10 ms·

Tailscale's new macOS home

567 points by tosh 7mo ago

daft_pink 7mo ago
Ironically, I have trouble with Tailscale and Mac SSO. I setup my tailnet with Apple SSO and when I want to connect on my non Windows device there is not an easy way to add a new user and the new user has their own tailnet. I wish I could just use tailscale with a passkey without using third party sso.
- fred256 7mo ago
  https://tailscale.com/docs/integrations/identity/passkeys https://tailscale.com/docs/integrations/identity/passkeys
paxys 7mo ago
I haven't had enough menu bar icons to run into this but is it really the case that the notch just hides whatever icons happen to be behind it? Like, the OS doesn't handle this incredibly obvious edge case? Why not just put an overflow dropdown next to the notch (something Windows XP managed to figure out 25 years ago)? I know software quality has been going down in recent versions of macOS but this is absurd.
- giancarlostoro 7mo ago
  This is genuinely shocking that Apple is not handling that. Talk about quite a decline in one of their flagship products.
  - gh02t 7mo ago
    Hasn't menu bar applets crowding with no official overflow menu been a problem with MacOS with an obvious solution (add an overflow menu) for... 2+ decades now? I know third party solutions exist and it's kind of an edge case, but still, I remember encountering this back in the day on my ancient plastic Macbook.
    - re 7mo ago
      It's much worse than it used to be. Before it was only really a problem with apps with a lot of menus, and you could access the items by switching to an app with fewer of them. Now, the notch takes up a lot of space, and you hit it really soon on a 14" display—I can only have maybe three third party menu applets on top of my collection of built-in ones before they disappear into the notch.
      - badc0ffee 7mo ago
        I think it's not just the notch, but that menu bar icons are more widely spaced than they used to be. I want to say it happened around Sonoma (10.14)? I was working on a Mac app at the time. Icon styles went from dense with a generally square clickable area to widely spaced, wide rectangular clickable area, and a highlight with rounded corners when clicked.
      - xp84 7mo ago
        I have a 16 inch and even I moved to the “no notch” resolution last year because a ton of apps don’t let you choose whether to have a menu icon, and many of them are required corporate crapware. Apple should have bought Bartender and made it part of the OS 10 years ago, or at least before shipping this stupid notch. Apple’s “we know what you need better than you do” approach is so exhausting.
  - lloeki 7mo ago
    My workaround was to restore pre-notch behaviour by picking a resolution from the "show all resolutions" list that is conveniently+ exactly screen res height minus notch height. I theoretically "lose" that much height but gain a) zero notch b) non-rounded top corners and c) a traditionally heighted menubar instead of the giant one that is so big only to cater for the notch. + I thought this was thanks to BetterDisplay but it turns out no third party tool is needed and it's all first party probably because someone at Apple is as annoyed by the notch as I was and so that's their solution.
    - freehorse 7mo ago
      I think it is because they want to send to apps resolution list that includes or excludes the notch area to choose from for full screen modes (eg in games). Selecting "show all resolutions" basically shows this list.
  - aidenn0 7mo ago
    From what I can tell, OS X is no longer one of their flagship products.
    - fyrabanks 7mo ago
      they kindamostly cared when it was OS X. everything's been a bit of a mess since it became macOS while trying to make a unified platform for all their hardware
  - MoonWalk 7mo ago
    iOS is a POS too, now.
    - devilbunny 7mo ago
      Did you ever think it was good? Aside from the tight integration with other Apple products enabling extra features, I never liked it better than Android. Switched for work, not really a choice. Still use “DROID!” from the OG Moto Droid as my text tone.
      - MoonWalk 7mo ago
        Yeah, it was pretty good, even without the "tight integration." The most important integration I can think of is answering texts on my computer. This is a huge win. And it does suck that Android still lacks a central syncing facility like iCloud. I do think we benefit from competition. I also have a Moto Droid and it was OK, but there was some janky UI. And the noises... talk about infuriating. The phone was always making noises with no indication as to WTF was making them or what they meant.
  - airstrike 7mo ago
    macOS UI/UX has been declining at an accelerating pace with each new version. My only hope at this point is it gets _so_ bad it becomes an absolute meme and they get around to fixing it.
    - Kovah 7mo ago
      The weird duality of Apple: their hardware becomes better with each devices, while their software gets worse with each version.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
- latchkey 7mo ago
  One of the mentioned apps, Bartender, was sold to a third party [0]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40584606 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40584606 I think they've cleaned it up since then [1], but in the age of supply chain attacks, very concerning. Personally, even as a paying user of Bartender, I moved to the open source solution, at least I can watch the github for changes. [1] https://www.macbartender.com/b5blog/Lets-Try-This-Again/ https://www.macbartender.com/b5blog/Lets-Try-This-Again/
  - InsideOutSanta 7mo ago
    The other mentioned app, Ice, is unmaintained and no longer works on Tahoe. There's a maintained fork called Thaw.
    - deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
    - latchkey 7mo ago
      Thanks, I'll check out Thaw. I've been using Ice without problems: https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice/releases/tag/0.11.13-dev.2 https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice/releases/tag/0.11.13-dev....
- seanssel 7mo ago
  Yep, and there's no indication that anything is hidden, no dropdown/etc.
- Jcampuzano2 7mo ago
  Yes it is genuinely infuriating that this is the case for a company that for so long was praised for their superior UX. This along with the tons of other paper cuts they've slacked on is tarring their brand.
- javawizard 7mo ago
  > I know software quality has been going down in recent versions of macOS Note that this particular problem has existed for well over a decade. It's atrocious, but let's not pretend it's anything new.
  - paxys 7mo ago
    The macbook notch has existed for a decade?
    - simonh 7mo ago
      Menu bar icons overflowing. The notch just makes it a problem quicker, and in an exciting new way.
    - data-ottawa 7mo ago
      If you opened an app like Xcode with a lot of menus options, it would extend beyond across the screen and cover up your menu bar icons. If I open Xcode today on a 14" MacBook, two menu items extend past the notch, and they still hide your menu bar icons. This has been the case for a long long time, and it's always been an obvious failure case.
    - javawizard 7mo ago
      No, menu bar items being hidden when there are too many of them has happened for a decade. The notch has just made menu bar space more scarce than it used to be.
- nozzlegear 7mo ago
  I run into it when using Rider. I have text size increased on my Macbook and Rider has 8000 menu items, so my menu icons (all of which are default macOS, no third-party stuff) will be hidden to make room for Rider's stuff. I have to switch over to another workspace or window (i.e. away from Rider) if I want to access one of them. It's annoying but I'm not sure who I blame here; Rider I guess, for having a zillion menu items. Screenshot: https://imgur.com/8y0QbZN https://imgur.com/8y0QbZN The gap between "Run" and "Tests" is the notch, which I don't usually notice is there unless I'm in Rider.
  - whimblepop 7mo ago
    Why not blame Apple for having a busted-ass menu bar design? The behavior of "if the menu is busy, icons just disappear" and advice like "apps shouldn't rely on menu bar icons" are just bad ideas. They don't work well with how people use computers or how developers write apps. It's a bad design.
    - nozzlegear 7mo ago
      I prefer to blame Rider because it's the only app where I encounter this problem, and it seems more like a "don't make your list of menu entries so long it spans the notch and pokes into the menu icons" error than anything else to me. Simple as.
      - whimblepop 7mo ago
        Unfortunately for me, notch overflow happens to me in Chrome, Edge, Firefox, VSCode, Outlook, Excel (and Word and probably all of the other Microsoft Office apps), LibreOffice, IINA (mpv frontend), CotEditor, IDEA, and QtCreator, just among those installed on my work machine. > Simple as. Neither Apple nor app developers control either what font sizes a user needs or how many apps they're running which produce menu bar icons. In that context, "not so long that it [...] pokes into the menu icons" isn't even well-defined. It's literally meaningless unless you parameterize it according to factors like those, which is not "simple as" anything. It's a computer screen, not a page in some particular print magazine. > it seems more like a "don't make your list of menu entries so long it spans the notch and pokes into the menu icons" Only counting menu bar items that either (a) come with the operating system or (b) are imposed on me by applications that my employer forces me to run for compliance or other purposes, there are eleven mandatory icons in my menu bar at all times. So it doesn't matter whether the app in focus has few menu items or many; I run into this issue regardless. > I prefer to blame Rider There are a few ways to make sense of the situation, but none of them look great for Apple tbh. If the menu bar is well designed but it doesn't work well with increased display scaling, accessibility is a second-class (or worse) concern in Apple's design. If the menu bar is well designed but it doesn't work well when there are dozen menu bar icons, then it isn't suitable for environments where users don't control the number of menu bar icons they have to deal with— this, of course, is many professional environments. So either: macOS isn't genuinely intended to be accessible, macOS isn't a general-purpose operating system for professionals, the menu bar has a bad design, or some combination of all three. Of the three, "the menu bar's design is bad" seems the simplest and least absurd.
- crazygringo 7mo ago
  To be clear: this is not really new with the notch. It's been menu bar icon behavior for decades where if there isn't enough space for all the menus plus menu icons, menu icons disappear with no way to get to them. The notch just acts like the last menu item now (albeit even if there's space between the last menu item and the notch, for applications without a ton of menus). And yes, it's completely bizarre that macOS doesn't provide an overflow menu. Instead, again yes for decades, you've had to buy/use something like Bartender for this. It is utterly bizarre and inexplicable. With Tahoe, Apple has finally provided a half-solution, which is that in System Settings you can entirely hide select running menubar utilities to regain some space. But of course that's only helpful for utilities you never need to look at or click. tl;dr: yes this is utterly absurd but it's been absurd for decades. It's nothing to do with recent versions of macOS.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- oaweoifjwpo 7mo ago
  This is a real problem, but when I complain about it I get told to just "hide the icons you don't care about" as if that's a solution. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47346079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47346079
  - wlesieutre 7mo ago
    Especially bad for people with poor eyesight who have to use the display scaling set toward "Large Text" instead of "Default" or "More Space" Between the larger display scaling, losing space to the notch, and the IT department setting up new computers with 8 little pieces of preinstalled bullshit up there, Apple's perspective on this seems to be "if the Ivanti VPN menu extra disappears I guess you didn't really need that anyway!" Having the sound, bluetooth, wifi, and other system stuff removed from the bar and accessible in control center helps, but is not sufficient. They're too busy solving important problems like "how can I use part of my screen as a videoconferencing light source" and chasing yearly iOS new feature parity to deal with pesky things like menu extras. It's only been 25 years since OS X came out.
    - devilbunny 7mo ago
      Poor eyesight? How about just being over 45? My visual acuity at distance has not changed from when I was 20. My ability to read tiny, poorly-contrasted text at phone distance has. Enlarging text size is a massive benefit to everyone as we age. It’s one of the reasons that older readers were among the first to adopt e-ink readers and tablets: every book suddenly becomes a large-print book. In the world of accessibility this is one of the easiest things to do with one of the largest impacts. Not everyone is blind, not everyone is hard of hearing, but everyone gets presbyopia if they live long enough.
    - rgblambda 7mo ago
      >the IT department setting up new computers with 8 little pieces of preinstalled bullshit up there You can usually toggle hide on the pre installed bullshit at least. It would be helpful if there was a notification or prompt to tell you the menu bar was full so you know to do that.
- pxc 7mo ago
  If you're visually impaired, you can hit it even with just a few icons on a 14" laptop. Fonts anything other than tiny + overloaded menus + even a handful of app icons means I always hit this unless I'm docked. Hacky menu bar modification tools are basically an accessibility requirement for me, and my vision isn't even that bad. (Best corrected is 20/30 or 20/40 or so.) People with serious impairments are totally screwed by this on macOS, sometimes even with large external monitors.
- izacus 7mo ago
  Yes, it's terrible and something even Windows handles better. It's one of those utterly bizarre Apple things which make me wonder which old product guy has dirt on everyone else at the company.
- fragmede 7mo ago
  Just take Ice's source and have Claude whip you up the features you want. Keep it to yourself. Takes an afternoon and doesn't have other people calling you a sloplogist. https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice
- Oanid 7mo ago
  It was Windows 7 when Microsoft added an overflow for tray icons, not XP.
  - xp84 7mo ago
    Not true. XP had a feature to set each icon to always show, “automatically,” or never. Will send you screenshots if you demand them, when I get home to my XP ThinkPad.
    - noisem4ker 7mo ago
      It's documented here: https://umidevi.blogspot.com/2010/09/how-to-make-windows-xp-system-tray.html https://umidevi.blogspot.com/2010/09/how-to-make-windows-xp-...
- MoonWalk 7mo ago
  It's not even an edge case. It should have been considered an inevitable case. Really depressing design dereliction and/or incompetence.
- TYPE_FASTER 7mo ago
  Yeah, I was surprised that something this obvious wasn't addressed. Investing in a visual redesign (Liquid Glass) but not an obvious UX issue of the notch hiding icons seems like a mis-prioritization.
- lobochrome 7mo ago
  It is ! I’m “solving” it with an app called bartender. It’s hacked and sometimes doesn’t work but was the only way I could manage this problem… Apple software sucks so bad!
  - princevegeta89 7mo ago
    I use an app called BarBee for this. I heard great things about bartender as well. There are a few other decent options. But, yeah, the bottom line is, it's kind of crazy how Apple did not think about this, about the overcrowding of the menu bar and implement an auto-collapse mechanism or something like that. The true short-sightedness Apple has had becomes really obvious in the latest liquid glass UI, whatever the fuck that is called. It's a grand fuck to a decent-looking UI that existed before that.
- dwedge 7mo ago
  With some apps, I can't remember if tailscale is one I don't think so but another vpn we use is, it's even worse because opening them only creates the menubar icon. I spent 15 minutes trying to figure out why the vpn wouldn't start before I realised it was just hidden. No feedback at all
al_borland 7mo ago
I always assumed the justification for the notch would be FaceID on Macs. However, it’s been many generations and we still don’t see it.
azuanrb 7mo ago
I’ve been using Bartender (paid) and Thaw (free) to manage my menu bar. Recently, both apps have become quite buggy. I’m not sure whether this is due to macOS or if there are better alternatives I’m not aware of.
- threetonesun 7mo ago
  I feel like every app I use has gotten buggier in Tahoe, I suppose major UI rewrites will do that.
sadeshmukh 7mo ago
Useful menu bar manager for Mac that lets you hide multiple icons behind a single icon: https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice
- ajyey 7mo ago
  I’m on mobile so don’t have the link handy but there’s a fork called Thaw that has been getting frequent updates
  - CharlesW 7mo ago
    Oh! Thanks for that, I hadn't realized Ice's maintainer had stopped working on it: https://github.com/stonerl/Thaw https://github.com/stonerl/Thaw
    - raybb 7mo ago
      I had been using Hidden Bar but gonna give Thaw a shot now. Looks a bit more full featured and under active development! https://github.com/dwarvesf/hidden https://github.com/dwarvesf/hidden
- LtWorf 7mo ago
  KDE has it included!
  - koiueo 7mo ago
    Ewww, it's free and opensource!
- ArmadilloGang 7mo ago
  I’ve been using this for years. It’s simple and works perfectly: https://github.com/dwarvesf/hidden https://github.com/dwarvesf/hidden
CharlesW 7mo ago
I personally found it confusing and un-Mac-like that quitting the configuration app also now stops the Tailscale service. It was unfortunate to discover this while I was AFK. My recommendation is to rethink it to work like apps like 1Password, Default Folder, Keyboard Maestro, Ice, etc., where I can always easily open a configuration app, but the service must be intentionally/knowingly quit via either the configuration app or the menu bar utility. TLDR: Please separate the service from the new configuration app.
- ezarowny 7mo ago
  This was driving me nuts but at some point very recently they added a "Hide Dock Icon" to settings.
_2d30 7mo ago
I love Tailscale so much and when I got added to what may have been an A/B test for the windowed app, I was even happier with it. It's a great improvement.
ctippett 7mo ago
Anyone know if this new windowed Tailscale view is enabled on the non-App Store version? I guess I'll find out soon enough once I update, but I didn't see any specific callout in the article.
- djsavvy 7mo ago
  Yes it is
gib444 7mo ago
Yes! More windowed interfaces! I hate apps that outgrow a modal. I hate losing the context. No wait I think I hate all modals. Mullvad, your turn next please
jedberg 7mo ago
This seems like a good place to ask: What is the current state of the art for connecting back to my home network while remote? I want: access to my home server ability to stream US TV when abroad (by exiting from my home network) ability to make it easy for others with non-tech backgrounds to connect with their devices (parents, kids, etc) ability to have remote linux servers connect automatically on boot. This one is because I can't get OTA TV at home and want to set up a simple streaming box at someone else's house to do it that connects back to my house, so we can stream off all of our devices. I'm guessing tailscale will be a part of this setup which is why I ask here.
- pants2 7mo ago
  Yes, you've described Tailscale + Exit Nodes + Tailnet that you invite your family to. Install Tailscale and enable some devices as exit nodes - it's pretty much as simple as that.
- paxys 7mo ago
  Tailscale will enable all of this. Set up a US device as an exit node, and configure other devices to proxy through it.
  - jd3 7mo ago
    > ability to stream US TV when abroad (by exiting from my home network) Should note that Tailscale does not work natively with hdhr for mpeg television streams b/c wireguard doesn't natively support udp multicast/broadcast. Also can't directly port forward b/c hdhr sets a default ttl of 2. My understanding is that most VPNs in general don't support udp multicast due to operating on the network layer rather than data link, though iirc OpenVPN supports multicast traffic through its virtual TAP (Layer 2) rather than TUN (Layer 3). Tailscale does create a TUN/TAP virtual network[0], though udp multicast is still not natively supported. [0]: https://tailscale.com/docs/concepts/tailscale-osi#data-link-layer https://tailscale.com/docs/concepts/tailscale-osi#data-link-... https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/1013 https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/1013 https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/11134 https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/11134
seabrookmx 7mo ago
> We’re working on a comparable UI for Windows devices As a Linux user and fan of good GUI apps, it always bums me out I'm stuck with the CLI-only options for apps like Tailscale. Even for a simple tray icon I have to resort to buggy GNOME extensions. I understand the fragmented ecosystem and small user-base on the desktop Linux side make it hard to justify, but I hope that changes one day!
- skavi 7mo ago
  this may have been what you were referring to with “ buggy GNOME extensions”, but in case it wasn’t: https://tailscale.com/docs/features/client/linux-systray https://tailscale.com/docs/features/client/linux-systray
  - seabrookmx 7mo ago
    It wasn't actually! I've been using a third party extension that tries to provide a similar tray icon (after moving from a different extension that doesn't support my version of GNOME) but it's really flaky. I'll try this. Thanks for the tip.
- iamcalledrob 7mo ago
  Re: buggy GNOME extensions, it drives me nuts that GNOME has no built in support for menu bar icons/app indicators. There's a whole class of GUI apps that should run in the background until needed, and GNOME just has no solution here. I really don't get why they removed this functionality. I don't want a "service" model where you start/stop gui apps via systemd. And I don't want to keep a window around for no good reason.
  - seabrookmx 7mo ago
    GNOME 44 has built-in support finally, but they're hidden in the quick settings menu. I prefer having them in the tray so I can see if they're running without having to click around.
corlinp 7mo ago
Every time I get a new Mac, I run these commands to reduce the spacing between menu bar icons. Lets you fit at least 2x the number of items in the menu bar. ``` defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSpacing -int 2 defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSelectionPadding -int 2 ```
- potatocoffee 7mo ago
  This is so much better, thank you for this.
- swiftcoder 7mo ago
  Dude. How am I only just learning this? This needs to be plastered loudly over the internet
- richardlblair 7mo ago
  This was always my biggest gripe about using a mac, the OS that "just works". I ended up a bunch of commands I had to run and a stack of apps I needed to install for it to feel usable.
  - freedomben 7mo ago
    And for years and years when in discussions about Linux vs Mac, Linux was always slammed as having to be customized and "user's should never have to use the terminal" . (I agree with that, but even in 2014 I remember having to run terminal commands to tweak stuff to make it work more like I wanted to)
    - richardlblair 7mo ago
      Ironically I ended up on linux. Windows went to crap, and I figured if I have to run a bunch of scripts to make my OS usable I may as well just use linux. Honestly, I couldn't be happier. I get so much more out of my hardware and I enjoy the experience so much more.
      - 7mo ago
vladde 7mo ago
i love that they posted a snippet of Swift code showing other developers how to detect this themselves!
eviks 7mo ago
> Apple, a company that traditionally favors simple functionality but not being able to interact with an icon is DISfunctionality, though yes, a simple one. So that principle can't explain the bad design either.
danslo 7mo ago
The only reason I used Tailscale's menubar applet was to change exit nodes, I definitely don't need a whole UI. Guess I'll just stick with CLI only for now (via darwin-nix)
nozzlegear 7mo ago
Isn't it true that Apple just prefers apps not use the menu bar in the first place? I'm not sure where I had read that, but it might explain why Apple doesn't improve the menu bar. Personally I'm of the opinion that they should improve it because the current situation is untenable. But am I misremembering this?
- snowwrestler 7mo ago
  Yes, it was a huge mistake to allow any random app developer to claim such a prominent and limited piece of screen real estate. But it’s been an option for so long now that everyone will scream bloody murder if they try take it away. Apple’s opinion seems to be: running out of space happens to only a few people running tons of menu-bar-loving apps, so if you are dorky enough to run into this problem, you should be dorky enough to solve it yourself.
- jasomill 7mo ago
  Not exactly, though many apps violate Apple's Human Interface Guidelines for macOS menu bar extras[1]: Let people — not your app — decide whether to put your menu bar extra in the menu bar. Typically, people add a menu bar extra to the menu bar by changing a setting in an app’s settings window. To ensure discoverability, however, consider giving people the option of doing so during setup. Avoid relying on the presence of menu bar extras. The system hides and shows menu bar extras regularly, and you can’t be sure which other menu bar extras people have chosen to display or predict the location of your menu bar extra. Consider exposing app-specific functionality in other ways, too. For example, you can provide a Dock menu that appears when people Control-click your app’s Dock icon. People can hide or choose not to use your menu bar extra, but a Dock menu is aways available when your app is running. [1] https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/the-menu-bar#Menu-bar-extras https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
alin23 7mo ago
The notch hiding menubar icons is such a stupid problem to have. I waste hours every week trying to help people who send me frustrated emails because they bought one of my apps and they say: "it doesn't launch" or "why doesn't it have any interface??" No amount of FAQ will help these people. And this also results in hasty refund requests and even worse, chargebacks that take 2x the amount the users paid out of my pocket. I recently helped my brother launch a simple app for making any window a PiP window (https://lowtechguys.com/pipiri https://lowtechguys.com/pipiri) and in the first two days, half of the sales turned into refunds exactly because of this issue. People had so many menubar icons that they thought the app just doesn't work. Not an encouraging launch for his first app. Not to mention the fact that the best solution that helped alleviate this, the Bartender app, was completely broken by Apple's internal API changes in macOS Tahoe. This could have been handled better.
- mort96 7mo ago
  It's such a simple problem to solve too: when there are too many menu bar icons, put them in an overflow menu. A single icon which contains a list of icons. And let me arrange which icons go into the top bar and which go into the overflow menu. Windows solved this many many decades ago with their system tray overflow menu. Browsers solved it too, by letting you put extension icons in an overflow menu. It's not hard. But nooo, macOS just silently hides applications from you, with no visible indication that there's anything hidden.
  - zamadatix 7mo ago
    Even if they didn't want to have an overflow menu for some reason there it boggles my mind why the menu bar isn't just aware of what portion is covered and should be skipped (file menus or icons) in the first place!
    - butlike 7mo ago
      Well there's effectively no space on the lefthand side of the notch. You must assume that side is going to be completely consumed by actual menu items. Side note: If you want to check what icons might be buried by the notch, you can Cmd + Drag any icon from the menu bar to rearrange them. If you drag an icon through the notch, the other items will pop into view, if any are hidden.
matt_daemon 7mo ago
I really thought this was going to be an Apple acquires Tailscale post
comrade1234 7mo ago
There's so much tailscale shilling on hn and if you say anything neutral you're voted down.
- rtaylorgarlock 7mo ago
  Being a principled, critical thinker sure has its costs these days. Yeah, that's right, I said it. Flag me (lol).
- brcmthrowaway 7mo ago
  It was way worse before AI
- faangguyindia 7mo ago
  tailscale offers many good things. for example "tailscale" drop for free, share files between devices on your network also https://tailscale.com/docs/features/tailscale-funnel https://tailscale.com/docs/features/tailscale-funnel which is cloudflare tunnel alternative, no more localtunnel or other things so i am not surprized people like it as product, most good features are free.
  - whywhywhywhy 7mo ago
    Had very high hopes for tailscale drop but it’s worked literally once of the 7 times I tried to use it before I stopped trying. Mostly machines on the same network.
wrs 7mo ago
> no options to rearrange the menu bar items This, at least, is not correct. Hold down Command and drag an icon to rearrange the order.
- ryanisnan 7mo ago
  I think they mean developers have no way of requesting or specifying order.
  - wrs 7mo ago
    Long experience with Window Taskbar icons has demonstrated you should not give developers that sort of control, only users.
bilalq 7mo ago
I use a wallpaper with a horizontal black bar at the top to make the notch invisible, so this catches me off guard pretty often.
dsl 7mo ago
Tailscale is really losing the plot to the movie. It is an app that sits in the background and provides connectivity. Occasionally you need to change a setting. Absolutely nobody wants a rich windowed UI, or a menu bar widget that drops down a complex detail card. I hope they can see this is exactly what killed desktop anti-virus: something that was supposed to be quietly doing its job in the background started getting in the users way. It needed to poke its head up and scream "hey remember me?" at the behest of some product managers or growth hackers. Eventually it got so bad Microsoft just baked it into the OS. Tailscale is on even worse footing here because Apple is even quicker to act when you destroy user experience.
- likecarter 7mo ago
  I feel like you don’t use tailscale. Because I use it every day - and I get confused when I can’t find it.
- micromacrofoot 7mo ago
  I have too many toolbar icons, so I do actually want the window to switch to so I can copy and paste IP addresses. I already keep it open so I can just command-tab to the window, and it's way better this way. I use tailscale every single day.
- joshryandavis 7mo ago
  You're the one losing the plot. It's optional, still closes to the system tray without you explicitly docking it. It doesn't emerge at random like McAfee. > Eventually it got so bad Microsoft just baked it into the OS. Tailscale is on even worse footing here because Apple is even quicker to act when you destroy user experience. So Apple are going to bake Tailscale into the OS? Also, read the blog. It's a response to Apple's bad user experience.
varenc 7mo ago
I always change my screen resolution to avoid the notch on my Mac. It's non-obvious how to do this but you end up with a slightly shorter resolution than the default. I know this means I'm wasting potential pixels, and wasting all the engineer effort that went into the nearly bezel-free design, but worth it IMHO.
KellyCriterion 7mo ago
I stumbled across TailScale while I asked ClaudeAI regarding switching off of VPN: I wasnt aware of the tool. Im "shocked" how perfect it functions! It worked out of the box for a fairly simple but old windows setup where I could apply it: Everything was perfectly fine, super user friendly in the beginning. Actually one of the tools that you could use to admin your mum & dad computer
- varenc 7mo ago
  > Actually one of the tools that you could use to admin your mum & dad computer I do exactly this! I keep Tailscale running my family's shared iMac, making it easy for me to remotely connect to it and screen share if necessary to help. I went a more complicated route[0] and installed Tailscale as a system background daemon that runs as root and starts up before the first user login. Which also means no GUI interface, so more protected from user error. [0] https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/wiki/Tailscaled-on-macOS https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/wiki/Tailscaled-on-ma... (the standalone variant is also entirely opensource, unlike their macOS GUI app)
  - KellyCriterion 7mo ago
    > installed Tailscale as a system background daemon On Windows Server this was done somehow automaticly the last time I installed it: So access is possible after the machine is booted That was the beauty that caught me: It just worked out of the box, not any SSL certificate stuff signing issues etc. And the funny thing: I really didnt know it existed before the AI told me about it :-))
ed_mercer 7mo ago
> Apple could certainly make some changes to prevent this being an issue at all. Why Apple still hasn't fixed this in 2026 baffles me. The fact that a company the size of Tailscale has to find workarounds for an Apple blunder like this speaks volumes about how terrible Apple's software management is.
- politelemon 7mo ago
  It really is very simple. Because people keep purchasing their products.
koinedad 7mo ago
The hidden notch issue is a pretty big problem. I had to look for tools to shrink the width spacing just to survive, and it just looks bad
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
anonu 7mo ago
would love to be able to run two accounts (two tailnets) on my MBP. Haven't figured out a good solution.
vicchenai 7mo ago
This feels like one of those bugs that sounds niche until you put a work Mac through the usual gauntlet of VPN, MDM, chat, calendar, backup, and whatever else corp IT adds. Not catastrophic, but it is kind of wild that macOS still has no first party overflow affordance for menu bar icons.
vicnov 7mo ago
This is all cool, but to allow ssh access I still need to install tailscale through brew? i don't get it.
- kccqzy 7mo ago
  I use Tailscale from the App Store. To allow SSH access I simply turn on the Apple-preinstalled SSH daemon.
yardstick 7mo ago
As a workaround, can Tailscale internally add multiple menu items and keep adding until one reports as visible?
faangguyindia 7mo ago
yesterday i setup tailscale on a gcp VM. i enabled route advertising and managed to ping my google cloud instances using tailscale problem is the packet loss rate is high. SSH tunnel worked! soo i think there is something wrong with tailscale
dcrazy 7mo ago
Back in the Mac OS X public beta days (and maybe even into 10.0–10.1?), apps that are nowadays shoved into the menu at used to live in the Dock. I kinda think I prefer that.
fogzen 7mo ago
I don't see what this has to do with the notch. There's limited space in the menu bar. The overflow is hidden with or without the notch. It is a bit weird that Apple hasn't provided a simple UI indicator that some icons are hidden. All that's needed is a dot with a tooltip that opens the settings to configure the menu icons.
Nevermark 7mo ago
Menu items are so convenient. Apple should let users double the menu bar height. Put the app menus, user name, current time and search along the bottom. A text only bar would look coherent. Then put menu bar items on the row above. Default from right, but let users move items to the left. I use hiding menu bar and dock. Dynamic Wallpaper toggles desktop files/widgets visibility. So my Mac's resting face is, and would remain, completely uncluttered.
nickfthedev 7mo ago
Apple should solve this. Windows got a little menu that can popup this can't be that hard
- michelb 7mo ago
  They might be out of courage.
noja 7mo ago
I use https://apps.apple.com/at/app/hidden-bar/id1452453066 https://apps.apple.com/at/app/hidden-bar/id1452453066 Hidden Bar to workaround the menu bar problem.
bsmith 7mo ago
I don't understand why people are still using Tailscale after the issue they had where two independent tunnels were connected together.
- jwrallie 7mo ago
  Never heard of it, could you send us a reference? What do you use instead?
  - bsmith 7mo ago
    I use almost plain old wireguard, hosting a wg-easy container that has a nice web gui wrapper that makes it easy with QR codes, no configuration files to create like just wireguard. It's the technology that Tailscale uses, so why would you complicate it, adding more risk? The incident seems like it was never exploited, and it was fixed within 24 hours. However, in my opinion, the fact that this COULD happen, let alone that id DID happen, is too much risk, and why I switched immediately after hearing about it. AI overview of the incident: TS-2023-001: Node Sharing Across Tailnets Without Authorization (January 2023) A bug in Tailscale's node sharing logic allowed the creation of sharing invitations by unauthorized users. A malicious individual who knew a target node's database ID could generate and accept a sharing invite for that node without being an admin of the target node's tailnet — for any node in any tailnet. Circl So in practice, a node from one unrelated tailnet could be pulled into another person's tailnet without the owner's consent. A node's ID is only visible in the API or admin console, by admins of either the node's tailnet or a tailnet to which that node has already been shared Circl — which limited exploitability, since you'd need to already know the target's internal database ID (a random 64-bit integer, not easily guessable). Tailscale fixed it server-side on 2023-01-12 and stated they verified it was never exploited. The bug reporter (Benjamin Roberts, HN user tsujamin) noted it was discovered accidentally while managing their own tailnet. The Hacker News thread praised Tailscale for deploying a fix within 24 hours: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34420142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34420142 TS-2024-002: ACL Overwrites Across Tailnets (May 2023 – July 2024) There's also a second related incident that's perhaps even more alarming in concept: an admin user could overwrite the ACLs of one tailnet with ACLs from another tailnet. Any user who was an Admin in multiple tailnets and edited ACLs in the admin console between May 22, 2023 and July 17th, 2024 could trigger this bug after switching the active tailnet. Tailscale This one involved the tailnet-switching feature in the admin console accidentally "bleeding" policy configuration between separate, unrelated tailnets.
jiehong 7mo ago
The new window is nice and useful, but I find the window’s header to be on the very thick side. Nowadays, that whole header should probably leave in the sidebar itself, and the sidebar could probably be more "Liquid Glass"-like.
lukasholzer 7mo ago
My only workaround with the stupid notch is to connect it to an external screen which is wider than my 16inch macbook pro so that I can access those apps
kangraemin 7mo ago
Moving from a menu bar app to a proper window is a bold call. Menu bar was convenient for "set it and forget it" but terrible for anything beyond toggling on/off. Curious if they'll keep the menu bar icon as a quick shortcut or kill it entirely.
- chris_st 7mo ago
  From the article: > As we noted at its September beta release, a windowed version of Tailscale’s macOS app doesn’t replace the menu bar app, but runs alongside it. It can be pulled up from the Dock or a Spotlight search, and makes a lot of Tailscale data and features more accessible.
kiviuq 7mo ago
“We don’t have any control over where things get rendered in the menu bar,” said one Tailscale engineer, who asked to go nameless so as to share their honest opinion. “You just say, ‘I want to be a menu bar app.’ They shove it up there, and that’s it, you end up where you end up.” > said one Tailscale engineer, who asked to go nameless Fear in a free society? There’s no contradiction here. A free society doesn't create a fearless society. Because freedom is the freedom to amass property. If you are not in that class of capital owners your fear is justified. Class society.
- frantathefranta 7mo ago
  I thought it was just Tailscale trying to style their blogpost into a news article.
- sunaookami 7mo ago
  It's a joke...
programmarchy 7mo ago
I really dislike how apps add themselves to the menubar. And I hate if there's no option to remove it from the menubar. Icons with indicators like WiFi, Battery, etc. make sense. But if an app does not need an indicator like that, just add the capabilities to the Dock icon!
macshome 7mo ago
The "apps" that appear in the menu bar are called Menu Bar Extras. They are supposed to be an optional UI to provide quick access to functions of regular applications that are not running in the foreground. They aren't supposed to be the entire app or the only way to interact with something.

567 points by tosh 7mo ago

Ironically, I have trouble with Tailscale and Mac SSO. I setup my tailnet with Apple SSO and when I want to connect on my non Windows device there is not an easy way to add a new user and the new user has their own tailnet. I wish I could just use tailscale with a passkey without using third party sso.

fred256 7mo ago
https://tailscale.com/docs/integrations/identity/passkeys https://tailscale.com/docs/integrations/identity/passkeys

paxys 7mo ago

I haven't had enough menu bar icons to run into this but is it really the case that the notch just hides whatever icons happen to be behind it? Like, the OS doesn't handle this incredibly obvious edge case? Why not just put an overflow dropdown next to the notch (something Windows XP managed to figure out 25 years ago)? I know software quality has been going down in recent versions of macOS but this is absurd.

giancarlostoro 7mo ago
This is genuinely shocking that Apple is not handling that. Talk about quite a decline in one of their flagship products.
- gh02t 7mo ago
  Hasn't menu bar applets crowding with no official overflow menu been a problem with MacOS with an obvious solution (add an overflow menu) for... 2+ decades now? I know third party solutions exist and it's kind of an edge case, but still, I remember encountering this back in the day on my ancient plastic Macbook.
  - re 7mo ago
    It's much worse than it used to be. Before it was only really a problem with apps with a lot of menus, and you could access the items by switching to an app with fewer of them. Now, the notch takes up a lot of space, and you hit it really soon on a 14" display—I can only have maybe three third party menu applets on top of my collection of built-in ones before they disappear into the notch.
    - badc0ffee 7mo ago
      I think it's not just the notch, but that menu bar icons are more widely spaced than they used to be. I want to say it happened around Sonoma (10.14)? I was working on a Mac app at the time. Icon styles went from dense with a generally square clickable area to widely spaced, wide rectangular clickable area, and a highlight with rounded corners when clicked.
    - xp84 7mo ago
      I have a 16 inch and even I moved to the “no notch” resolution last year because a ton of apps don’t let you choose whether to have a menu icon, and many of them are required corporate crapware. Apple should have bought Bartender and made it part of the OS 10 years ago, or at least before shipping this stupid notch. Apple’s “we know what you need better than you do” approach is so exhausting.
- lloeki 7mo ago
  My workaround was to restore pre-notch behaviour by picking a resolution from the "show all resolutions" list that is conveniently+ exactly screen res height minus notch height. I theoretically "lose" that much height but gain a) zero notch b) non-rounded top corners and c) a traditionally heighted menubar instead of the giant one that is so big only to cater for the notch. + I thought this was thanks to BetterDisplay but it turns out no third party tool is needed and it's all first party probably because someone at Apple is as annoyed by the notch as I was and so that's their solution.
  - freehorse 7mo ago
    I think it is because they want to send to apps resolution list that includes or excludes the notch area to choose from for full screen modes (eg in games). Selecting "show all resolutions" basically shows this list.
- aidenn0 7mo ago
  From what I can tell, OS X is no longer one of their flagship products.
  - fyrabanks 7mo ago
    they kindamostly cared when it was OS X. everything's been a bit of a mess since it became macOS while trying to make a unified platform for all their hardware
- MoonWalk 7mo ago
  iOS is a POS too, now.
  - devilbunny 7mo ago
    Did you ever think it was good? Aside from the tight integration with other Apple products enabling extra features, I never liked it better than Android. Switched for work, not really a choice. Still use “DROID!” from the OG Moto Droid as my text tone.
    - MoonWalk 7mo ago
      Yeah, it was pretty good, even without the "tight integration." The most important integration I can think of is answering texts on my computer. This is a huge win. And it does suck that Android still lacks a central syncing facility like iCloud. I do think we benefit from competition. I also have a Moto Droid and it was OK, but there was some janky UI. And the noises... talk about infuriating. The phone was always making noises with no indication as to WTF was making them or what they meant.
- airstrike 7mo ago
  macOS UI/UX has been declining at an accelerating pace with each new version. My only hope at this point is it gets _so_ bad it becomes an absolute meme and they get around to fixing it.
  - Kovah 7mo ago
    The weird duality of Apple: their hardware becomes better with each devices, while their software gets worse with each version.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
latchkey 7mo ago
One of the mentioned apps, Bartender, was sold to a third party [0]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40584606 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40584606 I think they've cleaned it up since then [1], but in the age of supply chain attacks, very concerning. Personally, even as a paying user of Bartender, I moved to the open source solution, at least I can watch the github for changes. [1] https://www.macbartender.com/b5blog/Lets-Try-This-Again/ https://www.macbartender.com/b5blog/Lets-Try-This-Again/
- InsideOutSanta 7mo ago
  The other mentioned app, Ice, is unmaintained and no longer works on Tahoe. There's a maintained fork called Thaw.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - latchkey 7mo ago
    Thanks, I'll check out Thaw. I've been using Ice without problems: https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice/releases/tag/0.11.13-dev.2 https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice/releases/tag/0.11.13-dev....
seanssel 7mo ago
Yep, and there's no indication that anything is hidden, no dropdown/etc.
Jcampuzano2 7mo ago
Yes it is genuinely infuriating that this is the case for a company that for so long was praised for their superior UX. This along with the tons of other paper cuts they've slacked on is tarring their brand.
javawizard 7mo ago
> I know software quality has been going down in recent versions of macOS Note that this particular problem has existed for well over a decade. It's atrocious, but let's not pretend it's anything new.
- paxys 7mo ago
  The macbook notch has existed for a decade?
  - simonh 7mo ago
    Menu bar icons overflowing. The notch just makes it a problem quicker, and in an exciting new way.
  - data-ottawa 7mo ago
    If you opened an app like Xcode with a lot of menus options, it would extend beyond across the screen and cover up your menu bar icons. If I open Xcode today on a 14" MacBook, two menu items extend past the notch, and they still hide your menu bar icons. This has been the case for a long long time, and it's always been an obvious failure case.
  - javawizard 7mo ago
    No, menu bar items being hidden when there are too many of them has happened for a decade. The notch has just made menu bar space more scarce than it used to be.
nozzlegear 7mo ago
I run into it when using Rider. I have text size increased on my Macbook and Rider has 8000 menu items, so my menu icons (all of which are default macOS, no third-party stuff) will be hidden to make room for Rider's stuff. I have to switch over to another workspace or window (i.e. away from Rider) if I want to access one of them. It's annoying but I'm not sure who I blame here; Rider I guess, for having a zillion menu items. Screenshot: https://imgur.com/8y0QbZN https://imgur.com/8y0QbZN The gap between "Run" and "Tests" is the notch, which I don't usually notice is there unless I'm in Rider.
- whimblepop 7mo ago
  Why not blame Apple for having a busted-ass menu bar design? The behavior of "if the menu is busy, icons just disappear" and advice like "apps shouldn't rely on menu bar icons" are just bad ideas. They don't work well with how people use computers or how developers write apps. It's a bad design.
  - nozzlegear 7mo ago
    I prefer to blame Rider because it's the only app where I encounter this problem, and it seems more like a "don't make your list of menu entries so long it spans the notch and pokes into the menu icons" error than anything else to me. Simple as.
    - whimblepop 7mo ago
      Unfortunately for me, notch overflow happens to me in Chrome, Edge, Firefox, VSCode, Outlook, Excel (and Word and probably all of the other Microsoft Office apps), LibreOffice, IINA (mpv frontend), CotEditor, IDEA, and QtCreator, just among those installed on my work machine. > Simple as. Neither Apple nor app developers control either what font sizes a user needs or how many apps they're running which produce menu bar icons. In that context, "not so long that it [...] pokes into the menu icons" isn't even well-defined. It's literally meaningless unless you parameterize it according to factors like those, which is not "simple as" anything. It's a computer screen, not a page in some particular print magazine. > it seems more like a "don't make your list of menu entries so long it spans the notch and pokes into the menu icons" Only counting menu bar items that either (a) come with the operating system or (b) are imposed on me by applications that my employer forces me to run for compliance or other purposes, there are eleven mandatory icons in my menu bar at all times. So it doesn't matter whether the app in focus has few menu items or many; I run into this issue regardless. > I prefer to blame Rider There are a few ways to make sense of the situation, but none of them look great for Apple tbh. If the menu bar is well designed but it doesn't work well with increased display scaling, accessibility is a second-class (or worse) concern in Apple's design. If the menu bar is well designed but it doesn't work well when there are dozen menu bar icons, then it isn't suitable for environments where users don't control the number of menu bar icons they have to deal with— this, of course, is many professional environments. So either: macOS isn't genuinely intended to be accessible, macOS isn't a general-purpose operating system for professionals, the menu bar has a bad design, or some combination of all three. Of the three, "the menu bar's design is bad" seems the simplest and least absurd.
crazygringo 7mo ago
To be clear: this is not really new with the notch. It's been menu bar icon behavior for decades where if there isn't enough space for all the menus plus menu icons, menu icons disappear with no way to get to them. The notch just acts like the last menu item now (albeit even if there's space between the last menu item and the notch, for applications without a ton of menus). And yes, it's completely bizarre that macOS doesn't provide an overflow menu. Instead, again yes for decades, you've had to buy/use something like Bartender for this. It is utterly bizarre and inexplicable. With Tahoe, Apple has finally provided a half-solution, which is that in System Settings you can entirely hide select running menubar utilities to regain some space. But of course that's only helpful for utilities you never need to look at or click. tl;dr: yes this is utterly absurd but it's been absurd for decades. It's nothing to do with recent versions of macOS.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
oaweoifjwpo 7mo ago
This is a real problem, but when I complain about it I get told to just "hide the icons you don't care about" as if that's a solution. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47346079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47346079
- wlesieutre 7mo ago
  Especially bad for people with poor eyesight who have to use the display scaling set toward "Large Text" instead of "Default" or "More Space" Between the larger display scaling, losing space to the notch, and the IT department setting up new computers with 8 little pieces of preinstalled bullshit up there, Apple's perspective on this seems to be "if the Ivanti VPN menu extra disappears I guess you didn't really need that anyway!" Having the sound, bluetooth, wifi, and other system stuff removed from the bar and accessible in control center helps, but is not sufficient. They're too busy solving important problems like "how can I use part of my screen as a videoconferencing light source" and chasing yearly iOS new feature parity to deal with pesky things like menu extras. It's only been 25 years since OS X came out.
  - devilbunny 7mo ago
    Poor eyesight? How about just being over 45? My visual acuity at distance has not changed from when I was 20. My ability to read tiny, poorly-contrasted text at phone distance has. Enlarging text size is a massive benefit to everyone as we age. It’s one of the reasons that older readers were among the first to adopt e-ink readers and tablets: every book suddenly becomes a large-print book. In the world of accessibility this is one of the easiest things to do with one of the largest impacts. Not everyone is blind, not everyone is hard of hearing, but everyone gets presbyopia if they live long enough.
  - rgblambda 7mo ago
    >the IT department setting up new computers with 8 little pieces of preinstalled bullshit up there You can usually toggle hide on the pre installed bullshit at least. It would be helpful if there was a notification or prompt to tell you the menu bar was full so you know to do that.
pxc 7mo ago
If you're visually impaired, you can hit it even with just a few icons on a 14" laptop. Fonts anything other than tiny + overloaded menus + even a handful of app icons means I always hit this unless I'm docked. Hacky menu bar modification tools are basically an accessibility requirement for me, and my vision isn't even that bad. (Best corrected is 20/30 or 20/40 or so.) People with serious impairments are totally screwed by this on macOS, sometimes even with large external monitors.
izacus 7mo ago
Yes, it's terrible and something even Windows handles better. It's one of those utterly bizarre Apple things which make me wonder which old product guy has dirt on everyone else at the company.
fragmede 7mo ago
Just take Ice's source and have Claude whip you up the features you want. Keep it to yourself. Takes an afternoon and doesn't have other people calling you a sloplogist. https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice
Oanid 7mo ago
It was Windows 7 when Microsoft added an overflow for tray icons, not XP.
- xp84 7mo ago
  Not true. XP had a feature to set each icon to always show, “automatically,” or never. Will send you screenshots if you demand them, when I get home to my XP ThinkPad.
  - noisem4ker 7mo ago
    It's documented here: https://umidevi.blogspot.com/2010/09/how-to-make-windows-xp-system-tray.html https://umidevi.blogspot.com/2010/09/how-to-make-windows-xp-...
MoonWalk 7mo ago
It's not even an edge case. It should have been considered an inevitable case. Really depressing design dereliction and/or incompetence.
TYPE_FASTER 7mo ago
Yeah, I was surprised that something this obvious wasn't addressed. Investing in a visual redesign (Liquid Glass) but not an obvious UX issue of the notch hiding icons seems like a mis-prioritization.
lobochrome 7mo ago
It is ! I’m “solving” it with an app called bartender. It’s hacked and sometimes doesn’t work but was the only way I could manage this problem… Apple software sucks so bad!
- princevegeta89 7mo ago
  I use an app called BarBee for this. I heard great things about bartender as well. There are a few other decent options. But, yeah, the bottom line is, it's kind of crazy how Apple did not think about this, about the overcrowding of the menu bar and implement an auto-collapse mechanism or something like that. The true short-sightedness Apple has had becomes really obvious in the latest liquid glass UI, whatever the fuck that is called. It's a grand fuck to a decent-looking UI that existed before that.
dwedge 7mo ago
With some apps, I can't remember if tailscale is one I don't think so but another vpn we use is, it's even worse because opening them only creates the menubar icon. I spent 15 minutes trying to figure out why the vpn wouldn't start before I realised it was just hidden. No feedback at all

al_borland 7mo ago

I always assumed the justification for the notch would be FaceID on Macs. However, it’s been many generations and we still don’t see it.

azuanrb 7mo ago

I’ve been using Bartender (paid) and Thaw (free) to manage my menu bar. Recently, both apps have become quite buggy. I’m not sure whether this is due to macOS or if there are better alternatives I’m not aware of.

threetonesun 7mo ago
I feel like every app I use has gotten buggier in Tahoe, I suppose major UI rewrites will do that.

sadeshmukh 7mo ago

Useful menu bar manager for Mac that lets you hide multiple icons behind a single icon: https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice

ajyey 7mo ago
I’m on mobile so don’t have the link handy but there’s a fork called Thaw that has been getting frequent updates
- CharlesW 7mo ago
  Oh! Thanks for that, I hadn't realized Ice's maintainer had stopped working on it: https://github.com/stonerl/Thaw https://github.com/stonerl/Thaw
  - raybb 7mo ago
    I had been using Hidden Bar but gonna give Thaw a shot now. Looks a bit more full featured and under active development! https://github.com/dwarvesf/hidden https://github.com/dwarvesf/hidden
LtWorf 7mo ago
KDE has it included!
- koiueo 7mo ago
  Ewww, it's free and opensource!
ArmadilloGang 7mo ago
I’ve been using this for years. It’s simple and works perfectly: https://github.com/dwarvesf/hidden https://github.com/dwarvesf/hidden

CharlesW 7mo ago

I personally found it confusing and un-Mac-like that quitting the configuration app also now stops the Tailscale service. It was unfortunate to discover this while I was AFK. My recommendation is to rethink it to work like apps like 1Password, Default Folder, Keyboard Maestro, Ice, etc., where I can always easily open a configuration app, but the service must be intentionally/knowingly quit via either the configuration app or the menu bar utility. TLDR: Please separate the service from the new configuration app.

ezarowny 7mo ago
This was driving me nuts but at some point very recently they added a "Hide Dock Icon" to settings.

_2d30 7mo ago

I love Tailscale so much and when I got added to what may have been an A/B test for the windowed app, I was even happier with it. It's a great improvement.

ctippett 7mo ago

Anyone know if this new windowed Tailscale view is enabled on the non-App Store version? I guess I'll find out soon enough once I update, but I didn't see any specific callout in the article.

djsavvy 7mo ago
Yes it is

gib444 7mo ago

Yes! More windowed interfaces! I hate apps that outgrow a modal. I hate losing the context. No wait I think I hate all modals. Mullvad, your turn next please

jedberg 7mo ago

This seems like a good place to ask: What is the current state of the art for connecting back to my home network while remote? I want: access to my home server ability to stream US TV when abroad (by exiting from my home network) ability to make it easy for others with non-tech backgrounds to connect with their devices (parents, kids, etc) ability to have remote linux servers connect automatically on boot. This one is because I can't get OTA TV at home and want to set up a simple streaming box at someone else's house to do it that connects back to my house, so we can stream off all of our devices. I'm guessing tailscale will be a part of this setup which is why I ask here.

pants2 7mo ago
Yes, you've described Tailscale + Exit Nodes + Tailnet that you invite your family to. Install Tailscale and enable some devices as exit nodes - it's pretty much as simple as that.
paxys 7mo ago
Tailscale will enable all of this. Set up a US device as an exit node, and configure other devices to proxy through it.
- jd3 7mo ago
  > ability to stream US TV when abroad (by exiting from my home network) Should note that Tailscale does not work natively with hdhr for mpeg television streams b/c wireguard doesn't natively support udp multicast/broadcast. Also can't directly port forward b/c hdhr sets a default ttl of 2. My understanding is that most VPNs in general don't support udp multicast due to operating on the network layer rather than data link, though iirc OpenVPN supports multicast traffic through its virtual TAP (Layer 2) rather than TUN (Layer 3). Tailscale does create a TUN/TAP virtual network[0], though udp multicast is still not natively supported. [0]: https://tailscale.com/docs/concepts/tailscale-osi#data-link-layer https://tailscale.com/docs/concepts/tailscale-osi#data-link-... https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/1013 https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/1013 https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/11134 https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/11134

seabrookmx 7mo ago

> We’re working on a comparable UI for Windows devices As a Linux user and fan of good GUI apps, it always bums me out I'm stuck with the CLI-only options for apps like Tailscale. Even for a simple tray icon I have to resort to buggy GNOME extensions. I understand the fragmented ecosystem and small user-base on the desktop Linux side make it hard to justify, but I hope that changes one day!

skavi 7mo ago
this may have been what you were referring to with “ buggy GNOME extensions”, but in case it wasn’t: https://tailscale.com/docs/features/client/linux-systray https://tailscale.com/docs/features/client/linux-systray
- seabrookmx 7mo ago
  It wasn't actually! I've been using a third party extension that tries to provide a similar tray icon (after moving from a different extension that doesn't support my version of GNOME) but it's really flaky. I'll try this. Thanks for the tip.
iamcalledrob 7mo ago
Re: buggy GNOME extensions, it drives me nuts that GNOME has no built in support for menu bar icons/app indicators. There's a whole class of GUI apps that should run in the background until needed, and GNOME just has no solution here. I really don't get why they removed this functionality. I don't want a "service" model where you start/stop gui apps via systemd. And I don't want to keep a window around for no good reason.
- seabrookmx 7mo ago
  GNOME 44 has built-in support finally, but they're hidden in the quick settings menu. I prefer having them in the tray so I can see if they're running without having to click around.

corlinp 7mo ago

Every time I get a new Mac, I run these commands to reduce the spacing between menu bar icons. Lets you fit at least 2x the number of items in the menu bar. ``` defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSpacing -int 2 defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSelectionPadding -int 2 ```

potatocoffee 7mo ago
This is so much better, thank you for this.
swiftcoder 7mo ago
Dude. How am I only just learning this? This needs to be plastered loudly over the internet
richardlblair 7mo ago
This was always my biggest gripe about using a mac, the OS that "just works". I ended up a bunch of commands I had to run and a stack of apps I needed to install for it to feel usable.
- freedomben 7mo ago
  And for years and years when in discussions about Linux vs Mac, Linux was always slammed as having to be customized and "user's should never have to use the terminal" . (I agree with that, but even in 2014 I remember having to run terminal commands to tweak stuff to make it work more like I wanted to)
  - richardlblair 7mo ago
    Ironically I ended up on linux. Windows went to crap, and I figured if I have to run a bunch of scripts to make my OS usable I may as well just use linux. Honestly, I couldn't be happier. I get so much more out of my hardware and I enjoy the experience so much more.
    - 7mo ago

vladde 7mo ago

i love that they posted a snippet of Swift code showing other developers how to detect this themselves!

eviks 7mo ago

> Apple, a company that traditionally favors simple functionality but not being able to interact with an icon is DISfunctionality, though yes, a simple one. So that principle can't explain the bad design either.

danslo 7mo ago

The only reason I used Tailscale's menubar applet was to change exit nodes, I definitely don't need a whole UI. Guess I'll just stick with CLI only for now (via darwin-nix)

nozzlegear 7mo ago

Isn't it true that Apple just prefers apps not use the menu bar in the first place? I'm not sure where I had read that, but it might explain why Apple doesn't improve the menu bar. Personally I'm of the opinion that they should improve it because the current situation is untenable. But am I misremembering this?

snowwrestler 7mo ago
Yes, it was a huge mistake to allow any random app developer to claim such a prominent and limited piece of screen real estate. But it’s been an option for so long now that everyone will scream bloody murder if they try take it away. Apple’s opinion seems to be: running out of space happens to only a few people running tons of menu-bar-loving apps, so if you are dorky enough to run into this problem, you should be dorky enough to solve it yourself.
jasomill 7mo ago
Not exactly, though many apps violate Apple's Human Interface Guidelines for macOS menu bar extras[1]: Let people — not your app — decide whether to put your menu bar extra in the menu bar. Typically, people add a menu bar extra to the menu bar by changing a setting in an app’s settings window. To ensure discoverability, however, consider giving people the option of doing so during setup. Avoid relying on the presence of menu bar extras. The system hides and shows menu bar extras regularly, and you can’t be sure which other menu bar extras people have chosen to display or predict the location of your menu bar extra. Consider exposing app-specific functionality in other ways, too. For example, you can provide a Dock menu that appears when people Control-click your app’s Dock icon. People can hide or choose not to use your menu bar extra, but a Dock menu is aways available when your app is running. [1] https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/the-menu-bar#Menu-bar-extras https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

alin23 7mo ago

The notch hiding menubar icons is such a stupid problem to have. I waste hours every week trying to help people who send me frustrated emails because they bought one of my apps and they say: "it doesn't launch" or "why doesn't it have any interface??" No amount of FAQ will help these people. And this also results in hasty refund requests and even worse, chargebacks that take 2x the amount the users paid out of my pocket. I recently helped my brother launch a simple app for making any window a PiP window (https://lowtechguys.com/pipiri https://lowtechguys.com/pipiri) and in the first two days, half of the sales turned into refunds exactly because of this issue. People had so many menubar icons that they thought the app just doesn't work. Not an encouraging launch for his first app. Not to mention the fact that the best solution that helped alleviate this, the Bartender app, was completely broken by Apple's internal API changes in macOS Tahoe. This could have been handled better.

mort96 7mo ago
It's such a simple problem to solve too: when there are too many menu bar icons, put them in an overflow menu. A single icon which contains a list of icons. And let me arrange which icons go into the top bar and which go into the overflow menu. Windows solved this many many decades ago with their system tray overflow menu. Browsers solved it too, by letting you put extension icons in an overflow menu. It's not hard. But nooo, macOS just silently hides applications from you, with no visible indication that there's anything hidden.
- zamadatix 7mo ago
  Even if they didn't want to have an overflow menu for some reason there it boggles my mind why the menu bar isn't just aware of what portion is covered and should be skipped (file menus or icons) in the first place!
  - butlike 7mo ago
    Well there's effectively no space on the lefthand side of the notch. You must assume that side is going to be completely consumed by actual menu items. Side note: If you want to check what icons might be buried by the notch, you can Cmd + Drag any icon from the menu bar to rearrange them. If you drag an icon through the notch, the other items will pop into view, if any are hidden.

matt_daemon 7mo ago

I really thought this was going to be an Apple acquires Tailscale post

comrade1234 7mo ago

There's so much tailscale shilling on hn and if you say anything neutral you're voted down.

rtaylorgarlock 7mo ago
Being a principled, critical thinker sure has its costs these days. Yeah, that's right, I said it. Flag me (lol).
brcmthrowaway 7mo ago
It was way worse before AI
faangguyindia 7mo ago
tailscale offers many good things. for example "tailscale" drop for free, share files between devices on your network also https://tailscale.com/docs/features/tailscale-funnel https://tailscale.com/docs/features/tailscale-funnel which is cloudflare tunnel alternative, no more localtunnel or other things so i am not surprized people like it as product, most good features are free.
- whywhywhywhy 7mo ago
  Had very high hopes for tailscale drop but it’s worked literally once of the 7 times I tried to use it before I stopped trying. Mostly machines on the same network.

wrs 7mo ago

> no options to rearrange the menu bar items This, at least, is not correct. Hold down Command and drag an icon to rearrange the order.

ryanisnan 7mo ago
I think they mean developers have no way of requesting or specifying order.
- wrs 7mo ago
  Long experience with Window Taskbar icons has demonstrated you should not give developers that sort of control, only users.

bilalq 7mo ago

I use a wallpaper with a horizontal black bar at the top to make the notch invisible, so this catches me off guard pretty often.

dsl 7mo ago

Tailscale is really losing the plot to the movie. It is an app that sits in the background and provides connectivity. Occasionally you need to change a setting. Absolutely nobody wants a rich windowed UI, or a menu bar widget that drops down a complex detail card. I hope they can see this is exactly what killed desktop anti-virus: something that was supposed to be quietly doing its job in the background started getting in the users way. It needed to poke its head up and scream "hey remember me?" at the behest of some product managers or growth hackers. Eventually it got so bad Microsoft just baked it into the OS. Tailscale is on even worse footing here because Apple is even quicker to act when you destroy user experience.

likecarter 7mo ago
I feel like you don’t use tailscale. Because I use it every day - and I get confused when I can’t find it.
micromacrofoot 7mo ago
I have too many toolbar icons, so I do actually want the window to switch to so I can copy and paste IP addresses. I already keep it open so I can just command-tab to the window, and it's way better this way. I use tailscale every single day.
joshryandavis 7mo ago
You're the one losing the plot. It's optional, still closes to the system tray without you explicitly docking it. It doesn't emerge at random like McAfee. > Eventually it got so bad Microsoft just baked it into the OS. Tailscale is on even worse footing here because Apple is even quicker to act when you destroy user experience. So Apple are going to bake Tailscale into the OS? Also, read the blog. It's a response to Apple's bad user experience.

varenc 7mo ago

I always change my screen resolution to avoid the notch on my Mac. It's non-obvious how to do this but you end up with a slightly shorter resolution than the default. I know this means I'm wasting potential pixels, and wasting all the engineer effort that went into the nearly bezel-free design, but worth it IMHO.

KellyCriterion 7mo ago

I stumbled across TailScale while I asked ClaudeAI regarding switching off of VPN: I wasnt aware of the tool. Im "shocked" how perfect it functions! It worked out of the box for a fairly simple but old windows setup where I could apply it: Everything was perfectly fine, super user friendly in the beginning. Actually one of the tools that you could use to admin your mum & dad computer

varenc 7mo ago
> Actually one of the tools that you could use to admin your mum & dad computer I do exactly this! I keep Tailscale running my family's shared iMac, making it easy for me to remotely connect to it and screen share if necessary to help. I went a more complicated route[0] and installed Tailscale as a system background daemon that runs as root and starts up before the first user login. Which also means no GUI interface, so more protected from user error. [0] https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/wiki/Tailscaled-on-macOS https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/wiki/Tailscaled-on-ma... (the standalone variant is also entirely opensource, unlike their macOS GUI app)
- KellyCriterion 7mo ago
  > installed Tailscale as a system background daemon On Windows Server this was done somehow automaticly the last time I installed it: So access is possible after the machine is booted That was the beauty that caught me: It just worked out of the box, not any SSL certificate stuff signing issues etc. And the funny thing: I really didnt know it existed before the AI told me about it :-))

ed_mercer 7mo ago

> Apple could certainly make some changes to prevent this being an issue at all. Why Apple still hasn't fixed this in 2026 baffles me. The fact that a company the size of Tailscale has to find workarounds for an Apple blunder like this speaks volumes about how terrible Apple's software management is.

politelemon 7mo ago
It really is very simple. Because people keep purchasing their products.

koinedad 7mo ago

The hidden notch issue is a pretty big problem. I had to look for tools to shrink the width spacing just to survive, and it just looks bad

deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]

anonu 7mo ago

would love to be able to run two accounts (two tailnets) on my MBP. Haven't figured out a good solution.

vicchenai 7mo ago

This feels like one of those bugs that sounds niche until you put a work Mac through the usual gauntlet of VPN, MDM, chat, calendar, backup, and whatever else corp IT adds. Not catastrophic, but it is kind of wild that macOS still has no first party overflow affordance for menu bar icons.

vicnov 7mo ago

This is all cool, but to allow ssh access I still need to install tailscale through brew? i don't get it.

kccqzy 7mo ago
I use Tailscale from the App Store. To allow SSH access I simply turn on the Apple-preinstalled SSH daemon.

yardstick 7mo ago

As a workaround, can Tailscale internally add multiple menu items and keep adding until one reports as visible?

faangguyindia 7mo ago

yesterday i setup tailscale on a gcp VM. i enabled route advertising and managed to ping my google cloud instances using tailscale problem is the packet loss rate is high. SSH tunnel worked! soo i think there is something wrong with tailscale

dcrazy 7mo ago

Back in the Mac OS X public beta days (and maybe even into 10.0–10.1?), apps that are nowadays shoved into the menu at used to live in the Dock. I kinda think I prefer that.

fogzen 7mo ago

I don't see what this has to do with the notch. There's limited space in the menu bar. The overflow is hidden with or without the notch. It is a bit weird that Apple hasn't provided a simple UI indicator that some icons are hidden. All that's needed is a dot with a tooltip that opens the settings to configure the menu icons.

Nevermark 7mo ago

Menu items are so convenient. Apple should let users double the menu bar height. Put the app menus, user name, current time and search along the bottom. A text only bar would look coherent. Then put menu bar items on the row above. Default from right, but let users move items to the left. I use hiding menu bar and dock. Dynamic Wallpaper toggles desktop files/widgets visibility. So my Mac's resting face is, and would remain, completely uncluttered.

nickfthedev 7mo ago

Apple should solve this. Windows got a little menu that can popup this can't be that hard

michelb 7mo ago
They might be out of courage.

noja 7mo ago

I use https://apps.apple.com/at/app/hidden-bar/id1452453066 https://apps.apple.com/at/app/hidden-bar/id1452453066 Hidden Bar to workaround the menu bar problem.

bsmith 7mo ago

I don't understand why people are still using Tailscale after the issue they had where two independent tunnels were connected together.

jwrallie 7mo ago
Never heard of it, could you send us a reference? What do you use instead?
- bsmith 7mo ago
  I use almost plain old wireguard, hosting a wg-easy container that has a nice web gui wrapper that makes it easy with QR codes, no configuration files to create like just wireguard. It's the technology that Tailscale uses, so why would you complicate it, adding more risk? The incident seems like it was never exploited, and it was fixed within 24 hours. However, in my opinion, the fact that this COULD happen, let alone that id DID happen, is too much risk, and why I switched immediately after hearing about it. AI overview of the incident: TS-2023-001: Node Sharing Across Tailnets Without Authorization (January 2023) A bug in Tailscale's node sharing logic allowed the creation of sharing invitations by unauthorized users. A malicious individual who knew a target node's database ID could generate and accept a sharing invite for that node without being an admin of the target node's tailnet — for any node in any tailnet. Circl So in practice, a node from one unrelated tailnet could be pulled into another person's tailnet without the owner's consent. A node's ID is only visible in the API or admin console, by admins of either the node's tailnet or a tailnet to which that node has already been shared Circl — which limited exploitability, since you'd need to already know the target's internal database ID (a random 64-bit integer, not easily guessable). Tailscale fixed it server-side on 2023-01-12 and stated they verified it was never exploited. The bug reporter (Benjamin Roberts, HN user tsujamin) noted it was discovered accidentally while managing their own tailnet. The Hacker News thread praised Tailscale for deploying a fix within 24 hours: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34420142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34420142 TS-2024-002: ACL Overwrites Across Tailnets (May 2023 – July 2024) There's also a second related incident that's perhaps even more alarming in concept: an admin user could overwrite the ACLs of one tailnet with ACLs from another tailnet. Any user who was an Admin in multiple tailnets and edited ACLs in the admin console between May 22, 2023 and July 17th, 2024 could trigger this bug after switching the active tailnet. Tailscale This one involved the tailnet-switching feature in the admin console accidentally "bleeding" policy configuration between separate, unrelated tailnets.

jiehong 7mo ago

The new window is nice and useful, but I find the window’s header to be on the very thick side. Nowadays, that whole header should probably leave in the sidebar itself, and the sidebar could probably be more "Liquid Glass"-like.

lukasholzer 7mo ago

My only workaround with the stupid notch is to connect it to an external screen which is wider than my 16inch macbook pro so that I can access those apps

kangraemin 7mo ago

Moving from a menu bar app to a proper window is a bold call. Menu bar was convenient for "set it and forget it" but terrible for anything beyond toggling on/off. Curious if they'll keep the menu bar icon as a quick shortcut or kill it entirely.

chris_st 7mo ago
From the article: > As we noted at its September beta release, a windowed version of Tailscale’s macOS app doesn’t replace the menu bar app, but runs alongside it. It can be pulled up from the Dock or a Spotlight search, and makes a lot of Tailscale data and features more accessible.

kiviuq 7mo ago

“We don’t have any control over where things get rendered in the menu bar,” said one Tailscale engineer, who asked to go nameless so as to share their honest opinion. “You just say, ‘I want to be a menu bar app.’ They shove it up there, and that’s it, you end up where you end up.” > said one Tailscale engineer, who asked to go nameless Fear in a free society? There’s no contradiction here. A free society doesn't create a fearless society. Because freedom is the freedom to amass property. If you are not in that class of capital owners your fear is justified. Class society.

frantathefranta 7mo ago
I thought it was just Tailscale trying to style their blogpost into a news article.
sunaookami 7mo ago
It's a joke...

programmarchy 7mo ago

I really dislike how apps add themselves to the menubar. And I hate if there's no option to remove it from the menubar. Icons with indicators like WiFi, Battery, etc. make sense. But if an app does not need an indicator like that, just add the capabilities to the Dock icon!

macshome 7mo ago

The "apps" that appear in the menu bar are called Menu Bar Extras. They are supposed to be an optional UI to provide quick access to functions of regular applications that are not running in the foreground. They aren't supposed to be the entire app or the only way to interact with something.