> If they approve, the settings open, then the user has to find the specific little toggle and enable it. Another security prompt then done. Why isn’t this at most 2 prompts?
Answer: Because modern-day Apple has subscribed to a particular brand of mitigation for the "noobs will always click 'Allow' especially if you ask them to first" problem. The mitigation is that Apple just dumps you on step 2 of a little 4-5 step mini sysadmin adventure where you prove, every time, that you're sophisticated enough to deserve an exception to the padded-cell walled garden mode they've sealed off 'for your safety.'
As a complete nerd, you'd think maybe I'd like that I can prove my skills like this, but it comes off as deeply disrespectful to me as the user that I can't disable this.
What's my solution to prevent grandma or a 10-year-old from clicking "Allow full filesystem access and keylogging" to an executable she downloaded from facebook-security-center-and-password-verification-cgi-bin-ab383 dot xyz? IDK, that's their problem, but they should offer a way for those of us who aren't clueless to turn whatever it is off.
That’s likely not quite the reason. It is to make you have to pause to think if this is the action you want to take.
On the flip side, many websites ask if I want to allow notifications. I almost never do. I was looking at settings recently and surprised how often I’d clicked yes by accident (maybe about 5% false click rate?)
Right, that’s why you get a simpler yes/no dialog for notifications, and a conplex “navigate to this settings pane and click a separate button” flow for a keylogger
For a long time, I’ve believed that the actual solution is to make the system transparent enough that a compromised system is obvious. Imagine playing hide and go seek in the salt flats
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonneville_Salt_Flats — the salt flats are extremely flat (as the name implies), and because of all the salt, no vegetation can survive. Look at the pictures: there are no trees, no grass, no hiding places at all. Anyone standing (or even lying prone) on the salt flats is visible to anyone else for miles around.
GP was saying that systems should be "transparent enough that a compromised system is obvious". I'm not entirely convinced that that's possible (On Trusting Trust should have taught us that compromised systems can create places for the compromise to hide), which means that the salt flats analogy is not a great analogy, IMHO. But at least now you understand the analogy.
This particular permission is pernicious, ponder for a picosecond the possibilities:
It’s used for writing keyloggers.
That’s it. It’s the permission that lets you write a keylogger. It SHOULD NOT be just a click away. It should require some extra song and dance, because this is an especially dangerous permission, and the extra friction is justified.
All the permissions are treated the same way though. Microphone access. Screen sharing access. etc. Yes, all could be used to spy on you in evil ways, but the replacement of a straightforward "Want to grant this app the following permissions?" with these stupid little spelunks through the garbage app that is Settings irritates me every time.
Apple should throw this whole thing out and replace it with first-launch lists of permissions, with toggles for each. This app 'Zoom' wants "Record the screen, microphone, camera." Then you're done and you don't have to keep searching for it in little lists and relaunching it.
Honestly, I think the permissions model for desktop and laptop computers is way too permissive to begin with, I think it just kinda sucks and doesn’t do its job. Apple is kind of fixing it but there is a long way to go.
There have been alarm bells ringing in my head for a long time with all these settings, and the fact that they’re buried in the settings app gives me a lot of peace of mind. I’ll click through a lot of boxes and alerts and grant permissions that I shouldn’t. I’m SUPER glad that I won’t accidentally grant, you know, full disk access or accessibility to an app just by clicking on a box that appears at startup.
I remember back in the bad old days when I was constantly making extra user accounts just to run some program. Kinda sucked. Hard truth is, you sometimes want to run code that you don’t fully trust.
And then one that grinds my gears, perhaps more than it should: there's no way to change the default browser without explicit user action or consent.
But do that and the very next thing that happens when you try to open a browser or a link in an email?
"Your browser has been changed from Safari to Chrome. Would you like to use Safari or keep using Chrome?" and for a little salt, the default is "Use Safari".
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), but eventually stopped maintaining it.
A decade later, I doubt anyone at Apple remembers that this bit of user interface used to be good.
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.
> 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.
> Two decades ago I had a better Mac desktop experience than I have today.
Two decades ago was 2006. I have the same desktop experience today as I had two decades ago (Fvwm2) and have had the grid virtual desktop layout this author misses so much for the entire time via the Fvwm2 (and Fvwm before that) virtual desktops feature. One of the reasons I switched to Fvwm (I no longer remember when, but sometime in the mid to late 1990's) was the grid virtual desktops feature. So I've had gridded virtual desktops for longer than twenty years. Fvwm2's configuration has been tweaked and adjusted slightly along the way, but at no time did a corporate designer decide that I no longer should have a feature I had previously been using.
Proprietary software does not have your interests at heart, it has its stock price or next quarters sales numbers at heart, nothing more.
Reading the article as a Linux user was almost infuriating. I can't imagine having my workflow, something I've refined for my needs over the years, taken away from me at the wish of a company. Before I switched to Plasma and Wayland I ran XFCE with the exact same config for maybe 15 years, unbothered by updates.
Magnet is easily one of the best mac apps i've ever purchased - makes window management so easy and it works great every time. Just Command + Shift and then you can pick any portion of the screen you want the window to go to.
That paired with multiple desktops does the trick for me! Highly reccommend (not sure if it's okay to share URLs? sorry in case it's not):
Reduce the huuuuge amount of padding around everything (configurable?) and drop the icon, and I'll definitely buy it! I was looking for something exactly like this earlier this week!
It's too bad we can't mix and match parts of releases as desired. If I could have OS X 10.9 Mavericks (last Aqua release) with 10.6 Spaces and modern macOS integration features (Continuity, etc) I'd be in heaven.
Humans have good spatial memory and having a handful of statically-positioned desktops in a 2D plane makes navigation intuitive and consistent.
The real issue is how the ORDER of the desktops changes all the time which messes with that spatial memory and kills a lot of the productivity improvements. A consistent straight line would still be worse than a grid, but still MUCH better than the current situation.
This fixes a dozens-of-times-per-day annoyance for me.
The grid is good, but even better is the instant virtual display switching.
Nowhere is the death-by-a-thousand-paper-cuts annoyance of modern macOS worse than having to hit Ctrl→→→→→→→ and suffer those repeated animations, over and over.
It's every action on Mac and iOS that does this, and it has been increasing in intrusiveness for a decade. I can't be sure why they do it, but it comes off as though their visual designers are immature, thinking we want to see their impressive animations not just in a demo, not just in a tutorial that we go through once, where we are meant to grasp the relationships between the things, but over and over again, all day long, for decades.
I freaking don't. One time was plenty. I don't want any animation. And the "reduce animation" feature's implementation is a slap in the face: all the delay -- that part is non-negotiable apparently -- but with blurry crossfades instead.
It is absolutely, positively mind boggling that you have to sit through those animations. And key presses don’t even take effect if your new desktop until the animation is done. It’s just lunacy.
How does a company with infinite resources and talented designers come up with shit like that??
Slightly off-topic: the old Aqua UI looks so much better. Not only it was much easier to see what's a control and what's text, but it also looked visually nicer (subjective, I know).
We need a new social media platform purely for Apple product experiences. Stay with me. People post their experiences with various parts of all their products, from hardware button position to software design and behavior. Upvotes are "It's Genius", downvotes are "It's Shit" -- because Apple has completely shirked its much needed Jobsian specter.
The joke, of course, is that I imagine a good 75% of the reviews would be "it's shit."
They already have that, it's the Apple Support Community. Apple still manages to neglect most complaints on the site.
Honestly, people have been complaining about Apple's decision on every semi-Apple-related forum forever. Still didn't prevent them from rolling out Liquid Glass. Not sure another one would do the job
I just installed it, but I can't get it to switch spaces, or show the grid overlay. It just beeps at me with the "you can't do that" beep. When I click "Add Desktop", it says "Could Not Add Desktop" and "GridLion could not read the current Spaces for this display."
This is a M1 macbook air. I really want to try this.
You could call it hyperspace in an homage to that old 10.6-era application which customized spaces. (Also I just realized why Apple called it called mission control, it allows you to organize spaces).
Also this is basically a replacement for the zombie TotalSpaces 3
Oh man, thank you! I was just complaining the other day about the missing Spaces grid… when they first took it away in Lion I looked frantically for the setting to bring it back, with no such luck.
Ironically, I think the reason they took it away was to help with fullscreen macOS apps, which are a garbage anti-feature it doesn’t seem like anybody uses. Long live the grid!
Part of the reason I wanted to to make the app is because _I actually do like fullscreen apps_. Or at least maybe I learned to after they took away the grid. In any case I certainly wanted this app to work with them.
As a fellow fullscreen liker (there are dozens of us! dozens!), this looks quite intriguing to me. A grid layout always fit better with my mental model of how these types of spaces should work, since I could use rows as categories of work and columns as specific applications within that category. Or one of a few other mental models I've used over the years.
Many parts of the LLM care about UX, and you unlock it with your feedback loop, which is a good way to unlock it but one of many ways.
One way to show that LLMs care about UX is to have one tutor you about UX. If they weren't trained to care about it, they couldn't do a decent job. But I've asked dozens of questions about UX to LLMs and they have a great deal of insight.
I don't get the use of the spatial layout here. A line may be cruder but if you're going full swordfish hackerman mode why are you caring about grid geography at all? Bind each to a hotkey. The only time you're swiping is when you're lost.
Like what competitive player uses scroll wheel weapon switching in Quakelike games? Nobody
> The next CEO of Apple is someone that cares about quality. (As evidenced by how good the hardware is)
I think it's important "what quality" they care about. Tim Cook cared about supply chain quality, and honestly he did an amazing job, but he didn't care much about software, vision of Apple, etc.
The current guy didn't ever once show a sign he cared about anything but 'Number Go Up'[1] so I don't see how anyone could be worse for those of us who care about the actual product than he was.
[1] to be clear, I stipulate Cook is indeed the world champion of Number Go Up. Nobody Number Goed Up more than Cook did. For Ternus to do Number Go Up to the same multiplier Cook did, I think he'd have to acquire all the other companies in the world.
> If they approve, the settings open, then the user has to find the specific little toggle and enable it. Another security prompt then done. Why isn’t this at most 2 prompts?
Answer: Because modern-day Apple has subscribed to a particular brand of mitigation for the "noobs will always click 'Allow' especially if you ask them to first" problem. The mitigation is that Apple just dumps you on step 2 of a little 4-5 step mini sysadmin adventure where you prove, every time, that you're sophisticated enough to deserve an exception to the padded-cell walled garden mode they've sealed off 'for your safety.'
As a complete nerd, you'd think maybe I'd like that I can prove my skills like this, but it comes off as deeply disrespectful to me as the user that I can't disable this.
What's my solution to prevent grandma or a 10-year-old from clicking "Allow full filesystem access and keylogging" to an executable she downloaded from facebook-security-center-and-password-verification-cgi-bin-ab383 dot xyz? IDK, that's their problem, but they should offer a way for those of us who aren't clueless to turn whatever it is off.
That’s likely not quite the reason. It is to make you have to pause to think if this is the action you want to take.
On the flip side, many websites ask if I want to allow notifications. I almost never do. I was looking at settings recently and surprised how often I’d clicked yes by accident (maybe about 5% false click rate?)
but the damage of notifications is almost zero compared to keylogger IMHO
Right, that’s why you get a simpler yes/no dialog for notifications, and a conplex “navigate to this settings pane and click a separate button” flow for a keylogger
Notification requests add to decision fatigue, which can lead to bad things.
For a long time, I’ve believed that the actual solution is to make the system transparent enough that a compromised system is obvious. Imagine playing hide and go seek in the salt flats
What does that actually mean?
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonneville_Salt_Flats — the salt flats are extremely flat (as the name implies), and because of all the salt, no vegetation can survive. Look at the pictures: there are no trees, no grass, no hiding places at all. Anyone standing (or even lying prone) on the salt flats is visible to anyone else for miles around.
GP was saying that systems should be "transparent enough that a compromised system is obvious". I'm not entirely convinced that that's possible (On Trusting Trust should have taught us that compromised systems can create places for the compromise to hide), which means that the salt flats analogy is not a great analogy, IMHO. But at least now you understand the analogy.
> but they should offer a way for those of us who aren't clueless to turn whatever it is off.
I'm not sure if it's what you're asking for, but you can disable SIP:
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/disabling...
This particular permission is pernicious, ponder for a picosecond the possibilities:
It’s used for writing keyloggers.
That’s it. It’s the permission that lets you write a keylogger. It SHOULD NOT be just a click away. It should require some extra song and dance, because this is an especially dangerous permission, and the extra friction is justified.
All the permissions are treated the same way though. Microphone access. Screen sharing access. etc. Yes, all could be used to spy on you in evil ways, but the replacement of a straightforward "Want to grant this app the following permissions?" with these stupid little spelunks through the garbage app that is Settings irritates me every time.
Apple should throw this whole thing out and replace it with first-launch lists of permissions, with toggles for each. This app 'Zoom' wants "Record the screen, microphone, camera." Then you're done and you don't have to keep searching for it in little lists and relaunching it.
Honestly, I think the permissions model for desktop and laptop computers is way too permissive to begin with, I think it just kinda sucks and doesn’t do its job. Apple is kind of fixing it but there is a long way to go.
There have been alarm bells ringing in my head for a long time with all these settings, and the fact that they’re buried in the settings app gives me a lot of peace of mind. I’ll click through a lot of boxes and alerts and grant permissions that I shouldn’t. I’m SUPER glad that I won’t accidentally grant, you know, full disk access or accessibility to an app just by clicking on a box that appears at startup.
I remember back in the bad old days when I was constantly making extra user accounts just to run some program. Kinda sucked. Hard truth is, you sometimes want to run code that you don’t fully trust.
And then one that grinds my gears, perhaps more than it should: there's no way to change the default browser without explicit user action or consent.
But do that and the very next thing that happens when you try to open a browser or a link in an email?
"Your browser has been changed from Safari to Chrome. Would you like to use Safari or keep using Chrome?" and for a little salt, the default is "Use Safari".
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), but eventually stopped maintaining it.
A decade later, I doubt anyone at Apple remembers that this bit of user interface used to be good.
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.
> 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.
that's a setting you can turn off. settings -> desktops and spaces -> reorder spaces
Ah thanks!
The setting is "Automatically rearrange Spaces based on most recent use" which explains why the behaviour felt so intermittent.
I’ve been using a friend’s app switcher because cmd+tab was a bit too slow and not window oriented.
But this has been pretty nice for me.
https://mwitch.viraat.dev/
It’s also open source if you want to customize it for your own preferences (pinned apps, custom keybinds, etc)
> Two decades ago I had a better Mac desktop experience than I have today.
Two decades ago was 2006. I have the same desktop experience today as I had two decades ago (Fvwm2) and have had the grid virtual desktop layout this author misses so much for the entire time via the Fvwm2 (and Fvwm before that) virtual desktops feature. One of the reasons I switched to Fvwm (I no longer remember when, but sometime in the mid to late 1990's) was the grid virtual desktops feature. So I've had gridded virtual desktops for longer than twenty years. Fvwm2's configuration has been tweaked and adjusted slightly along the way, but at no time did a corporate designer decide that I no longer should have a feature I had previously been using.
Proprietary software does not have your interests at heart, it has its stock price or next quarters sales numbers at heart, nothing more.
Yeah okay. But at least we have decent font rendering.
Reading the article as a Linux user was almost infuriating. I can't imagine having my workflow, something I've refined for my needs over the years, taken away from me at the wish of a company. Before I switched to Plasma and Wayland I ran XFCE with the exact same config for maybe 15 years, unbothered by updates.
Magnet is easily one of the best mac apps i've ever purchased - makes window management so easy and it works great every time. Just Command + Shift and then you can pick any portion of the screen you want the window to go to.
That paired with multiple desktops does the trick for me! Highly reccommend (not sure if it's okay to share URLs? sorry in case it's not):
https://magnet.crowdcafe.com/
Reduce the huuuuge amount of padding around everything (configurable?) and drop the icon, and I'll definitely buy it! I was looking for something exactly like this earlier this week!
Nice to see I'm not alone in missing old Spaces.
It's too bad we can't mix and match parts of releases as desired. If I could have OS X 10.9 Mavericks (last Aqua release) with 10.6 Spaces and modern macOS integration features (Continuity, etc) I'd be in heaven.
Humans have good spatial memory and having a handful of statically-positioned desktops in a 2D plane makes navigation intuitive and consistent.
The real issue is how the ORDER of the desktops changes all the time which messes with that spatial memory and kills a lot of the productivity improvements. A consistent straight line would still be worse than a grid, but still MUCH better than the current situation.
I think this behavior can be changed in System Settings > Desktop & Dock > Automatically Rearrange Spaces based on most recent use (turn it off)
This fixes a dozens-of-times-per-day annoyance for me.
The grid is good, but even better is the instant virtual display switching.
Nowhere is the death-by-a-thousand-paper-cuts annoyance of modern macOS worse than having to hit Ctrl→→→→→→→ and suffer those repeated animations, over and over.
It's every action on Mac and iOS that does this, and it has been increasing in intrusiveness for a decade. I can't be sure why they do it, but it comes off as though their visual designers are immature, thinking we want to see their impressive animations not just in a demo, not just in a tutorial that we go through once, where we are meant to grasp the relationships between the things, but over and over again, all day long, for decades.
I freaking don't. One time was plenty. I don't want any animation. And the "reduce animation" feature's implementation is a slap in the face: all the delay -- that part is non-negotiable apparently -- but with blurry crossfades instead.
It is absolutely, positively mind boggling that you have to sit through those animations. And key presses don’t even take effect if your new desktop until the animation is done. It’s just lunacy.
How does a company with infinite resources and talented designers come up with shit like that??
yes! it's the worst!
I've been using Instant Space Switcher (which got a small callout in tfa) as a targeted fix for this, and it's lifechanging
DockDoor does this and a lot more. Its also open source https://dockdoor.net/
I just checked out DockDoor and I could not find anything related to multiple desktops in it at all.
Maybe I just missed it, but I don't see where DockDoor has anything at all to do with spaces.
Slightly off-topic: the old Aqua UI looks so much better. Not only it was much easier to see what's a control and what's text, but it also looked visually nicer (subjective, I know).
Funnily enough when Aqua was new i remember thinking Platinum looked so much better.
We need a new social media platform purely for Apple product experiences. Stay with me. People post their experiences with various parts of all their products, from hardware button position to software design and behavior. Upvotes are "It's Genius", downvotes are "It's Shit" -- because Apple has completely shirked its much needed Jobsian specter.
The joke, of course, is that I imagine a good 75% of the reviews would be "it's shit."
They already have that, it's the Apple Support Community. Apple still manages to neglect most complaints on the site.
Honestly, people have been complaining about Apple's decision on every semi-Apple-related forum forever. Still didn't prevent them from rolling out Liquid Glass. Not sure another one would do the job
how do u write the "llms dont care about ux" paragraph then link to your app site that exemplifies llm ux
I just installed it, but I can't get it to switch spaces, or show the grid overlay. It just beeps at me with the "you can't do that" beep. When I click "Add Desktop", it says "Could Not Add Desktop" and "GridLion could not read the current Spaces for this display."
This is a M1 macbook air. I really want to try this.
You could call it hyperspace in an homage to that old 10.6-era application which customized spaces. (Also I just realized why Apple called it called mission control, it allows you to organize spaces).
Also this is basically a replacement for the zombie TotalSpaces 3
Oh man, thank you! I was just complaining the other day about the missing Spaces grid… when they first took it away in Lion I looked frantically for the setting to bring it back, with no such luck.
Ironically, I think the reason they took it away was to help with fullscreen macOS apps, which are a garbage anti-feature it doesn’t seem like anybody uses. Long live the grid!
Part of the reason I wanted to to make the app is because _I actually do like fullscreen apps_. Or at least maybe I learned to after they took away the grid. In any case I certainly wanted this app to work with them.
As a fellow fullscreen liker (there are dozens of us! dozens!), this looks quite intriguing to me. A grid layout always fit better with my mental model of how these types of spaces should work, since I could use rows as categories of work and columns as specific applications within that category. Or one of a few other mental models I've used over the years.
> LLMs don’t care about UX
Many parts of the LLM care about UX, and you unlock it with your feedback loop, which is a good way to unlock it but one of many ways.
One way to show that LLMs care about UX is to have one tutor you about UX. If they weren't trained to care about it, they couldn't do a decent job. But I've asked dozens of questions about UX to LLMs and they have a great deal of insight.
I don't get the use of the spatial layout here. A line may be cruder but if you're going full swordfish hackerman mode why are you caring about grid geography at all? Bind each to a hotkey. The only time you're swiping is when you're lost.
Like what competitive player uses scroll wheel weapon switching in Quakelike games? Nobody
I am not so hopeful about the future of macOS given that the next CEO of Apple is a hardware guy, not a software person.
That’s one framing, here’s another:
The next CEO of Apple is someone that cares about quality. (As evidenced by how good the hardware is)
> The next CEO of Apple is someone that cares about quality. (As evidenced by how good the hardware is)
I think it's important "what quality" they care about. Tim Cook cared about supply chain quality, and honestly he did an amazing job, but he didn't care much about software, vision of Apple, etc.
Their chips are quality and the hardware itself is still some of the best. Which is what I believe they were designed insinuating.
The current guy didn't ever once show a sign he cared about anything but 'Number Go Up'[1] so I don't see how anyone could be worse for those of us who care about the actual product than he was.
[1] to be clear, I stipulate Cook is indeed the world champion of Number Go Up. Nobody Number Goed Up more than Cook did. For Ternus to do Number Go Up to the same multiplier Cook did, I think he'd have to acquire all the other companies in the world.
I do not like the grid. I can’t see what’s in it.