3 ms·

Prior to MacOS 10.11, Mission Control was good: you would swipe up with four fingers and it would show you a preview of all of your spaces. Then in 10.11, for n

Prior to MacOS 10.11, Mission Control was good: you would swipe up with four fingers and it would show you a preview of all of your spaces. Then in 10.11, for no discernable reason, they changed it to suck: rather than showing you a preview, the bar just says "Desktop 1", "Desktop 2", etc until you mouse over it; the practical effect is that using spaces is disorienting and requires memorization. Some third-party software pretends to restore this functionality, but they do it by repositioning the mouse to simulate a hover, which introduces a delay and doesn't integrate correctly with the animation. Someone wrote a patch that works by disabling SIP and injecting code (https://github.com/briankendall/forceFullDesktopBar https://github.com/briankendall/forceFullDesktopBar), but eventually stopped maintaining it. A decade later, I doubt anyone at Apple remembers that this bit of user interface used to be good.

ebbi 4mo ago
Agree! That "Desktop 1", "Desktop 2" view is so annoying, and given we have higher res monitors now, it serves no purpose if the intention was to save space.
- josho 4mo ago
  I loathe that I can't even rename the desktops. Wouldn't it be great to have them named "Design", "Dev", "Productivity", "Games". Or whatever makes sense given your needs, instead of simply desktop #.
  - jeroenhd 4mo ago
    Windows has had the rename feature for ages and I don't know why Apple can't just copy that. They've copied plenty of other stuff, why stick with the weirdly restrictive desktop naming scheme?
willtemperley 4mo ago
> rather than showing you a preview, the bar just says "Desktop 1", "Desktop 2" I never noticed that behaviour because I only use mission control in full-screen mode. If you swipe up with three (or four) fingers from a full-screen window the previews are visible immediately. I have no idea why we need a different preview for desktop vs full screen however. The part of this UX that annoys me is the spaces get re-ordered for no apparent reason. I usually have a few IDE windows open and it's tiring to have to double-check the window hasn't moved.
- fragmede 4mo ago
  that's a setting you can turn off. settings -> desktops and spaces -> reorder spaces
  - willtemperley 4mo ago
    Ah thanks! The setting is "Automatically rearrange Spaces based on most recent use" which explains why the behaviour felt so intermittent.
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  - 71bw 4mo ago
    Does it work nowadays? Back in High Sierra days whenever I tried turning this off it did absolutely nothing and still reordered my shit.
    - willtemperley 4mo ago
      Turning off "Automatically rearrange Spaces based on most recent use" keeps the spaces in the order I left them. That's nice. Three finger swipe between spaces when not using the preview seems to work. However, swiping beetween the previews, it sometimes jumps to random places in the order - which is not nice. Possibly a bug, but I might as well just write this as a letter to Santa because it's got more chance of being read than a feeback.
  - QuercusMax 4mo ago
    that is an incredible rage-inducing default, and really makes no sense. why would i want a system that scrambles my spaces?
- jimrandomh 4mo ago
  The full-screen mode handling might be a clue about what went wrong: if you swipe up from a space that contains a full screen app, it has an animation where the app goes into a slot in the preview strip, but that animation doesn't make sense visually for a non-full-screen space. So, perhaps someone was implementing that animation, didn't want to implement an alternate animation for the non-fullscreen case, and decided to minimize the preview strip instead? And because this was after Steve Jobs had died, there was no one left in charge of UX to explain why that was a bad idea?

ebbi 4mo ago

Agree! That "Desktop 1", "Desktop 2" view is so annoying, and given we have higher res monitors now, it serves no purpose if the intention was to save space.

josho 4mo ago
I loathe that I can't even rename the desktops. Wouldn't it be great to have them named "Design", "Dev", "Productivity", "Games". Or whatever makes sense given your needs, instead of simply desktop #.
- jeroenhd 4mo ago
  Windows has had the rename feature for ages and I don't know why Apple can't just copy that. They've copied plenty of other stuff, why stick with the weirdly restrictive desktop naming scheme?

willtemperley 4mo ago

> rather than showing you a preview, the bar just says "Desktop 1", "Desktop 2" I never noticed that behaviour because I only use mission control in full-screen mode. If you swipe up with three (or four) fingers from a full-screen window the previews are visible immediately. I have no idea why we need a different preview for desktop vs full screen however. The part of this UX that annoys me is the spaces get re-ordered for no apparent reason. I usually have a few IDE windows open and it's tiring to have to double-check the window hasn't moved.

fragmede 4mo ago
that's a setting you can turn off. settings -> desktops and spaces -> reorder spaces
- willtemperley 4mo ago
  Ah thanks! The setting is "Automatically rearrange Spaces based on most recent use" which explains why the behaviour felt so intermittent.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- 71bw 4mo ago
  Does it work nowadays? Back in High Sierra days whenever I tried turning this off it did absolutely nothing and still reordered my shit.
  - willtemperley 4mo ago
    Turning off "Automatically rearrange Spaces based on most recent use" keeps the spaces in the order I left them. That's nice. Three finger swipe between spaces when not using the preview seems to work. However, swiping beetween the previews, it sometimes jumps to random places in the order - which is not nice. Possibly a bug, but I might as well just write this as a letter to Santa because it's got more chance of being read than a feeback.
- QuercusMax 4mo ago
  that is an incredible rage-inducing default, and really makes no sense. why would i want a system that scrambles my spaces?
jimrandomh 4mo ago
The full-screen mode handling might be a clue about what went wrong: if you swipe up from a space that contains a full screen app, it has an animation where the app goes into a slot in the preview strip, but that animation doesn't make sense visually for a non-full-screen space. So, perhaps someone was implementing that animation, didn't want to implement an alternate animation for the non-fullscreen case, and decided to minimize the preview strip instead? And because this was after Steve Jobs had died, there was no one left in charge of UX to explain why that was a bad idea?