6 ms·

Fix macOS 26 (Tahoe) exaggerated rounded corners

56 points by guessmyname 9mo ago

altairprime 9mo ago
The title is misleading: this only modifies the desktop rounded corners, not the app window corners (heavily discussed recently at HN and elsewhere). The blog post about this is slightly interesting, but mostly feels like a candidate’s position paper on rounded corners, rather than an newsworthy or technical explanation: https://medium.com/@makalin/reclaiming-the-screen-a-developers-fix-for-macos-26-s-corners-a28844a0974d https://medium.com/@makalin/reclaiming-the-screen-a-develope... The core innovation is the ctx.fill calls here: https://github.com/makalin/CornerFix/blob/main/Sources/CornerCapsView.swift https://github.com/makalin/CornerFix/blob/main/Sources/Corne...
- frizlab 9mo ago
  I still have no idea what this does. What on earth are the desktop rounded corners?
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  - jaffa2 9mo ago
    Macs have rounded corners on the desktop. I.e 4 corners. It looked awesome in the CRT days because of the shape of them. These days on flat lcd screens the geometry is so good that they aren’t required to provide the same function as in CRT days but some people still like the look. I do, but i dont run extra software if i can help it especially for an aesthetic change. I used a tool like this is the past but there were incompatibility’s.
    - sho_hn 9mo ago
      I'm super confused. My Macbook desktop has no rounded corners. Both the menu bar and content against the bottom edge are sharp-cornered. Is this only for external screens?
      - brycewray 9mo ago
        > I'm super confused. My Macbook desktop has no rounded corners. Both the menu bar and content against the bottom edge are sharp-cornered. Is this only for external screens? Running an Apple Studio Display here, and no rounded corners at any edges. So, just for non-Apple monitors?
        duskwuff 9mo ago
        Not the case with a third-party display either.
        ksidisnidjsdj 9mo ago
        Not even that. I have both Apple and non-Apple monitors, and my Mac only rounds the top edges on the MacBook’s screen, as intended. Not sure what this tool’s function is supposed to be, given that the rounded corners only appear on screens that are actually rounded. Why would you want to straighten that out on a physically-rounded screen?
        frizlab 9mo ago
        It’s more than that, the screen is rounded at the hardware level, there are no pixels to show anything here. What the OP software is supposed to “fix” CANNOT be fixed!
        ksidisnidjsdj 9mo ago
        [dead]
        Mister_Snuggles 9mo ago
        Running two Lenovo ThinkVision displays off of my work MacBook Pro. On the MBP built-in display, the upper-left and upper-right corners are rounded. I believe this is due to the shape of the display. The bottom corners are not rounded. On the external displays, the corners are all square.
      - carlosjobim 9mo ago
  - Etheryte 9mo ago
    Modern MacBooks models have rounded corners at the top right and top left corners of the screen, see [0]. The bottom corners don't do this and external displays don't do this. This is a stylistic choice to match the curvature of the laptop's edge. If you move your mouse along that corner it doesn't disappear behind the curve, it follows the curve. [0] https://www.apple.com/v/macbook-air/x/images/overview/mac-plus-iphone/mac_iphone__n2863l0ne0q6_large_2x.jpg https://www.apple.com/v/macbook-air/x/images/overview/mac-pl...
    - frizlab 9mo ago
      I really think* the rounded corners on top-left and top-right of the MacBook Pros are hardware. There is no software in the world that can “fix” that… * Try to move space on such a device, the non-rounded desktop appears…
      - deleted 9mo ago
        [deleted]
- davebranton 9mo ago
  The linked article on medium was also written by AI, which immediately disqualifies it from being interesting or useful. "And the worst part? Apple didn’t provide a switch to turn it off." Now see, this is AI. A normal human being would write, "Apple didn't even provide any way to switch off this non-feature" - for example. AI always, for reasons that are likely neither interesting nor especially illuminating, writes like this. Unnecessary and stupid stylistic choices everywhere. Look, if you cannot be bothered to write something, why on God's Good Earth would anyone bother to read it?
  - locao 9mo ago
    I'm not saying you're wrong about this article being AI-written, but I know people who write like this, and I hate it.
    - JoshTriplett 9mo ago
      Exactly. AI wrote this way because humans wrote this way. Just as humans used em-dashes long before AI was a thing.
  - Finnucane 9mo ago
    If AI does this, it's because it's ingested the last 25 years of bad internet headlines. Written allegedly by humans.
  - teekert 9mo ago
    And to be honest? It’s really annoying indeed.
    - throw5t432s3r 9mo ago
      I like it. A lot of times I just skim, so sentences like this let me know when to pay more attention to some point the author is trying to make.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
- mvdtnz 9mo ago
  > There’s also a consistency problem. If you use multiple monitors or virtual machines, the mismatch between macOS’s new roundness and other systems’ sharper corners creates visual friction. Once you notice it, you can’t unsee it. I guess it's a good thing I never noticed it then? Of all the very real problems with Tahoe this one would never have even registered with me.
- jrmg 9mo ago
  And the screenshot in the blog post is of a window with rounded corners!
cweagans 9mo ago
Your GitHub repo and the associated medium article do a great job of describing the problem and the solution that you settled on. I don’t understand why you didn’t include a screenshot of what this looks like though. The suitability of your tool depends on what it looks like. Please, always include screenshots in open source projects that are aesthetic in nature.
- Jaxan 9mo ago
  Yeah, I am also confused they didn’t include a screenshot (or photo in this case). It’s the first thing you’ll want to see for such a project.
- mrkpdl 9mo ago
  I came to say the same thing, a screenshot is all I want to see before diving deeper.
- irq 9mo ago
  Thank you for posting this. It never ceases to amaze me how many open source GUI projects forget screenshots.
- IshKebab 9mo ago
  I assume it doesn't look very good if they didn't want to show it off.
vishnuharidas 9mo ago
A screenshot is the bare minimum for things like this.
puppycodes 9mo ago
Thank you for the work but if you include an image of the problem why would you not include an image of the solution?
msephton 9mo ago
I'm assuming it wasn't the creator that posted this here, and I'm also assuming that the OP has managed to get this working. So @guessmyname can you please post a screenshot of the "fix" in use?
cesaref 9mo ago
This has reminded me that in System 7, the code for the window was a system resource (resource forks contained all sorts of code, icons, text dictionaries etc). Anyhow, if you dropped an updated window resource into your system with the correct resource id, you could change this default behaviour. A friend of mine wrote a round window for a clock app, and made a copy with resedit in the system, and a reboot later, all windows were round. It was a very flexible and hackable system, very fragile, and no security whatsoever, but lots of fun!
ykl 9mo ago
I think this project is best described by one of my favorite quotes from Top Gear: “an ingenious solution to a problem that should never have existed in the first place”.
- ksidisnidjsdj 9mo ago
  [dead]
- thehamkercat 9mo ago
  The problem does exist, but the tool is solving none of it
  - ksidisnidjsdj 9mo ago
    [dead]
Mogzol 9mo ago
I have no idea what this is fixing. > Note: This does not change the rounded corners of individual app windows. It only restores the straight silhouette at the edges of your display. My display does not have rounded corners. I am on macOS Tahoe using external monitors. I know that newer macbooks have rounded display corners, but those are rounded at the hardware level afaik, those corner pixels simply don't exist. And besides that, the medium article linked in the repo specifically talks about external monitors. Does anyone have an example of what this program is actually meant to fix? EDIT: I downloaded and compiled it myself to see. All it does is add a black border around your whole screen. Here is a screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/7XWAwxz.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/7XWAwxz.jpeg Again, I don't have rounded corners on my display in the first place, but if I did I suppose this would hide them. At the cost of losing the whole edge of my display, lol. I don't see why anyone would actually use this, especially since it cuts off half the menu bar.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- ksidisnidjsdj 9mo ago
  Okay so this is not just useless but actually detrimental to the UX. Oh, boy. I wouldn’t be surprised if the author vibe-coded this, seeing as the article they reference was very much entirely written by AI.
- tefkah 9mo ago
  thank you for actually including a fricking screenshot!
- wink 9mo ago
  I had not noticed the rounded corner in the edge of my screen until now because I use a dark background and usually have some window maximized. This is a screenshot without this tool: https://stuff.art-core.org/2026/osx_corner.png https://stuff.art-core.org/2026/osx_corner.png This screenshot shows the bottom right corner of my left monitor and a small slice of my right monitor. The light thing is the rounded corner of my browser window.
yokoprime 9mo ago
A screenshot of the «after» would clear up a lot of confusion

56 points by guessmyname 9mo ago

The title is misleading: this only modifies the desktop rounded corners, not the app window corners (heavily discussed recently at HN and elsewhere). The blog post about this is slightly interesting, but mostly feels like a candidate’s position paper on rounded corners, rather than an newsworthy or technical explanation: https://medium.com/@makalin/reclaiming-the-screen-a-developers-fix-for-macos-26-s-corners-a28844a0974d https://medium.com/@makalin/reclaiming-the-screen-a-develope... The core innovation is the ctx.fill calls here: https://github.com/makalin/CornerFix/blob/main/Sources/CornerCapsView.swift https://github.com/makalin/CornerFix/blob/main/Sources/Corne...

frizlab 9mo ago
I still have no idea what this does. What on earth are the desktop rounded corners?
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- jaffa2 9mo ago
  Macs have rounded corners on the desktop. I.e 4 corners. It looked awesome in the CRT days because of the shape of them. These days on flat lcd screens the geometry is so good that they aren’t required to provide the same function as in CRT days but some people still like the look. I do, but i dont run extra software if i can help it especially for an aesthetic change. I used a tool like this is the past but there were incompatibility’s.
  - sho_hn 9mo ago
    I'm super confused. My Macbook desktop has no rounded corners. Both the menu bar and content against the bottom edge are sharp-cornered. Is this only for external screens?
    - brycewray 9mo ago
      > I'm super confused. My Macbook desktop has no rounded corners. Both the menu bar and content against the bottom edge are sharp-cornered. Is this only for external screens? Running an Apple Studio Display here, and no rounded corners at any edges. So, just for non-Apple monitors?
      - duskwuff 9mo ago
        Not the case with a third-party display either.
      - ksidisnidjsdj 9mo ago
        Not even that. I have both Apple and non-Apple monitors, and my Mac only rounds the top edges on the MacBook’s screen, as intended. Not sure what this tool’s function is supposed to be, given that the rounded corners only appear on screens that are actually rounded. Why would you want to straighten that out on a physically-rounded screen?
        frizlab 9mo ago
        It’s more than that, the screen is rounded at the hardware level, there are no pixels to show anything here. What the OP software is supposed to “fix” CANNOT be fixed!
        ksidisnidjsdj 9mo ago
        [dead]
      - Mister_Snuggles 9mo ago
        Running two Lenovo ThinkVision displays off of my work MacBook Pro. On the MBP built-in display, the upper-left and upper-right corners are rounded. I believe this is due to the shape of the display. The bottom corners are not rounded. On the external displays, the corners are all square.
    - carlosjobim 9mo ago
- Etheryte 9mo ago
  Modern MacBooks models have rounded corners at the top right and top left corners of the screen, see [0]. The bottom corners don't do this and external displays don't do this. This is a stylistic choice to match the curvature of the laptop's edge. If you move your mouse along that corner it doesn't disappear behind the curve, it follows the curve. [0] https://www.apple.com/v/macbook-air/x/images/overview/mac-plus-iphone/mac_iphone__n2863l0ne0q6_large_2x.jpg https://www.apple.com/v/macbook-air/x/images/overview/mac-pl...
  - frizlab 9mo ago
    I really think* the rounded corners on top-left and top-right of the MacBook Pros are hardware. There is no software in the world that can “fix” that… * Try to move space on such a device, the non-rounded desktop appears…
    - deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
davebranton 9mo ago
The linked article on medium was also written by AI, which immediately disqualifies it from being interesting or useful. "And the worst part? Apple didn’t provide a switch to turn it off." Now see, this is AI. A normal human being would write, "Apple didn't even provide any way to switch off this non-feature" - for example. AI always, for reasons that are likely neither interesting nor especially illuminating, writes like this. Unnecessary and stupid stylistic choices everywhere. Look, if you cannot be bothered to write something, why on God's Good Earth would anyone bother to read it?
- locao 9mo ago
  I'm not saying you're wrong about this article being AI-written, but I know people who write like this, and I hate it.
  - JoshTriplett 9mo ago
    Exactly. AI wrote this way because humans wrote this way. Just as humans used em-dashes long before AI was a thing.
- Finnucane 9mo ago
  If AI does this, it's because it's ingested the last 25 years of bad internet headlines. Written allegedly by humans.
- teekert 9mo ago
  And to be honest? It’s really annoying indeed.
  - throw5t432s3r 9mo ago
    I like it. A lot of times I just skim, so sentences like this let me know when to pay more attention to some point the author is trying to make.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
mvdtnz 9mo ago
> There’s also a consistency problem. If you use multiple monitors or virtual machines, the mismatch between macOS’s new roundness and other systems’ sharper corners creates visual friction. Once you notice it, you can’t unsee it. I guess it's a good thing I never noticed it then? Of all the very real problems with Tahoe this one would never have even registered with me.
jrmg 9mo ago
And the screenshot in the blog post is of a window with rounded corners!

cweagans 9mo ago

Your GitHub repo and the associated medium article do a great job of describing the problem and the solution that you settled on. I don’t understand why you didn’t include a screenshot of what this looks like though. The suitability of your tool depends on what it looks like. Please, always include screenshots in open source projects that are aesthetic in nature.

Jaxan 9mo ago
Yeah, I am also confused they didn’t include a screenshot (or photo in this case). It’s the first thing you’ll want to see for such a project.
mrkpdl 9mo ago
I came to say the same thing, a screenshot is all I want to see before diving deeper.
irq 9mo ago
Thank you for posting this. It never ceases to amaze me how many open source GUI projects forget screenshots.
IshKebab 9mo ago
I assume it doesn't look very good if they didn't want to show it off.

vishnuharidas 9mo ago

A screenshot is the bare minimum for things like this.

puppycodes 9mo ago

Thank you for the work but if you include an image of the problem why would you not include an image of the solution?

msephton 9mo ago

I'm assuming it wasn't the creator that posted this here, and I'm also assuming that the OP has managed to get this working. So @guessmyname can you please post a screenshot of the "fix" in use?

cesaref 9mo ago

This has reminded me that in System 7, the code for the window was a system resource (resource forks contained all sorts of code, icons, text dictionaries etc). Anyhow, if you dropped an updated window resource into your system with the correct resource id, you could change this default behaviour. A friend of mine wrote a round window for a clock app, and made a copy with resedit in the system, and a reboot later, all windows were round. It was a very flexible and hackable system, very fragile, and no security whatsoever, but lots of fun!

ykl 9mo ago

I think this project is best described by one of my favorite quotes from Top Gear: “an ingenious solution to a problem that should never have existed in the first place”.

ksidisnidjsdj 9mo ago
[dead]
thehamkercat 9mo ago
The problem does exist, but the tool is solving none of it
- ksidisnidjsdj 9mo ago
  [dead]

Mogzol 9mo ago

I have no idea what this is fixing. > Note: This does not change the rounded corners of individual app windows. It only restores the straight silhouette at the edges of your display. My display does not have rounded corners. I am on macOS Tahoe using external monitors. I know that newer macbooks have rounded display corners, but those are rounded at the hardware level afaik, those corner pixels simply don't exist. And besides that, the medium article linked in the repo specifically talks about external monitors. Does anyone have an example of what this program is actually meant to fix? EDIT: I downloaded and compiled it myself to see. All it does is add a black border around your whole screen. Here is a screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/7XWAwxz.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/7XWAwxz.jpeg Again, I don't have rounded corners on my display in the first place, but if I did I suppose this would hide them. At the cost of losing the whole edge of my display, lol. I don't see why anyone would actually use this, especially since it cuts off half the menu bar.

deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
ksidisnidjsdj 9mo ago
Okay so this is not just useless but actually detrimental to the UX. Oh, boy. I wouldn’t be surprised if the author vibe-coded this, seeing as the article they reference was very much entirely written by AI.
tefkah 9mo ago
thank you for actually including a fricking screenshot!
wink 9mo ago
I had not noticed the rounded corner in the edge of my screen until now because I use a dark background and usually have some window maximized. This is a screenshot without this tool: https://stuff.art-core.org/2026/osx_corner.png https://stuff.art-core.org/2026/osx_corner.png This screenshot shows the bottom right corner of my left monitor and a small slice of my right monitor. The light thing is the rounded corner of my browser window.

yokoprime 9mo ago

A screenshot of the «after» would clear up a lot of confusion