, it's a kick in the nuts.
• hrdwdmrbl 9mo ago
  I would highly recommend Magnets to anyone users who prefer shortcuts anyway: https://magnet.crowdcafe.com/ https://magnet.crowdcafe.com/
• st3fan 9mo ago
  This 100% Please please please make this better Apple. Or just give us an option for square windows.
• mrcwinn 9mo ago
  I started with an Apple Lisa. I’ve never enjoyed Apple products less than I do right now. And there were some rough days in the 90s! I switched from a AW Ultra 3 to a Garmin. Considering an S26 because of the semi-matte screen. The Mac, though, I probably can’t replace, but man Tahoe/Liquid Glass sucks.
• chmaynard 9mo ago
  This controversy could have been avoided if the GUI changes in Tahoe had been opt-in only. In other words, the Sequoia GUI should have remained the default, with the option of choosing to switch to Liquid Glass.
  • GaryBluto 9mo ago
    When has Apple ever really allowed you to do anything like that?
• BoneShard 9mo ago
  Maybe I'm too old and every modern computer is a marvel to me, but as someone switching between win/macos/linux all these complaints amuse me. While in windows I'm using powertoys and I can move/resize windows using any space inside a window. It's the same with linux/gnome - a couple of config settings. Then, when I started using macos I looked for a similar solution - found BetterSnapTool and just started using it.
  • hopelite 9mo ago
    I get your point and think it is a matter of when things are relatively "perfectly" done as in iOS/MacOS, every little anthill seems like an eruption volcano, but let's also not make excuses for some of the rather disgusting issues in Tahoe that Steve Jobs' would have never allowed to ship. I can't recall them all right off the top of my head, but I waited til 26.2 to update because of all the comments I saw about glitziness, and this resizing issue is just one of the quirks I have noticed are still not resolved; not to mention that my M4 Mac has not crawled and locked up as often as it has since I updated to 26.2. But again, to put it in perspective, that's only been very little hassle compared to what seems to be nothing but misery, suffering, and existential questions suffered by the wretched souls condemned to Windows. Edit: another issue I have noticed in iOS is that now things like saving bookmarks in Safari is no longer a two step/tap process using long-press, it's a three step/tap process....WHY?? Same with "add to home screen". Also, the long press horizontal context menu (i.e., copy, paste) now does not slide left to reveal more options, it just changes mode to a vertical list. What is going on??? That's sickening...in my opinion. Horizontal, vertical? Pick one. Second Edit: I just experienced another Tahoe glitch in at least Safari, where hyperlinks become un-clickable and the only way to resolve that is to seemingly restart safari. I don't find that acceptable in Safari of all places.
    • hopelite 9mo ago
      I was just reminded of another glitch in iOS, when typing if you select the left most suggested word, the selection highlight is not only aligned with the rounding and position of the underlying rounded background, it literally overlaps/extends beyond the background. Again... rather gross.
• john_alan 9mo ago
  Tahoe is a nightmare. I’m Literally not buying a new Mac because of it. Dye destroyed macOS. I don’t know what they do, but they have to backtrack.
  • tbirdny 9mo ago
    I agree. I would like to buy a new Mac but that would mean I'm forced to use macOS 26. It may be years before I buy a new Mac.
• blinded 9mo ago
  I game on windows because of anti cheat software requirements. Windows is garbage. The windows + tab order is never consistent. Not having a good built in shell and don't get me started if you ever have to edit the registry for anything. Super poor experience.
  • Daneel_ 9mo ago
    I fully agree, but the winkey + tab order is simply in order of last used, with the most recent being at the upper left and oldest at the lower right.
    • blinded 9mo ago
      Interesting! Thanks for that
• jdkee 9mo ago
  Steve Jobs would never have let this ship.
• amelius 9mo ago
  Why does the UI have to change all the time? Can't they just keep it the same? If cars were like computers, the steering wheel would be in a different place after every maintenance check. Anyway, I'm on Linux, using Gnome Classic as my WM, and I don't have these stupid "everything is suddenly different now" issues.
  • imiric 9mo ago
    Cars have similar UX issues as well. See the whole touchscreen saga. It's also an issue on Linux, to an extent. GNOME has a tendency of forcing UIs on users, and Ubuntu with Unity, now GNOME again, etc. Though, thankfully, since the user is free to choose their own desktop environment and window manager, it's not as pressing of an issue. I realized many years ago that simpler UIs deliver the best UX. This is a large reason why I love the command line so much. Most programs have a fixed and stable interface, and can be composed to do what I want. For graphical programs I prefer using a simple window manager like bspwm on X, and niri on Wayland. These don't draw window decorations, and are primarily keyboard-driven, so I don't need superfluous graphics. I only need a simple status bar that shows my workspaces, active window, and some system information. I recently configured it with Quickshell[1], and couldn't be happier. I plan to use this setup for years to come, and it gives me great peace of mind knowing that no company can take that away from me. I will have to maintain it myself, but there shouldn't be any changes in the programs I use to break this in a major way. [1]: https://github.com/imiric/quickshell-niri/tree/main/fancy-bar https://github.com/imiric/quickshell-niri/tree/main/fancy-ba...
  • iknowstuff 9mo ago
    Car designs do change all the time, mostly just for novelty too.
  • pwg 9mo ago
    > Why does the UI have to change all the time? Can't they just keep it the same? Because if they kept it the same, then there would be no need to continue to employ all those UI designers. Therefore, to be assured of their continued employment, the UI designers have to make constant changes to justify their existence. Meanwhile, we get to suffer with their changes.
• lunar_rover 9mo ago
  Are we reaching the death of UI design? Feel like we're now at the point where being mid-bad makes something one of the best for many. I miss Windows 7 and OS X.
  • itopaloglu83 9mo ago
    I think we need to call it as what it is, half assed design.
  • bsimpson 9mo ago
    Scott Jenson - who worked on the classic Mac for Apple, and Android for Google - recently gave a talk on this: https://youtu.be/1fZTOjd_bOQ?si=BVOxUPjoULhwiclE https://youtu.be/1fZTOjd_bOQ?si=BVOxUPjoULhwiclE The tl;dw is that copying UX lets others invest energy in identifying the paradigm. Linux, which tends to be starved for resources, has historically been reasonably well served by letting Apple and Microsoft define UX, while Linux focuses on implementing it. However, those headlining companies haven't been investing in desktop UX excellence in recent years. It's time for open source projects to embrace experimentation and take the mantle of cutting edge UX, because Apple et. al. aren't paving the way anymore.
• urbandw311er 9mo ago
  I haven’t had to move the mouse near a window corner to resize it in years — I just hold down the Shift and Fn keys and the window under my mouse resizes as I move it. Strongly recommend getting BetterTouchTool for this - changed my life.
• itwillnotbeasy 9mo ago
  Who asked for those rounded windows anyway? They create so many problems; every app has its own border-radius, and it wastes precious screen space...
• rishabhaiover 9mo ago
  Unrelated but iOS 26 is so bad and janky that I've finally decided to switch to an android phone. I hate it so much. Thank god I haven't upgraded to Tahoe.
• eviks 9mo ago
  > Since upgrading to macOS Tahoe, I’ve noticed that quite often my attempts to resize a window are failing. That should nudge users away from this rather primitive method of window resizing using tiny 19px corners and instead set up a productivity app where your can use the full 33% of the window size (so conveniently huge! and of course customizable) to resize via an extra trigger (for example, using a modifier key) (nice plate picture joke!)
  • AlienRobot 9mo ago
    "I need to resize my window." "You shouldn't need this."
    • eviks 9mo ago
      "My reading comprehension failed, help me!" "You should use this more convenient way to fulfill your window resizing need!"
  • 1f60c 9mo ago
    I set up Raycast (https://www.raycast.com/ https://www.raycast.com/) with the same keybinds as Magnet (https://magnet.crowdcafe.com/ https://magnet.crowdcafe.com/) because I learned those first and haven't looked back.
    • eviks 9mo ago
      Look back and discover a better way, those are not ergonomic defaults even though you got used to them. But also convenient app switching beats having your content get shifted around due to constant window resizing, that workflow mostly works for stuff you need "permanently" side by side. And on laptops this also runs into screen size limitations
• mvkel 9mo ago
  Seems very clear now that we are going to see touch screen MacBooks. Which is a very silly idea. But explains why the UI "snaps" like an iPad, and everything is designed for touch.
• drob518 9mo ago
  Apple really screwed the pooch on this last set of UI upgrades. They have been known as UI experts for decades and then they produced this unusable mess. I’ve upgraded my iPhone and iPad, but I’ve been delaying upgrading MacOS, hoping that they will fix most of the mess before I switch. If I was Tim Cook, I’d be looking for a scalp. This is as bad as the butterfly keyboard mess in terms of usability, IMO.
• bob1029 9mo ago
  I just saw the upgrade notification and thought to myself "no, thank you". Still running Sonoma on my MBP and iOS17 on my phone.
• fatih-erikli-cg 9mo ago
  [dead]
• antfarm 9mo ago
  It's obvious, the new Apple UI (and Liquid Glass) is optimized for visionOS, not macOS or iOS.
• graypegg 9mo ago
  I’ve been more and more confused by Apple’s product positioning for MacOS. They still have a sizeable “pro” (emphasis not sarcasm) market that spans across a very aspirational set of careers: Film, YouTubers, developers, photographers, artists, musicians, etc. Considering how many people only buy a MacBook PRO no matter what they plan on doing with it, they really need to keep the actual salary-earning pros happy with it or else it’ll lose all credibility. A Mac in a recording booth has a look to it that sells well, but that aesthetic won’t last if you stop seeing them. Being an effective tool for the pro minority should honestly be the priority for MacOS, even at the cost of making it incongruous from iPadOS/iOS. * * disclaimer: what do I know honestly haha, I’m sure they’ll print money anyway.
• jojule 9mo ago
  When resizing, I expect to drag from the edge of a window. This is exactly how it works in macOS Tahoe, with a sufficient drag zone on the both sides. The only "strangeness" is that the drag zone extends further outside the window in the corner zone. IMO this is nice. All that said, I REALLY would love to have a hotkey combo I can beep pressed down to resize anywhere over the window. Just like in many Unix/Linux window managers.
  • crazygringo 9mo ago
    Yeah, I have to agree. The blog post seems convincing when you look at the images, but now that I've actually been playing with it, I can always drag the corner to resize. In fact, the corner provides much more draggable area than the window edges do. There's no problem. So I agree it's strange that the drag zone extends so far beyond, but that's not really something to complain about...? Everywhere inside the corner where it feels reasonable to resize, it resizes. The article is expecting an absurd level of a drag zone on the inside. Again, the large drag zone outside the corner is kinda weird. But honestly that's more just an understandable artifact of the corner drag zone being a square. If it were me, I probably wouldn't bother to round off one corner of the drag zone either. There's a lot of stuff to criticize about Tahoe, but this would be about last on my list...
  • VerifiedReports 9mo ago
    And yet Mac OS didn't support resizing from edges, or any corner of the window except the lower-right ONE, until well into the 2000s. Incredibly dumb.
    • VerifiedReports 9mo ago
      Yes, downvote facts.
  • nescap 9mo ago
    There is this obscure setting you can enable to be able to click anywhere on a window while holding Command + Control to move it. defaults write −g NSWindowShouldDragOnGesture −bool true This only supports moving around windows, not resizing.
• etempleton 9mo ago
  Just this week it also dawned on me the impracticality of the large corners after twice in a row failing to grab the corner of a window. Tahoe is absolute amateur hour.
• raffael_de 9mo ago
  Let's be honest, everything windows on macOS is and always has been an utter cluster fuck.
• aadishv 9mo ago
  I find it very ironic that Apple's Mac hardware is the best it's ever been, and some of the best (if not the best) in the entire industry, yet their software team seems intent on burning down their entire reputation. Maybe they think that's better than getting fired over the laughingstock that is Apple Intelligence
• ivanjermakov 9mo ago
  The era of Apple design with great care to little details is long gone.
• deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
• MacConfusesMe 9mo ago
  I'm on macOS 15.4 on a 2021 M1 Max. I haven't rebooted for months. Is it possible for me to update to whatever was released just before "Tahoe", or will it just put me on that now?
  • waz0wski 9mo ago
    Yes you can still update to 15.7.3 the usual way in Settings It'll present you the Tahoe upgrade but underneath in small print it'll show other updates, which you have to then open and manually select the 15.7.3 update And you really should keep up on the point updates because there's been a ton of major security patches since 15.4
• alejoar 9mo ago
  I use easy-move-resize [1] to resize windows from anywhere inside the area of the window, using a modifier key. In my case I like using cmd + middle mouse button + drag. This is standard in Gnome and a must for me back when I switch to MacOS for work. [1] https://github.com/dmarcotte/easy-move-resize https://github.com/dmarcotte/easy-move-resize
  • locusofself 9mo ago
    Just tried this. Pretty cool. Kinda strange how the mouse cursor doesn't move with the window, but still might be worth using.
  • callc 9mo ago
    I came here to say something similar. Ever since I found out about alt + left click drag anywhere in window to move, and alt + right click drag practically anywhere on any side to resize, anything else feels user-hostile. I rarely use windows anymore, but just like you installed a tool to get this behavior. This UI feature saves approx 3 seconds on average for resizing windows. Plus, more importantly it more predictably works, and is an easier target to hit than a 2-10 wide pixel line or square region.
  • fghorow 9mo ago
    The doco mentions "left" and "right" mouse. I have the ctrl-click already mapped to right mouse on my trackpad. Before I take the plunge, how well does this work with a trackpad on a MB Air?
  • paustint 9mo ago
    I use https://rectangleapp.com https://rectangleapp.com which has been a lifesaver. I only use the following three shortcuts and disable the rest: cmd+option+f = maximize to fill entire screen cmd+option+ctrl+left/right = move window to other monitor on left/right I occasionally use cmd+option+left/right if I need to have two windows side-by-side on the same monitor. MacOS window sizes have always felt weird to me - no easy way to maximize without making it go into full screen mode. As I was writing this, I just realized that hovering on the green traffic light shows a menu to choose some window placement options.... not sure how I never realized this before, but even the "maximize" option there doesn't go all the way to the edges - weird.
• AlienRobot 9mo ago
  >Living on this planet for quite a few decades, I have learned that it rarely works to grab things if you don’t actually touch them: Yes, but that is skeuomorphic design, which is old and ugly. We live in the era of anti-skeuomorphic design, where nothing makes any sense but it looks sleek.
• hit8run 9mo ago
  Those big radius borders are a waste of space just for the sake of fashion. Form follows function not the other way around.
  • mindok 9mo ago
    And the title bars of the windows. On a 13” screen, that’s a fair percentage of available screen real estate down the toilet
• arexxbifs 9mo ago
  I don't really care if it's because of bizarro designer hegemony, device unification, cost cutting, bad developers or something else, but it's astonoshing how far the desktop paradigm has fallen (and not just in MacOS). What baffles me the most about things like this isn't that crap slips through, it's that crap accumulates in an alarming rate and that apparently tech-savvy people aren't just seemingly fine with stuff like this, but will happily step up and defend it.
• fuzzy_lumpkins 9mo ago
  it’s like windows and iOS teamed up to upset everyone
• daxaxelrod 9mo ago
  Use rectangle and this will never be a problem for you. https://rectangleapp.com/ https://rectangleapp.com/
• chupchap 9mo ago
  Result of UI people work on UX. As an industry we need to de-hyphenate UI and UX.
• jd3 9mo ago
  I noticed this and modified the .car to just make window corners sharp. It looks a bit jarring, but functionally speaking, it feels like a big improvement.
• gjvc 9mo ago
  the macOS window manager has been awful for many years
• aebot 9mo ago
  [dead]
• 8bitsrule 9mo ago
  Window-resize radii seem to be a fixable problem (make it a user setting!) on many OS's. I can only -wish- that my Linux distro's resize radius wasn't -painfully- small. I've probably wasted HOURS fishing around until the red icon popped up.
  • crapple8430 9mo ago
    Funny, on Linux I just use the special key (normally alt or super) to do all my window moving and resizing. It requires no precision at all and works even in tiling WMs without titlebars. I always found it weird Macos and Windows don't have this and it's a little painful to need to be precise with the mouse.
    • 8bitsrule 9mo ago
      Could be distro-dependent. Yep I can use a key to move a window ... depending on where I 'grab' ('alt' works anywhere, 'super' only outside the browser window). But horizontal, vertical resizing requires a THIN edge, and diagonal re-sizing requires grabbing a tiny corner (character-sized), keys have no effect.
• manoDev 9mo ago
  I'm shocked this update was pushed by the same company that created the HIG. I guess companies really do keep growing to the point of mediocrity.
• dabinat 9mo ago
  I noticed Apple’s software quality decline the moment they committed to 1-year release cycles. Because an x.0 release inevitably has issues, it offers less than a year of stability (sometimes only a few months if it takes until x.4 to be fully stable) before things get broken again in y.0. And because Apple stops signing old versions pretty quickly, you’re often stuck on an unstable new version if you take the risk and upgrade. Additionally, it is hard on all developers (Apple included) to release updates for all of its many platforms on the same day, which IMO reduces software quality across the ecosystem. (Apple also has the luxury of only supporting the latest OS versions with its software. Customers often expect third-party developers to support a wider range of OS versions and devices than Apple does.)
  • systemtest 9mo ago
    I have been using OS X since 10.4 Tiger. I still remember standing in line at midnight trying to get a copy on DVD. Getting to test all the new features back home in the middle of the night was so exciting! Well worth the €129/€29 they charged for it. Nowadays the yearly releases are more of a "meh". I hit install, they added a new grouping feature to Reminders and that is about all I use from what they added. Still bitter that my 2006 Core Duo MacBook only had support up to 10.6 Snow Leopard but back then that was over 4 years of being able to use the latest OS, so comparable to four releases with the current cycles.
    • morshu9001 9mo ago
      I used that same MacBook until 2014. At least Snow Leopard was a gem.
      • systemtest 9mo ago
        I used it up till 2011. It had multiple top-cases replaced under the extended warranty, display CCFL was changed a few times due to flickering, disc-drive got swapped once, new logic board because the audio-jack was stuck on SPDIF, new power adapter. The only device I ever got Apple Care on and I got thousands in repairs covered for free. This was from before Apple would just replace the entire device. All my other MacBooks have been trouble free luckily.
• didip 9mo ago
  So… it’s a good thing that the design emperor is poached by Meta, yeah? Funny enough, I never suffered this because my mouse pointer has always been configured to be comically large. So I had adapt with inaccurate click area for many many years due to my own cause.
• lowbloodsugar 9mo ago
  Not updating to Tahoe and hoping they make a major change for whatever is next. My M1 is getting a bit long in the tooth, and was thinking about upgrading to an M5, but not if it comes with Tahoe.
• lolive 9mo ago
  Probably off topic question [coming from someone who spends 99.99% in i3+iOS+maximed windows in W11]: when do you need to have overlapping windows, or even windows that you resize by hand? Windows should take a zone in your screen. Punto. Even W11 has understood that by now.
• pentagrama 9mo ago
  This feels like a surprisingly good moment for Linux desktops to position themselves as real alternatives and actually gain ground. MacOS Tahoe has been heavily criticized for its UI decisions, especially Liquid Glass, which many people feel actively hurts usability rather than improving it. On the other side, Windows keeps piling on user-hostile features, dark patterns, and friction that increasingly frustrate power users and regular users alike. Distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora, Mint, and others have mature desktops, solid performance, and fewer design decisions that get in the user’s way. I honestly cannot remember another moment where both major desktop platforms were being questioned this openly at the same time. If Linux is ever going to take advantage of dissatisfaction at scale, this feels like it.
  • simpaticoder 9mo ago
    >This feels like a surprisingly good moment for Linux desktops to...actually gain ground. I agree, and its likely that both macOS and Windows will continue to get worse. That said, it's important to be realistic because users can and will put up with quite a lot of discomfort before switching, and this is because for every bad feature or misstep, there are 100 others that are so good you don't even notice them. And when you switch, you start noticing all those others features you never noticed before, because they are now gone. Some of these features will be hardware, some OS, some application support, and some of them you can fix and some you just have to get used to. An approach I recommend is to add a linux laptop to the mix. You can buy a used, powerful laptop cheap, install Linux on it and try to use it for a time, keeping your other machines around. Chances are you'll find various trade-offs - Linux will NOT be a strict improvement, it will have downsides. Linux is particularly weak with power management and certain devices like fingerprint readers. Depending on the apps you use, it can be weak there, too. That said, Linux is very usable, easy to install, and you should try it. But I think it does people a disservice to imply its better on every axis. It's better on some, worse on others.
    • steine65 9mo ago
      Well put. I dual booted because I still can't trust my CachyOS desktop not to do something surprising during important calls. But damn it is relieving to have full control again.
• kurtis_reed 9mo ago
  Stop using MacOS?
• hacker_homie 9mo ago
  The curves are a lie, the window is still square, can we stop putting lipstick on the pig, I just want my computers to work not look like some computer in a sci-fi movie.
• tokamak 9mo ago
  I find MacOS terrible (any version) and wish my employer would not force Mac upon me. I hope one day we will be able to use Linux on Mac hardware (in enterprise setting).
• freeAgent 9mo ago
  I've noticed this as well and it's infuriating. It's extremely unintuitive and I constantly find myself missing the resize zone.
• deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
• gulnaw 9mo ago
  When performing the resize action on any windows, the cursor changes to the resize cursor. The only time it doesn't change to the resize cursor is when you're not focused on that specific window. I don't really see the frustration this article is trying to portray.
• reader9274 9mo ago
  Also Finder can never remember to start the new window size as I last left it.
• eru 9mo ago
  I don't have this problem, and I can't seem to reproduce it.
• claysmithr 9mo ago
  I'm on Tahoe and really not seeing this issue.
• nine_k 9mo ago
  What's jarring is not even that macOS Tahoe has such weird shapes of windows. What really astonishes me is that nobody seems to have anticipated how users would try to resize windows, and did not reshape the corner drag area (which I would expect to be a quarter-circle, or a quarter-ring along the rounded edge). This can't be a mistake, this can only be deliberate cutting corners by management in order to ship ASAP. And then nobody cared to issue an update. Verily, the last UI redesign that was based on honest research and watching real users act was WinXP.
  • choppaface 9mo ago
    It’s not cutting corners. Apple does most of their testing using strictly internal resources, like secret “mini malls” in the Silicon Valley area. They fail because this testing biases their sampling; users must sign draconian NDAs to participate, among other things. These samples are effectively biased due to Apple’s corporate culture regarding secrecy and competition. So, Apple actually works very hard. It’s just they culturally prefer a lot of techniques that their competitors (e.g. Google and Facebook) have throughly proven as inferior. But is Google better? Not really, they killed a lot of good products like Reader. But is Facebook better? Not really, Cambridge Analytica and Metaverse and .. facebook products are disposable. But I think these Apple UX bugs are misdiagnosed. Yes they are atrocious. But think about how atrocious and non-representative and non-competitive Apple’s testing population is.
    • nine_k 9mo ago
      This all is pretty curious! But my point is that every developer involved would notice how crazy the end result is. No need for a focus group to demonstrate that emperor's new clothes barely cover the body, and don't match the body parts. But nobody from likely hundreds of people inside Apple involved in the project was able to effect a change towards sanity. I'm afraid many just didn't feel like speaking.
      • hopelite 9mo ago
        In the spirit of not being intimidated, I am going to just say what I’ve been wondering; if this could be a result of the oppressive nature of all the “DEI” stuff at Apple having turned into a kind of intimidation cudgel. Are you going to speak out and point out the emperor has no clothes if doing so will have your head? The circular self-congratulation of DEI introduces an intimidation factor where the objective and scientific truth is inherently no longer the basis for decision making because there are multiple layers of a kind of aristocratic privilege that cannot be questioned, let alone criticized, because critique of their actions equals critique of their divinity, i.e., becomes heresy. So we end up with this point where no one pointed out the increasingly ridiculous reductions of the emperor’s clothes, only ever cheering on with positive affirmations, to the point that everyone’s intimidated to even point out the emperor is walking around stark naked. I could see how a combination of the DEI intimidation tactics with the advent of AI, the hash economic factors, and general desire to not rock the personal benefit boat could have resulted in institutional paralysis. Is there anyone with a force of personality left at Apple? Ultimately, this is on Cook as the Chief Executive Officer poorly executing. It really makes you wonder if the leadership doesn’t actually use any of their own company’s products. How do you not notice these glitches immediately like everyone else if you are using them? I could see Cook not having even regularly used an iPhone or actively interacted with any Apple product himself in years as his real life Siris around him do every single thing for him every day all day, besides maybe giving him briefs on screens that happen to be iPhones and iPads. At that level you actively have to make choices to remain connected to the ground. I doubt Cook finds being grounded comes easy.
• maxkfranz 9mo ago
  I always stay one major version behind so I only get security patches after an initial, yearly upgrade. Not experiencing Tahoe myself yet, I felt that perhaps the UI issues people are talking about were a tad overstated, but the example in the article states it very plainly. I'm taken aback. Change the look, that's fair enough. But it should have some usability testing for this kind of thing before it goes out the door.
• mertd 9mo ago
  I must be the minority that barely noticed any changes after upgrading to Tahoe.
• deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
• magicturtle256 9mo ago
  [dead]
  • pseudalopex 9mo ago
    > Note: This does not change the rounded corners of individual app windows. It only restores the straight silhouette at the edges of your display.
• Tiktaalik 9mo ago
  Wow that's an insane bug and I'm hoping it is a bug. I'm glad I saw this blog post. I'm not going to upgrade until stuff like this gets addressed.
• diimdeep 9mo ago
  It is case of Corporate Memphis induced design, SF people increasingly detachment from common sense, and general sign of societal decline.
• rikima_ 9mo ago
  Going to stay on Sonoma for another year
• burntcaramel 9mo ago
  This is why Steve Jobs demoed software. Watch when he unveils Aqua, there’s a couple of slides of the lickable visuals and then he sits down and demos it. He clicks and taps and shows it working. Because that’s what you the user will do. He’ll show boring things like resizing windows because those things matter to you trying and if he cares about resizing windows to this degree then imagine what else this product has. Apple today hides behind slick motion graphics introductions that promise ideal software. That’s setting them up to fail because no one can live up to a fantasy. Steve showed working software that was good enough to demo and then got his team to ship it.
  • halapro 9mo ago
    > He’ll show boring things like resizing windows If you use something long enough, you'll get used to its idiosyncrasies. Jobs would have clicked and dragged 10px away from the rounded corner here instinctively. This is why the owner of an old car can turn it on and drive away in a blink while his son has trouble: hold the accelerator 10% down, giggle the key a little while turning, pull the wheel a bit, ... all comes natural to the owner.
    • SoftTalker 9mo ago
      Yes, and Mac owners will do the same thing. I don't use MacOS but people will just figure out the new behavior, be briefly annoyed by it, and then get used to it and move on. Apple could have done better here but users acclimate to much worse UX than this.
    • eviks 9mo ago
      So why would he have different instincts? > This never happened to me before in almost 40 years of using computers. > If you use something long enough, you'll get used to its idiosyncrasies. Or you don't and get constantly annoyed by some basic thing that is broken (the owner of an old car would curse it every day when giggling the key)
• post-it 9mo ago
  Inside the window is where the content is. It makes sense for most of the resize hitbox to be outside that. They could make it bigger though for sure, or add an accessibility option for it.
• josephd79 9mo ago
  I started using aerospace, a window tiling manager a long time ago and will never look back. Once you get used to the keybindings there's nothing better.
• deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
• vasuadari 9mo ago
  I never had this problem for ages. As I use hammerspoon with hotkeys to resize and move the apps between displays.
• stephenbuilds 9mo ago
  Tahoe is the first macOS I'm planning to skip if I can
• andy_ppp 9mo ago
  I’ve updated my phone and now it can’t talk to MacOS and I don’t want to upgrade. I can’t imagine much about sharing internet or whatever has changed between these OS versions…
• aikinai 9mo ago
  Wow, this was so well presented! I almost didn't click on the article since I assumed it would be a meandering explanation about awkward edge cases or something. But this is so clearly and succinctly demonstrated! Amazing work by the author.
• voiprodrigo 9mo ago
  This is very well presented and I hope Apple sees it. And this is the kind of thing that I don’t think would fly with Steve Jobs, most likely with very harsh reaction. Attention to the details was a big part of Apple’s DNA much because of him, and it’s a bit sad to see that eroding.
• consumer451 9mo ago
  I have a few computers. Win, MacOS, Fedora, and iOS for mobile. Out of all the things, the UX I cannot forgive is: 1. Hold Siri button 2. say "Create appointment at 3PM tomorrow." The result is that no alert/notification/warning of this appointment occurs, unless I open the appointment and create the alert manually, at least at time of event. I cannot imagine any use case where one would create an appointment that required no reminder. If I had created this appointment via Gmail or even Outlook, and synced... then there are notifications. My point here is that the UX rot at Apple is not new. I am curious as to how this rot begins at BigOrg, and how it can be cured, if it can be addressed. I have never worked at BigOrg, so I really don't get it. Is there some missing UX role in the c-suite? How does my gripe, or Tahoe... ever happen? I understand how it happens at MSFT, but is this just what happens at all BigOrgs, eventually?
  • LeoPanthera 9mo ago
    Whether appointments have an alert by default or not is a setting in the Calendar app.
    • consumer451 9mo ago
      Oh wow. Confirmed! However, can you please explain to me the use case of "Siri, create an appointment at 3PM tomorrow" - where I would want no alert, at time of event, at the very least? I am pretty good at imagining edge cases, and I cannot imagine even one. I have never been more upset at a default setting. I want to name and shame, and worse. Who made this call, a hippo? Think of the lost productivity at scale. "It just works UX" was supposed to be the entire point of Apple.
      • LeoPanthera 9mo ago
        I would imagine a majority of office workers create appointments with no alerts. They're looking at their calendar all day. That's only speculation, but that's why it's a setting. You can have it either way.
        • 9mo ago
• rickcarlino 9mo ago
  They took our scroll bars and now they are coming for our resize controls.
• moi2388 9mo ago
  The rounded corners are stupid to begin with. They are also there in a maximised window, meaning you now always have a slight visible border around your app and see the background in the corners. Absolutely stupid design
• ed_balls 9mo ago
  Volume bar now blocks access to the latest tabs in the browser
• BenFranklin100 9mo ago
  It’s a massive UI failure, design over function, something Jobs would have never tolerated. I’m glad other people are pointing this out. At first I thought my eyes were going. It’s especially bad with the magic mouse for some reason.
• arlyle 9mo ago
  i went to Sonoma from Tahoe. it felt like an upgrade rather than a downgrade. why Sonoma? it was the version appeared in Recovery mode. but its size still makes me use scientific notation to write it in kilobyte unit. i am calling everyone(apple google..) here to switch their mindset to: "how can we reduce code size?", "what can we get rid of?", "how small can my product be?"... set rules to measure everything in kilobytes and make your employees realize how big the number you are typing. if every company thinks like that and stop the madness for a year or two, we might be able to solve the main issue: obesity.
• findthebug 9mo ago
  did downgrade because of stuff like this. never look back.
• danans 9mo ago
  Overlapping windows seem like a dated skeumorphic paradigm at this point. I almost never want to see just part of a window. For a long time, I've found that either full screen or tiling (driven by keyboard shortcuts) is a far less frustrating a way to interact with windows, so I almost never use window-resizing. Window resizing is also horrendous when you try to do it with a touchpad.
  • seec 9mo ago
    Agreed. The problem is that native window management is pretty bad in macOS. And the 3rd party tools solving the problem aren't that great on top of being expensive sometimes. Apple could fix it, but instead they made overlapping windows for iPadOS, which is even dumber considering the smaller display area. I think it doesn't matter what they do; part of their clientele is fully captive, another part is only there for the status, and the last part is just using it rudimentally, so anything is OK.
    • danans 9mo ago
      > Agreed. The problem is that native window management is pretty bad in macOS. And the 3rd party tools solving the problem aren't that great on top of being expensive sometimes. Linux desktops have great ground-up support for tiling window management, whether as an optional behavior (Gnome/KDE/ChromeOS), or strict tile enforcement (i3/xMonad). > I think it doesn't matter what they do; part of their clientele is fully captive, another part is only there for the status, and the last part is just using it rudimentally, so anything is OK. It's too bad even technologists often fall into those categories these days.
      • seec 9mo ago
        Yeh, Linux desktops are pretty good nowadays; the problem is just software support. If commercial software were easier to make/sell for Linux, that would be great. There are not a lot of technologists left, and they are dominated by the crowd anyway. Apple used to cater more to people who really liked computers, but now they try to sell to everyone, so the objectives have changed a lot, sadly.
• NamlchakKhandro 9mo ago
  Meanwhile, window management in linux is Superior. lmao mac.
• macinjosh 9mo ago
  Seems to me Apple is getting ready to make the black arrow mouse pointer obsolete. In the next generation or two iPads and MacBooks are going to essentially merge as a product line. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple abandons classic macOS (w/ Terminal and a filesystem) all together. To continue to support developers all they need is a tweaked Xcode for Apple dev and their version of WSL for everything else. All the parts are already in macOS/iPadOS (native virtualization and containerization). iMac and Mac Pro are all but dead now too. Mac Mini and Mac Studio will be the only desktop options and will be bought by people who are Millenials and older or ML/AI praciticioners. We may even see a special AI/Local LLM Mac Studio that would be the equivalent of mac pro of the ai era. Your fingers will need these big round edges to grab. They may let you use a bluetooth mouse but they aren't going to cater their UX to you. They year of the Linux desktop has come as commercial desktop OS's die.
• raffraffraff 9mo ago
  That's like xfce!
• tensility 9mo ago
  I would love to go back to more skeumorphic system interfaces. The layered panes of glass metaphor has been a pain in the ass from a usability perspective from the get go, enough so that I cheered to hear of Alan Dye leaving Apple.
• LeoPanthera 9mo ago
  Thank God this is not just me. I thought I was going insane. Has text selection also changed? When I drag a block and copy it, I often find I've missed the first character. It's happening almost every time and I swear this wasn't happening to me before.
• aaronbrethorst 9mo ago
  I've used every release of macOS since the Mac OS X Public Beta in late 2000. Until now. I'm skipping 26 altogether and hoping 27 tones down the worst excesses of the Alan Dye era.
• nxpnsv 9mo ago
  My first reaction was that it never bothered me, but now I realize I also didn't update to Tahoe yet. I'll wait a bit longer...
• billforsternz 9mo ago
  No one serious ever talks about "upgrading" to Tahoe without the quotes. I hope Apple are seriously embarrassed about this and determined to mend their ways.
• socalgal2 9mo ago
  I just remember all the people who will tell you that Apple (and Google, and Microsoft) have teams of people testing this stuff therefore it's great and your opinion that there is a problem is wrong. >:(
• classified 9mo ago
  > Living on this planet for quite a few decades, I have learned that it rarely works to grab things if you don’t actually touch them. Hilarious. Is Apple attempting to defy the laws of physics?
• qxxx 9mo ago
  I don't know what you have, it works on my machine. Just tried it. I can grab the rounded corner (+- few px inside/outside). I can't grab the corner like shown in the gif. I am on Tahoe 26.2 (25C56)
  • nescap 9mo ago
    After a bit of testing, the target area seems to have certain dimensions that are based on pixels (19x19 according to OP). With a lower resolution, the corners become much easier to grab. I have had no issues resizing windows, and I'm on 26.0 (25A353).
• dagi3d 9mo ago
  one of my biggest fears is to upgrade my mb air by mistake will stay on sequoia as longer I can
• MORPHOICES 9mo ago
  [dead]
  • ricardobeat 9mo ago
    Why are you posting AI-generated slop to HN?
• iamcalledrob 9mo ago
  Surprisingly, this is an issue on Windows and Linux too -- macOS has just joined the sad party. The location of the drag region is either the 10px-or-so just outside the window (GTK apps), or just inside the window (I see this in Electron apps). On GNOME, anyway. On Windows this is caused by the removal of the thick window border with Win10. It wasn't really removed, it was just made transparent instead, thus the drag region moved outside the visible window to avoid the content size changing (for backwards compatibility). Apps often end up in a broken state too, because if you eschew system decoration, you lose the invisible border (which you don't even know you have), and it's easy to end up with a 1px drag region. It's infuriating, because of the issue the author highlights -- you try and grab the window corner and fail. It's a sad state of affairs, and a great example of how the basics are going backwards on desktop.
• kosolam 9mo ago
  And the HiDPi/retina issues with 32” Dell monitors for example especially when using rdp is super annoying.
• willtemperley 9mo ago
  Normally bug reports should include the exact version and machine. I personally don't see this behavour on Tahoe 26.2 and an M2 MBP.
  • deanc 9mo ago
    I'm on latest Tahoe and M3 MBP and the issue is even worse than the author describes. There is about a 5px window also for grabbing the straight edges of the window to expand in one axis only.
• vim-guru 9mo ago
  Apples products are still the best on the market, but if they keep this up; they will sooner or later become irrelevant.
  • hasperdi 9mo ago
    "Best" is a relative term. It depends on the purpose / criteria
• sbinnee 9mo ago
  I am glad that I restrained myself from buying a macbook and went for a thinkpad. I think I saw icon issue on Tahoe not long ago on HN. I know that macbook has been crushing laptop market with their M chip. Macbook is amazing for sure. I very much enjoy using it at work. But for personal computing, I need Linux setup.
  • nicbou 9mo ago
    I haven't upgraded to Tahoe yet, but overall MacOS is still solid. It has lots of quirks that would benefit from a quality of life release, but generally the OS gets out of the way and the hardware is solid. I could not say the same about Windows and to an extent Linux.
• deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
• _def 9mo ago
  I recently learned about a shortcut you can enable for moving windows, is something similar around for resizing? On linux I do this via alt + left click and alt + right click `NSWindowShouldDragOnGesture` setting allows you to drag windows at any point if you hold ⌃⌘ `defaults write -g NSWindowShouldDragOnGesture -bool YES`
  • gcbirzan 9mo ago
    I'm using Easy Move+Resize, though, I don't recommend using cmd as the only modifier (you're already using ctrl+cmd, so shouldn't be a big deal), since that screws up with cmd clicking on links to open in a new tab.
• fnoef 9mo ago
  Liquid glass is a piece of crap from Apple. I didn’t update my iPhone, nor my Mac. I will hold for as long as possible, and will consider switching away from the apple ecosystem if they do not address this fiasco of an update.
  • brikym 9mo ago
    I still call it liquid ass.
• pranavm27 9mo ago
  Made a decision on not to upgrade midway installation. Feels like it payed off. And I am on M2 256 GBs so it would have been worst for me.
• avazhi 9mo ago
  Yeah, I'll be on Sequoia until it's unbearable (probably 4 more years), and then I'll either put Linux on that machine or I'll just buy a non-Mac. Been using Macs since Snow Leopard but between ios 26 or whatever it is and this shit, I'm done.
• maximgeorge 9mo ago
  [dead]
• aristofun 9mo ago
  It all started with a dumb move to replace input language icon flags with text. Apple keeps being a hardware company unfortunately. Their software is not nearly as good as it could and should be if they had real competition. Windows/linux is not a competition since they dropped bootcamp. Because that implies switching to a subpar hardware.
• supermatt 9mo ago
  It is comical how far apple has fallen with its UI overall. They were praised for their human interface guidelines, and yet they now break almost every rule. I appreciate things change but those guidelines haven’t even evolved they have just been ignored. Have they truly innovated in the last 10 years? What capitalist reason is for them to actually invest the manpower in the enshittification of the product experience? It feels counterintuitive. Maybe they are just too big to communicate internally?
• gurghet 9mo ago
  I'm one of those who instinctively click OUTSIDE the windows. I guess your instincts depend how long have you worked on a Mac.
• virde 9mo ago
  Might be the best problem TLI5'ing GIF I've seen :)
• w4rh4wk5 9mo ago
  There is no option to simply decrease the corner radius?!
• blackhaz 9mo ago
  If I would be running this company I would imagine a person, or the entire group of persons, who implemented this were nothing else but saboteurs sent by a competitor. I would fire the whole team immediately.
• pasloc 9mo ago
  I have not had any problems resizing. Honestly, I think my resizing got more precise with Tahoe. In earlier versions I had sometimes wrongly clicked for horizontal and vertical resizing. It's better now for me at least. And I do not get why people so upset with Tahoe. I really really love it.
• deviation 9mo ago
  Interesting, in the era of productivity tools I just realised I don't re-size windows anymore. I just use Swish or Spectacle.
• poolnoodle 9mo ago
  I've had the same struggle whenever I tried some Linux distro in my life. I don't know why but resizing windows is so fiddly.
• WhereIsTheTruth 9mo ago
  They want you to do the pinch in/out gesture /s
• neuroelectron 9mo ago
  Crazy how all the mainstream desktop OSes became shit all at the same time. If I was crazy enough, I might think that the government is giving us a message that we all need to move to Lennox because the state-mandated back doors are being co-opted by a foreign entity to spy on us.
• jonplackett 9mo ago
  I’ve noticed a gradual increase in my annoyance with technology over the last couple of years. A lot of things now just feel irritating and not-quite-right. Eg on my iPhone filling in a password sometime is kinda blanks the screen while I’m trying to fill the password in. My keyboard is absolutely terrible. Lots of other little annoyances I can’t remember right now. This window thing is another good example of just not enough thought being put into things.
  • morshu9001 9mo ago
    I swear Apple broke the iPhone keyboard permanently in like 2015. I don't know what it is, but I can't type reliably on any newer phone I've had, to the point where I call instead of texting. And the rare times I go back to use that iPhone 5 in my car for music, it's so easy to type, so I'm not just remembering wrongly.
    • jonplackett 9mo ago
      And those screens were TINY so how can it now be worse? I think one of the big issues is the autocorrect seems to make as many correctly typed words into random bullshit words as it does typos into correct words. So you feel like you’re walking on ice, just constantly monitoring what you last typed to make sure it didn’t make it into nonsense.
      • morshu9001 9mo ago
        The old autocorrect didn't seem any better though. I actually disabled it on both, so narrowed it down to purely a keyboard issue.
      • layer8 9mo ago
        The keyboard is still bad when you turn off autocorrect.
• janpmz 9mo ago
  And what to do about the slow mouse?
• SilverSlash 9mo ago
  I have a multitude of complaints about Tahoe, many of which others have already pointed out. One more thing that doesn't get mentioned as often but probably should is their new placement of the volume / brightness level UI which pops up when you change those two. It used to be in the middle of the screen and worked just fine. But then someone thoughts of putting it exactly where browser tabs usually are and I _constantly_ find myself in a situation where I change the volume and try to click on a tab that this UI is on top of. Then I need to move my mouse outside the UI otherwise it stays there, and wait for it to disappear before I can change tabs. It's infuriating.
• altern8 9mo ago
  I downgraded back to Sequoia after 1 day. I have no idea what Apple were thinking, this OS is basically unusable, and extremely ugly. I hope I won't somehow be forced to upgrade at some point. Apple needs to start thinking about their users again instead of shareholders.
• pilif 9mo ago
  As much as I like to hate on a new OS like the next person, I think it's worth pointing out we're probably not seeing the full picture here: When trying to reproduce the problem as shown in the article by resizing the Safari window currently displaying the article, the drag cursor changes shape at the visible border of the window, not the shadow and consequently, dragging works as expected. https://youtu.be/kNovjjvYP8g https://youtu.be/kNovjjvYP8g This might be an application- or driver specific issue, not necessarily a common Tahoe issue.
  • froddd 9mo ago
    This is absolutely true. The demo in the original article seems quite deceptive in that respect. Nobody would attempt to resize a window by launching their cursor at the corner with great speed as the demo shows. The resize pointer seems to show in exactly the right place, and allows for an extra hit area slightly outside the rounded corner — I don’t see any problem with that. As for the fact that one cannot resize from inside the window, it makes absolute sense for every other corner of the window, where the user would instead be clicking an icon or some other button (try the top right corner of the finder, where the search button sits). So, while I agree on the whole that Tahoe is a huge step backwards in terms of design, this seems like an odd gripe to point out, as it doesn’t in fact seem to be an issue at all. Edit: clarification
    • Sweepi 9mo ago
      > Nobody would attempt to resize a window by launching their cursor at the corner with great speed as the demo shows. ... great speed? Interpolating from the zoom, I would say its not fast at all.
      • froddd 9mo ago
        I’m referring to the demo in the original article. The mouse pointer moves rather rapidly onto the inside of the window. You can just about see the resize pointer flashing as the user does so. I don’t think I ever attempted to resize a window with such erratic mouse movements. Approaching the corner at reasonable speed shows the resize pointer where expected.
• shultays 9mo ago
  I think another problem is the tiny resize cursor, on windows (at least on mine) it is a lot bigger and more distinct compared to regular cursor and when your cursor changes to resize arrow it is more apparent. I don't really see/care where my mouse exactly is. If it is outside or inside the window. Once my cursor turns to resize cursor, I just start dragging.
• river_otter 9mo ago
  Great first blog post! The corner highlighting in the gifs and images was very clear. Also, I really like the formatting of how you inserted the gifs inline with border radius and shadow effect: I haven't seen blogs with your styling and it was refreshing.
• worksonmine 9mo ago
  What's going on at Apple? I don't own any Apple devices but the intuitive UI is their biggest selling point (even if a colleague had to explain that I have to drag the program to some window to install it). This seems like a very strange thing to release for a company that's supposed to care about the details.
• Kon5ole 9mo ago
  This complaint is made with a level of consideration and effort that Apple should aspire to when they make the OS itself. Bravo!
• trumbitta2 9mo ago
  I just want to add that designers are usually bullied by upper management into designing beautiful things that make upper managers look good with their friends. No matter how impractical those beautiful things are. Edit: Oh, and the "beauty" is in the eye of the managers.
• sgt 9mo ago
  I tried this resizing (also on Tahoe) and I can't reproduce this. It has a fairly well sized area around that corner in which I can click and drag to resize.
• alentred 9mo ago
  Modern interfaces are digging a bigger and bigger gap between UI and UX, while UI-UX is actually a balancing act. Let's face it, new glass UI is stunning - not for everyone's taste, like everything in art - but it has the Wow effect. Fresh look, transparency, new colors, wow! Same goes to many, not all, web sites, apps, etc. On the UX side, with some exceptions, it is a disaster, though. Why on Earth would I want an ill-readable text behind a semi-transparent panel? Windows that only use 90% of my OLED screen I paid for? Do I want every web app invent its own navigation? Not in my worst dreams. I like the new UIs, designers do an excellent job. Now, we must also bring back the UX people! Real user-oriented UX, not dark patterns UX that trick users to sign up for services they don't need. Its a pity, the latter actually killed the UX domain I think.
  • trinix912 9mo ago
    But is it really stunning? When we first got Aqua and Vista they were stunning because nobody had seen anything like that before. But Liquid Glass isn’t really new in that sense. It’s just some transparency with background blur which anyone who’s used, say, Windows 7, has already seen.
• mikkupikku 9mo ago
  The old linux/X11 method of meta+dragging to move or resize windows from anywhere in the window, not having to hunt for the edges of the window, is so obviously superior to Windows and MacOS it's downright silly. They both should have swallowed their pride and implemented this 30 years ago.
  • 6P58r3MXJSLi 9mo ago
    Easy move + resize solves this https://github.com/dmarcotte/easy-move-resize https://github.com/dmarcotte/easy-move-resize
  • hrnnnnnn 9mo ago
    I recommend altSnap to get this functionality on Windows. https://github.com/RamonUnch/AltSnap https://github.com/RamonUnch/AltSnap
    • url00 9mo ago
      I use this all day everyday. Love this, changed how it feels to work with GUIs for me.
  • jackwilsdon 9mo ago
    Moving windows like this is already built into macOS but it's hidden behind a flag for some reason: defaults write -g NSWindowShouldDragOnGesture -bool true You can then use Control+Command+Click to move windows from anywhere inside them. Sadly this doesn't provide resizing.
    • atommclain 9mo ago
      FWIW I have a note in my dot files that for this to take effect you need to logout and then log back in, not sure if this is (still?) the case.
      • oneeyedpigeon 9mo ago
        I think you still need to. I just tested and it doesn't take immediate effect. Which means I’ve now got to try to remember that keyboard shortcut and try it out the next time I restart...
• ainiro 9mo ago
  OSx updates have turned into a "lottery". Typically your machine goes down 50% in performance, and starts acting like a Commodore from 1982. They keep on asking me to upgrade to some new OS, I consistently keep on telling it to sodd off!
• piker 9mo ago
  A lot of the design changes over the last decade seem largely Jobs-ian marketing driven. The round corners and friendly surfaces were useful in bringing the mass market into computing. Now that computer use is ubiquitous, it will be interesting to see if we start migrating back to the way the original programmers envisioned things like always-visible scrollbars and obvious click targets. We've spent billions. Are UIs a lot better off than Windows 3.1?
• tomaskafka 9mo ago
  Apple is completely lost, exhibit #3281. Also, years after reporting, you still need to pause typing for one second after switching keyboard language via keyboard shortcut, otherwise the original language stays selected.
• dannersy 9mo ago
  I had a failing work laptop that had bad battery power and finally just said fine, give me a Mac. The battery and build quality is the only good thing I can say about it. I absolutely hate the OS, despite using MacOS in the past and felt only mildly inconvenienced. It is still amazing to me how unwieldy it is to make keyboard shortcuts, have tiling that isn't embarrassingly bad, and something that is visually consistent. Now I know most people aren't using this tool like I do and Linux has been historically bad at this, but lately, I'm not so sure. KDE and COSMIC seem to handle these cases flawlessly, and even GNOME, which is divisive in the DE discussion seems to get these things right. MacOS/Windows have officially crossed over to being more cumbersome rather than less than your bog standard Linux distro. Have you ever tried to do anything other than adjust volume for your sound settings on Windows 11? It's absurd. You can see the remnants of the Windows 10 attempt at simplifying it with a new flavor of 11 nonsense, and to really do anything meaningful you STILL end up with the old school Control Panel style settings window. A company worth billions couldn't come up with something better for decades. Tahoe is a similar stumble. How does one take these companies serious as a consumer product anymore if you're anything but a casual browser user?
• pete1302 9mo ago
  IMO: There should be 2 update channels, Security updates(MANDATORY), <ALL OTHER UPDATES>(no reason to be mandatory). end of discussion.
  • atommclain 9mo ago
    I was just looking into this today. I want to keep my computer updated with the cli tool softwareupdate. Before I was using the flag --all to apply any update, but then tried to change it to --recommended as I wanted to avoid any major macOS upgrades (ie Tahoe). But Tahoe is listed as a recommended upgrade. Now I call it with --required which only applies critical and security updates. Then I call it again with --safari-only, and one more time with --list to see what remaining updates are available. Frustrating (but sadly not surprising) there isn't a way to apply all available updates excluding major OS updates.
• ht-syseng 9mo ago
  This app I found to fix the problem on my system: https://mikkelmalmberg.com/moves https://mikkelmalmberg.com/moves
• wt__ 9mo ago
  It's not just that I haven't upgraded my Mac, but also I'm actively avoiding buying a new or refurbished one until (if) they fix all this stuff, because there will be no way to downgrade to an earlier version…
  • herpdyderp 9mo ago
    I haven’t tried it in many a year but I’m fairly certain that if you have the installer, you can downgrade to any version that runs on your computer.
  • alden5 9mo ago
    on a mac you can downgrade freely if the hardware supported it at one point, isn’t like all their other hardware which prevents you from downgrading, all arm mac’s can downgrade to sequoia
    • wt__ 9mo ago
      Hmm - that's a point. Thanks.
• dceddia 9mo ago
  That looks so ridiculous that it has me wondering how hard of a technical change it would’ve been to change that drag target, and if they just punted on it.
• irusensei 9mo ago
  I've upgraded because I wanted to have access to the latest OS features but I got to admit I'm not a fan of the UI either. I have an M3 Max with 128GB and sometimes my computer UI feels sluggish. What is even going on? My biggest beef is there seems to be a lot of bugs in Safari. If I open Discord and switch tabs a few minutes later the tab is dead and a refresh doesn't work you need to retype the discord address again on the tab window. On a full screen safari If I click on the share button by accident and don't pick any of the options the address bar for that tab becomes uneditable. In IOS long pressing a video would show options such as opening on a new tab or downloading the file. Now for certain websites the options show for a split second before it switches to the full screen player. There are many other annoying bugs but those are the most annoying ones. BTW it's also amusing how not only iCloud doesn't flag a false Apple billing phishing message as junk but Apple """Inteligence""" will highlight it as priority. https://imgur.com/a/HaHxsUR https://imgur.com/a/HaHxsUR
  • AlexandrB 9mo ago
    > If I open Discord and switch tabs a few minutes later the tab is dead and a refresh doesn't work you need to retype the discord address again on the tab window. I get this on iOS26 all the time and it's extremely annoying since I don't always have the correct URL. Can't make heads or tails of what triggers it (I don't use Discord). Safari 26 slowly leaks something on older macOS releases and opening new tabs or typing into the address bar becomes unbearably slow after a while[1]. The best solution is to downgrade to Safari 18.6 - though this seems to only work on Intel Macs. Basically a total mess. I don't want to upgrade my MacBook to 26, but Apple seems to be embracing some dark patterns in their update dialog and I'm worried I'm going to accidentally upgrade and enter a world of pain one day. [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1nm534e/sluggish_safari_26_when_opening_new_tabs_or/ https://old.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1nm534e/sluggish_saf...
  • yuters 9mo ago
    They've made Tahoe available on some older Intel hardware, and in my case it rendered my MacBook Pro barely usable. Obvious planned obsolescence in this case convinced me to fully jump ship.
• sevkih 9mo ago
  See: [shipping the org chart](https://betterthanrandom.substack.com/p/shipping-the-org-chart https://betterthanrandom.substack.com/p/shipping-the-org-cha...)
• weagle05 9mo ago
  I laughed for a solid 5 minutes at the video of grabbing a plate.
• dhbradshaw 9mo ago
  Often on HN the comments are a better read than the original article. This time the article is so good -- clear, funny, succinct, accurate -- that it's a better read than the comments.
• aalert 9mo ago
  First failing autocorrect on iOS, now this... Love how it is solved in Omarchy Linux - Super Key + Right Mouse Button anywhere on the window.
• oneeyedpigeon 9mo ago
  Something that baffles me about macOS: the pointer bug. I’ve been aware of this for ages—as far as I can recall, since Snow Leopard; maybe others have insight—and it still hasn't been fixed. Simply put: the pointer doesn't always switch context properly. So, you'll have it hovered over a resize control and it will refuse to change from the default pointer. Or you'll be working, and suddenly notice the pointer is a 'drag' one, even though nothing's being dragged and nothing draggable is active. I would love anyone with any knowledge, especially an (ex-)insider, to shed light on this issue.
  • fluoridation 9mo ago
    This is Windows, but it might shed some light on the situation. I have a Qt application that I made, and occasionally when I switch from one window to another, the cursor doesn't switch from resize to normal, or vice versa, until I move the mouse. The precise effect is consistent, but difficult to describe, hence why the "sometimes". I think it happens because I'm not handling the window switch event as one that may require re-evaluating the cursor shape.
    • oneeyedpigeon 9mo ago
      Absolutely, I've always suspected that it's something to do with that. There's also something about the underlying tech that makes the macOS pointer behave 'more independently' of the rest of the UI, like it's running in a separate thread? I've definitely noticed scenarios in the past that would 'block' the pointer from updating (even its position) on Windows, that wouldn't on Mac. So maybe the pointer is not as tightly-coupled to the underlying UI components, so some scenarios can cause them to briefly lose track of each other?
• mark_l_watson 9mo ago
  Well prepared article, and the window resizing pisses me off also! For practical reasons I am stuck inside Apple’s macOS garden, but I wanted to share a few things that at least make me feel content using macOS: First, I have at least two VPS systems so via mosh/ssh/tmux I always have Linux dev environments, the ability to use throwaway VPS for sandboxing, etc. Second, when actually working on macOS I stick with tools that make me happy: Emacs and terminal windows, a uv-based Python enviroment and tuned-up Common Lisp, Haskel, and Clojure dev environments. Anyway, I am just sharing my ‘macOS therapy’ - hope it helps someone here.
• meken 9mo ago
  Wait I literally thought the ChatGPT desktop app has been broken for months (both dragging and resizing the window has been super inconsistent). Could it be that I just need to drag the window outside of the pane..?
• whywhywhywhy 9mo ago
  I know most wont care but to me the biggest red flag was when they changed the cursor stem to be like the windows cursor stem, it's angled geometrically correct but when you actually stare at it then it looks wonky and wrong. It's one of those things an amateur designer would assume is correct because theoretically it is but a talented designer knows the angle has to be off to feel correct.
  • hoherd 9mo ago
    It looks wrong because it isn't symmetrical. If you go into System Settings -> Accessibility -> Display increase your pointer size, screenshot it, and rotate it, you can see that it's not symmetrical. It looks wonky because it is wonky.
• wolvoleo 9mo ago
  Good point. I'm not on Mac anymore but this would really tick me off too. In fact I am not on Mac anymore because with every release there were more features I didn't use (because they only work within the Apple ecosystem) and more and more things that ticked me off. Eventually I decided it wasn't for me anymore, after being on the platform for more than 15 years. Oh well. I am very happy on KDE now.
• julienreszka 9mo ago
  I just tested and didn't have any issue.
• thomasdd 9mo ago
  MacOS 26 is an UI-disaster!
• thomasdd 9mo ago
  MacOS 26 is an UI disaster!
  • grougnax 9mo ago
    I second this. The design team at Apple must rework their copy as soon as possible.
• digitalsushi 9mo ago
  i am positive there's a bug in tahoe where the login screen passsword text input is waiting for something to settle in the background, either with my weird unicomp keyboard, a remap i do, or even the external monitors. my password is always incorrect unless i count to about 20 or 30 seconds. once i have 'redocked' for the day, unlocking it subsequently doesnt have the requirement. but every dock insertion, it comes back.
  • oneeyedpigeon 9mo ago
    Yes! It takes a LONG time for my bluetooth keyboard to connect, after the login screen is shown.
• user3939382 9mo ago
  I’ve been an Apple user since before there was such thing as Mac, OS X or macOS has been my daily driver for over 20 years. The SIP bullshit, buried dark pattern allow buttons to download programs. The totally out of control background processes and snooping and remote online checks for every program execution nanny state bullshit. I’m 100% done with iOS macOS all of it. New Desktop is FreeBSD+MATE. Config is a pain initially but idc.
• datadrivenangel 9mo ago
  The share buttons on iOS seem to fail like 15% of the time as well. Randomly.
• alistairSH 9mo ago
  Ugh, this caught me as well. And it's not just Tahoe. The various iOS/WatchOS updates from the fall are all broken in one way or another. For example, WatchOS's music app can't play more than 2-3 songs from a downloaded playlist without crashing. The WatchOS Outlook app won't launch (which also means the watch face complication is broken). iOS Safari's search bar/address bar periodically freezes after you enter a search term. If you click the bar, the search term disappears, so you have re-type it.
• otikik 9mo ago
  I have realized that I only need 3 window sizes: maximized, minimized, or half-of-the-screen vertically. Rectangle [1] is a great way to get key combinations for resizing and moving my windows around. It works well across multiple monitors and it's free. I didn't even notice this issue, but I see how it could be problematic for people. https://rectangleapp.com/ https://rectangleapp.com/
• jbverschoor 9mo ago
  I'm surprised you can even see the border of each window lol
• thiht 9mo ago
  The little video seems really weird to me, the author is clearly trying to resize outside of the border?? I just tried it myself and the resize zone feels more than reasonable: https://imgur.com/iip8DIL https://imgur.com/iip8DIL there's like 5mm on each side of the actual border to grab and resize!
• Tyr42 9mo ago
  I tried to resize my already mostly fullscreen window now, and I cant, as it always triggers the hot corner for notes. I guess I have to have full sized windows then.
• WaltPurvis 9mo ago
  I've noticed the occasional momentary failure to resize a window, and this probably explains it, but it's worth noting that the cursor changes to a "resize arrows" cursor when it enters the resizing zone, so as long as I'm paying attention I know exactly when I can or can't click and drag to resize. It is preposterous that much of the zone actually lies outside of the visible bounds of the window.
• fifticon 9mo ago
  Well, moving/dragging windows on windows 11 (earlier?) is no picnic either, with the scrollbar nazis having decided, that windows title bars must be the next to die. Apparently this is all intentional, and app developers are encouraged to leave tiny drag-concentration-camp areas somewhere in what used to be the titlebar, which today's presumably incredibly IT savvy users are then expected to decode with no problems whatsoever. Well paint me green and call me a dinosaur, because to me it looks like each app chooses to interpret those 'guidelines' in its own way, and often in a way I fail to decode reliably. In my head, I can hear GPT laugh hysterically, while it explains to me that I can just continue to use alt-SPACE to bring up the MOVE system menu, if I am overwhelmed, while it gleefully assures me that MSFT has 'no current plans to get rid of that feature' (which we know is Kremlin-speak for 'the system menu is NEXT brother'.
  • fifticon 9mo ago
    Funnily, all this weirdness was already solved with the original titlebars, which did not try to be both a drag handle and a menu. Apparently, only peasants use windows that are not maximised. Which reminds me, it has now been 2 years or more since microsoft turned keyboard-layout-switching from a standard feature into a standard bug :-/.
  • cornedor 9mo ago
    To make this easier in MacOS: defaults write -g NSWindowShouldDragOnGesture -bool true This allows you to drag windows around by grabbing the window anywhere you want while holding ctrl + cmd.
  • fifticon 9mo ago
    And also, it reminds me of minimalist design furniture design, where e.g. handles are hidden, and you just press a secret area to toggle e.g. a cabinet door open. I wish we could take all designers and architects, and people who encourage them, who wants to do such designs, and lock them inside TESLAs which we then push from a bridge into cold water, and then watch them try to exit those same TESLAs from under the water. If it's good design, it should be be a problem. MUHAHHA.
• nkotov 9mo ago
  I wonder if it's because there's a hidden agenda of introducing a touch friendly interface where pixel perfection doesn't matter. Maybe the rumors are true about a touchscreen MacBook.
  • josh_p 9mo ago
    Even if this is true, it doesn't justify breaking the interface for keyboard/mouse users. They're big enough to handle both cases.
• petterroea 9mo ago
  The hand grabbing the plate made me audibly laugh
• gyoridavid 9mo ago
  I'm so glad I'm still on sequoia!
• adolph 9mo ago
  I can't remember the last time I resized a window. Does everyone not already install Magnet or an alternative first-thing to emulate the impeccable DWM? https://dwm.suckless.org/ https://dwm.suckless.org/
• maximgeorge 9mo ago
  [dead]
• NoSalt 9mo ago
  IMHO, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard was the pinnacle of Mac OS X. When I "upgraded" to 10.7, they lost me. It was then that I switched to Linux full time, and I haven't looked back. Every now and then I do pull out my Wallstreet with Mac OS 9 on it so I can relive the heyday of old school computing.
• whompyjaw 9mo ago
  It makes me really happy when companies continue to fuck up and enshitify their software because it adds more ppl to the Linux/FOSS evosystem. I have a MBP and I love it dearly (the hardware, macOS is fine), but Apple has been disappointing me with each software update on macOS and iOS. The quality of their software is degrading so badly. I know Asahi linux is around, but Im at the point ill just go full Framework and make my ecosystem Linux based (with GrapheneOS on my nee pixel). Just so tired of companies doing such a bad job with billions and billions of dollars. It’s truly unbelievable.
• hbn 9mo ago
  It's bad but not as bad as Windows 11. I swear I have a 2x2 pixel grid on my 4k monitor where I can grab the window resize handle, and it doesn't align to where the window's actual corner is at all. Even worse: because the min/max/close buttons are all shunted into the top right corner, if you're trying to resize from the top right and you miss, you close the window.
• progforlyfe 9mo ago
  Apple does not want you to resize windows. They want to set the window size for you so don't need to re-adjust it. Apple always knows what's best for the customer.
• dent9 9mo ago
  This is a fake issue. You should just be using window snapping which finally is included directly in the os
• capital_guy 9mo ago
  I usually find these apple design nitpick articles tiresome but the gif of the guy grabbing at the plate was hilarious and also accurate about user expectations
• multiplegeorges 9mo ago
  Hopefully getting a true UX practitioner in as Head of Design will help avoid these incredibly obvious usability issues. Ref: https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job
• seanparsons 9mo ago
  Flipping things around as I see it as a desktop Linux user: "OMG this one thing doesn't work in macOS, looks like 2026 wont be the year of the macOS desktop!"
• nymalt 9mo ago
  Not upgrading my personal iphone/macbook and I wish I didn’t upgrade my work iphone/macbook (unfortunately I had to) For the first time in 15 years I am considering to not buy apple as my next phone/laptop regardless of the specs.
• andrei_says_ 9mo ago
  What does it take for a megacorp to admit a mistake and correct it??? I think it all boils down to this one question. It’s not complicated.
• andrei_says_ 9mo ago
  Let’s also not forget the introduction of unnecessary and confusing icons: https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/ https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/
• jamescontrol 9mo ago
  This is why I’m always wait as long as possible to update major versions, seems like there is fuckups big and small in every single major macOS update.
• vesche 9mo ago
  Been using this for a few years, works like a charm: https://rectangleapp.com/ https://rectangleapp.com/
  • marcofiset 9mo ago
    Yeah, I don't even remember the last time I resized a window by hand.
• Wojtkie 9mo ago
  I think it is really telling of the quality of the UI when the best way to use it is after enabling a bunch of accessibility settings. I found the Liquid Glass color background effect make some websites unusable on Safari due to the background becoming the same color as the text.
• aanet 9mo ago
  That pic/movie of trying to grab the corner(?!) of the plate full of food... priceless
• MaysonL 9mo ago
  If you pay attention to the cursor, instead of aiming at the corner of the window, the UI gives you great feedback of where you should click: when the cursor changes to 2 arrowheads pointing diagonally or orthagonally to the window, resizing is available. Why aim for inside the window? I do think the expanded corner radius of Tahoe sucks badly.
• jesse_dot_id 9mo ago
  Great article. I put a Teams meeting on my second monitor. I put Teams on my first monitor. I minimize Teams to look at something in a browser on the first monitor. The Teams meeting on the second monitor minimizes, too. Mac window management UX is dogshit in a lot of different ways. There are a lot of problems that I either have to just deal with, or try to find some third party app to solve in lieu of Apple actually caring about UX again.
  • leptons 9mo ago
    >Apple actually caring about UX again I doubt Apple ever really cared about UX. It took Apple 24 years after Microsoft's Windows 2.0 introduced resizing a window from any edge, for Apple to finally implement it in MacOS Lion in 2011. Apple UX is ridiculous. If they cared about UX, they'd throw out their "HIG", hire some competent people, and start over. Why is the first item on the first menu of every software program "About this software"? Is it because the most frequently used thing by every user is to know what version of the software they are running? Apple specified this in their "HIG" long ago and it never changed, and it's been stuck there ever since. And it's completely stupid. MS Windows applications typically have "About this software" as the last menu item on the last menu, which is objectively a far better place for it than the first thing on the first menu, since it is rarely needed when using an application.
    • msephton 9mo ago
      I'd say they have plenty of competent people, the problem is management and process.
• sebnukem2 9mo ago
  The idiotic rounded corners of Tahoe are so ugly I just wish I didn't upgrade. I hope Apple will make the radius configurable.
• AaryanM23 9mo ago
  use rectangle, it's OP
• elzbardico 9mo ago
  Weird. I have no such trouble.
• miladyincontrol 9mo ago
  Is this a monitor resolution or custom HiDPI scaling issue or something? I genuinely do not have their issue with resizing windows, nor do my tolerances seem anything as odd as they claim to have. Seems like most the attention this is getting is people wanting to grave dance Apple at any chance given.
• rtaylorgarlock 9mo ago
  The OS which requires you to click in order to update also makes it, uh, challenging to resize windows. Sublime. A tiling manager would never.
• bluenose69 9mo ago
  The cursor changes when you get to resizing corners and edges, so I don't suffer from the problem pointed out in the original article. However, I do find something annoying: sometimes when I'm resizing (or maybe dragging) a window, it gets expanded to fill the whole screen. I think that kind of behaviour ought to be controlled by the green dot at the top-left of windows, not by some particular mouse movements. There was a time when the changes to the mac UI were quite good, or at least not annoying. Sometimes it seems as though they are changing stuff just to change stuff.
  • msephton 9mo ago
    Is this the fairly new window tiling option? Do you have it enabled?
• kcplate 9mo ago
  This is the first UX issue I have seen since moving to MacOS 26 that I have been able to reliably recreate and haven’t been able to just attribute to a subjective opinion. I never knew about before this post mainly because any window resizing I do is via rectangle. It’s definitely a flaw they need to address.
• cdrnsf 9mo ago
  It's not unusable, but this whole update cycle hasn't offered much in the way of improvements. It's basically a bad UI, Safari updates (which shouldn't be coupled to the OS), a phone app and additions to system apps I don't touch.
• notShabu 9mo ago
  This is the sort of thing that apple (used to?) take pride in doing well. e.g. new hires in orientation would be asked if there was anything 'special' about their offer letter and it was a thicker more premium kind of paper. Emphasizing the magical 'feel' that differentiated apple products.
• nrvn 9mo ago
  The whole article is tongue in cheek. And I struggle to find any comment here that would actually verify and confirm (or not) the results of the author. So here I am, random hacker news links verifier. Scrolling to the image below "So, for example, grabbing it here does not work:" text and reproducing the issue with a small caveat: just moving cursor 1 (ONE) pixel right turns the cursor into the "diagonal resizing mode" cursor. Overall, the resizing area of the window corner is comfortably bigger than the author draws. Dragging empty space outside the rounded corner is weird but what isn't in today's user interface designs? All in all have never experienced difficulties resizing windows in macos. Miss the times of windows 95/98 and macos 9 (as some other commenters here) when OS UI was designed by humans and for humans and everything was explicitly clear including the area for window resizing.
  • spinningarrow 9mo ago
    I agree with this. I was curious and tried it out just now - there's a good part of the inside corner that is draggable and a decent amount outside as well. The cursor changes to indicate resizability make it quite difficult for me to make a mistake here.
• LevkaDev 9mo ago
  I've spent months building a proper window manager for macOS, and the fundamental problem isn't the UI — it's that macOS has no proper window management API. Third-party apps have to use the Accessibility API, which was designed for screen readers, not window manipulation. Some windows simply refuse to be resized below certain thresholds, and there's no way to query the minimum size in advance. You request 500px width, get 800px back, no error. The real question is: will Apple ever provide a proper public API, or will this remain a cat-and-mouse game with Accessibility permissions?
• teekert 9mo ago
  Omg, I though I could only just grab that super tiny edge. Turns out can grab the "air" around it. Thanks for the heads up, makes life a lot easier!
• grougnax 9mo ago
  This is clearly an issue, and it isn't even the biggest issue on macOS Tahoe UI.
• michelb 9mo ago
  Again it’s becoming painfully clear that people at Apple do not use their own systems in any meaningful way.
• NoPicklez 9mo ago
  These are the sorts of small details that I remember Apple being known for and putting a lot of thought into, often times a little obsessive. Not to say this isn't the case anymore but
• lupinglade 9mo ago
  Tahoe’s UI is a disaster. Giant buggy controls. Sad to see where macOS has ended up. Apple used to have so much attention to detail in their UI design - now it looks like it’s “anything goes”.