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Is my vision that bad? No, it's just a bug in Apple's Calculator

(martin.wojtczyk.de)
631 points wojtczyk | 7 comments | 31 Aug 24 04:29 UTC | HN request time: 0.213s | source | bottom
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dylan-m ◴[31 Aug 24 05:51 UTC] No.41406819[source]▶
One of my favourite unreported MacOS issues comes from how, at some point, they changed the appearance of the window close button to be a particular shade of red with a tiny little X in the center. And if you happen to be using a particular kind of screen and possibly wearing glasses, that little X kind of wanders around in the button, appearing just slightly off center in a maddening way. Made only more maddening by the glasses component: https://www.robbert.org/2014/10/the-off-center-close-button/.

That post points out it’s probably just subpixel stuff causing the issue, but I think my thick, cheap glasses at the time were adding a layer of chromatic aberration to something that was already visually confusing.

I assume it’s kind of gone away at this point with all the high DPI screens these days. But I remember thinking at the time, if there was a public bug tracker, that issue would be a fun one.

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1. jahnu ◴[31 Aug 24 08:01 UTC] No.41407250[source]▶
Another irritating thing that is captured in that image is the single pixel gap between the top of the application window and the menu bar. If the desktop background is bright it is very distracting. Not a mistake like the off centre X but drives me mad, nevertheless.
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2. jeffhuys ◴[31 Aug 24 09:56 UTC] No.41407683[source]▶
I knew from the very start of using macOS that it was designed around apps NOT being full-screen. Yeah, they are catering to the full-screen-apps people a little more nowadays, but embracing floating windows everywhere, and making good use of the distinction betweend CMD+Tab and CMD+~ makes it so much more powerful than just tabbing through full-screen apps, or three-finger-swiping. It also makes macOS way more beautiful to look at in my opinion.
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3. sph ◴[31 Aug 24 11:56 UTC] No.41408208[source]▶
That gap provides contrast and separation between two similarly-coloured-but-not-quite grey objects. It would look worse without it, though I agree it is silly.

This is the same reason why window gaps are so popular in all tiling window managers. It just looks better.

4. skydhash ◴[31 Aug 24 12:43 UTC] No.41408498[source]▶
It’s quite maddening if you use spaces (as workspaces) and same windows across them. An option like CMD-Tabbing being restricted to only applications with windows in the current space will go a long way.

Power users is an unknown concept at Apple.

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5. jwells89 ◴[31 Aug 24 14:00 UTC] No.41408927{3}[source]▶
I’m not sure that they’re an unknown concept, because macOS has lots of little things tucked away all over the place for power users. It’s one of the things I miss most when using other desktops, particularly those that go maybe a little too far on the minimalism thing (like GNOME).

It’s just that they expect these users to have fairly specific usage patterns and design around those. The further one’s personal patterns deviate from that expectation, the higher the level of friction encountered.

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6. skydhash ◴[31 Aug 24 14:21 UTC] No.41409069{4}[source]▶
> It’s just that they expect these users to have fairly specific usage patterns and design around those.

That’s how you design generic appliances, not professional tools. While macOS is great for the users it caters to (that only use a handful of apps), it’s not for people that use their computers as computers (making it do pretty much everything).

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7. jwells89 ◴[31 Aug 24 15:05 UTC] No.41409399{5}[source]▶
It’s kinda tough, because a clean-cut, coherent vision of how the OS is intended to be used is necessary to build a great experience. The more you try to accommodate ways of usage beyond that, the more the vision falls apart and you end up with checkbox waterfalls and branching tunnels of config dialogs added in the pursuit of making everybody happy.

So realistically, judiciousness is required to keep it all glued together, and some usage patterns just won’t be accommodated.

For example, Apple doesn’t seem to be bending over backwards to make former Windows users happy, because the way that desktop works is just too different from what they’ve envisioned and what their long time users are used to. If they add a series of toggles to support Windows usage patterns, that’s a sudden 2x multiplier on the behaviors and UI that needs to be tested.

That said, I don’t necessarily agree with all of Apple’s decisions (I’ve never liked the linear representation of virtual desktops that in place since 10.7 Lion that well and preferred 10.6’s Snow Leopard’s 2D grid, for example), but the lines have to be drawn somewhere.