Fix macOS 26 (Tahoe) exaggerated rounded corners

by guessmyname • 6 months ago

56 42 6 months ago

The title is misleading: this only modifies the desktop rounded corners, not the app window corners (heavily discussed recently at HN and elsewhere).

The blog post about this is slightly interesting, but mostly feels like a candidate’s position paper on rounded corners, rather than an newsworthy or technical explanation: https://medium.com/@makalin/reclaiming-the-screen-a-develope...

The core innovation is the ctx.fill calls here: https://github.com/makalin/CornerFix/blob/main/Sources/Corne...

frizlab4• 6 months ago

I still have no idea what this does. What on earth are the desktop rounded corners?

jaffa2• 6 months ago

Macs have rounded corners on the desktop. I.e 4 corners. It looked awesome in the CRT days because of the shape of them. These days on flat lcd screens the geometry is so good that they aren’t required to provide the same function as in CRT days but some people still like the look. I do, but i dont run extra software if i can help it especially for an aesthetic change. I used a tool like this is the past but there were incompatibility’s.

Etheryte• 6 months ago

Modern MacBooks models have rounded corners at the top right and top left corners of the screen, see [0]. The bottom corners don't do this and external displays don't do this. This is a stylistic choice to match the curvature of the laptop's edge. If you move your mouse along that corner it doesn't disappear behind the curve, it follows the curve.

[0] https://www.apple.com/v/macbook-air/x/images/overview/mac-pl...

davebranton• 6 months ago

The linked article on medium was also written by AI, which immediately disqualifies it from being interesting or useful.

"And the worst part? Apple didn’t provide a switch to turn it off."

Now see, this is AI. A normal human being would write, "Apple didn't even provide any way to switch off this non-feature" - for example. AI always, for reasons that are likely neither interesting nor especially illuminating, writes like this. Unnecessary and stupid stylistic choices everywhere.

Look, if you cannot be bothered to write something, why on God's Good Earth would anyone bother to read it?

locao• 6 months ago

I'm not saying you're wrong about this article being AI-written, but I know people who write like this, and I hate it.

Finnucane• 6 months ago

If AI does this, it's because it's ingested the last 25 years of bad internet headlines. Written allegedly by humans.

teekert• 6 months ago

And to be honest? It’s really annoying indeed.

throw5t432s3r2• 6 months ago

Is this the new em dash witch hunt?

I sometimes write like that because I noticed for regular people, they tend to pay more attention if some things are written a specific way. It’s like an FAQ.

I’ll continue to use bolded titles and bullet points when writing for a regular audience.

mvdtnz• 6 months ago

There’s also a consistency problem. If you use multiple monitors or virtual machines, the mismatch between macOS’s new roundness and other systems’ sharper corners creates visual friction. Once you notice it, you can’t unsee it.

I guess it's a good thing I never noticed it then? Of all the very real problems with Tahoe this one would never have even registered with me.

jrmg• 6 months ago

And the screenshot in the blog post is of a window with rounded corners!

cweagans• 6 months ago

Your GitHub repo and the associated medium article do a great job of describing the problem and the solution that you settled on. I don’t understand why you didn’t include a screenshot of what this looks like though. The suitability of your tool depends on what it looks like.

Please, always include screenshots in open source projects that are aesthetic in nature.

Jaxan• 6 months ago

Yeah, I am also confused they didn’t include a screenshot (or photo in this case). It’s the first thing you’ll want to see for such a project.

mrkpdl• 6 months ago

I came to say the same thing, a screenshot is all I want to see before diving deeper.

irq• 6 months ago

Thank you for posting this. It never ceases to amaze me how many open source GUI projects forget screenshots.

IshKebab• 6 months ago

I assume it doesn't look very good if they didn't want to show it off.

vishnuharidas• 6 months ago

A screenshot is the bare minimum for things like this.

puppycodes• 6 months ago

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

msephton• 6 months ago

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

cesaref• 6 months ago

This has reminded me that in System 7, the code for the window was a system resource (resource forks contained all sorts of code, icons, text dictionaries etc). Anyhow, if you dropped an updated window resource into your system with the correct resource id, you could change this default behaviour. A friend of mine wrote a round window for a clock app, and made a copy with resedit in the system, and a reboot later, all windows were round.

It was a very flexible and hackable system, very fragile, and no security whatsoever, but lots of fun!

ykl• 6 months ago

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

thehamkercat• 6 months ago

The problem does exist, but the tool is solving none of it

Mogzol• 6 months ago

I have no idea what this is fixing.

Note: This does not change the rounded corners of individual app windows. It only restores the straight silhouette at the edges of your display.

My display does not have rounded corners. I am on macOS Tahoe using external monitors. I know that newer macbooks have rounded display corners, but those are rounded at the hardware level afaik, those corner pixels simply don't exist. And besides that, the medium article linked in the repo specifically talks about external monitors. Does anyone have an example of what this program is actually meant to fix?

EDIT: I downloaded and compiled it myself to see. All it does is add a black border around your whole screen. Here is a screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/7XWAwxz.jpeg

Again, I don't have rounded corners on my display in the first place, but if I did I suppose this would hide them. At the cost of losing the whole edge of my display, lol. I don't see why anyone would actually use this, especially since it cuts off half the menu bar.

ksidisnidjsdj3• 6 months ago

Okay so this is not just useless but actually detrimental to the UX.

Oh, boy.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the author vibe-coded this, seeing as the article they reference was very much entirely written by AI.

tefkah• 6 months ago

thank you for actually including a fricking screenshot!

wink• 6 months ago

I had not noticed the rounded corner in the edge of my screen until now because I use a dark background and usually have some window maximized. This is a screenshot without this tool:

https://stuff.art-core.org/2026/osx_corner.png

This screenshot shows the bottom right corner of my left monitor and a small slice of my right monitor. The light thing is the rounded corner of my browser window.

yokoprime• 6 months ago

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

Fix macOS 26 (Tahoe) exaggerated rounded corners

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