DidYaWipe

"MCP?" The "master control program," from Tron?

I had no idea it survived.

Yeah, that's a good one too. I remember reading that China was allegedly trying to curtail this by limiting money movement out of the country for large transactions, but we all know that the people with that kind of money will find a way (if those "efforts" were even really being made).

Good point, and surely a valid concern... one that Apple has forgotten in some places today. Look at the utterly useless icon/thumbnail view in Finder: Contents don't wrap within the window. There could be dozens or hundreds of files off-screen in limbo, and you'll never know.

There are, of course, ways to indicate "more controls this way" with an arrow or other affordance when there's a toolbar or menu overflow, though.

Anyway, the point is that by the time OS X came along, other platforms had solved the problems but Apple rejected those widely-accepted solutions.

Ah, OK! Thanks.

"Spoon-feeding?" Saying WTF the product is isn't spoon-feeding. Expecting people to run around and do Web searches (or even roam around other pages at the domain) because posters are too lazy to add three descriptive words is douchey as hell, and way too often accepted (and even actively promoted) here.

"I much prefer that to a self-aggrandising comment essentially stating 'I'm better than them because I wouldn't post something like that'"

I don't see anyone saying that. What I said was, why waste our time with empty blather masquerading as a how-to?

Because it doesn't provide insightful guidelines on how to avoid pitfalls or how to work around this or that impediment or, or, or.

Whatever, man. I guess we have different standards for what constitutes "informative."

Wow, that whole thing was completely devoid of useful content. Does it even say what the product or service is?

"We’ve also added a few contractors to the team. And these guys are legends. They come straight from the ProjectionLab user community"

So... the product was obviously built, because it had a "user community;" so now they've added contractors? Whoop dee doo.

Is there some advice or playbook we're supposed to take away from this? Or is it self-congratulatory spam?

Thanks for the info!

Never heard of "harding" though.

What is "MCP?"

Bummer about the reported Mac issues. Anybody have experience with it there?

I have Logic, so I will probably never devote the time to trying to fix this. But maybe if I understood the "tracker" interface it would be more appealing.

I'm not really exploring the origin of the problem; I'm just saying it's dumb and a pain in the ass.

Huh. I wonder why they thought this was such a big deal. I mean... the user caused the problem, and could easily fix it by enlarging the window. Other windowing GUIs handle this just fine.

"More things" than what? And novelty has nothing to do with it. This is about validity.

I don't know. Was it?

Except of course when it's not obvious at all.

I've been on Mac for 20 years and it's still annoying as hell.

Another side effect is the uselessness of the Help menu. What help am I looking at? The application owns the menu, so where's the OS help?

Oh right, it's just all mixed together. When I'm searching for information in some developer tool I'm using, I really enjoy all the arbitrary hits from the OS help about setting up printers, sending E-mail, whatever.

Ah yes, this old argument. Except nobody slams his cursor against the top of the screen in real life, assuming that the menu bar is "infinitely tall." Watch real users interact with a Mac's menu, and you simply won't see this behavior. Not to mention that it doesn't work if you're using a laptop and a second monitor positioned behind and above it.

And we're talking about a GUI here, so when I minimize an application's GUI then yes, I expect that I've minimized the application. And again, I think you'll find that the vast majority of users work under this M.O.

But your observation raises another usability issue caused by the single menu: Instead of an "infinite" desktop, the Mac reduces the entire screen to a single application's client area... so, historically, Mac applications treated it that way...littering it with an armada of floating windows that you had to herd around.

The problem is that turning the whole screen into one application's client area fails because you can see all the other crap on your desktop and all other open applications' GUIs THROUGH the UI of the app you're trying to use. It's stupid.

So, to users' relief, the floating-window nonsense has been almost entirely abandoned over the last couple of decades and single-window applications have become the norm on Mac as they have been on Windows forever. Oh wait, hold on... here comes Apple regressing back to "transparent" UI with "liquid glass;" a failed idea from 20+ years ago.

Full circle, sadly.

Exactly. The single menu causes quite a few problems, both obvious and subtle.

But yeah... now I'm relieved when I go home from work and get back on my Mac. I waste so much time hunting for stuff on Windows now... it's just incredible.

Pompous pedants used to trot out "Fitt's Law" in defense of the Mac's dumb menu all the time, when in fact it contra-indicates it:

"Fitts’ law states that the amount of time required for a person to move a pointer (e.g., mouse cursor) to a target area is a function of the distance to the target divided by the size of the target. Thus, the longer the distance and the smaller the target’s size, the longer it takes."

Right, so where should an application's menu go? ON ITS WINDOW. Not way up at the top of the screen. It's as if the people citing this "law" don't even read it.

That assertion is absurd.

Thanks very much. But it doesn't sound like that would help. First, I doubt a giant network path would fit in the title of a thumbnail.

Second, I want to give focus to the entire application at once. ALL of its windows need to be brought to the foreground at once.

How does turning that off help? Does it let you bring an entire application to the foreground (all of its windows) at once?

Amen. And then there's the idiotic peek-a-boo UI that hides controls until you accidentally roll over them with the cursor... not saving any space at all.

I've always considered the Mac's shared menu bar a GUI 1.0 mistake that should have been fixed in the transition to OS X. Forcing all applications to share a single menu that's glued to the top of the screen, and doesn't switch back to the previous application when you minimize the one you're working with, is dumb.

Windows and Unix GUIs had it right: Put an application's menu where it belongs, on the application's main frame.

But now on Windows... NO menu? Oh wait, no... partial menus buried under hamburger buttons in arbitrary locations, and then others buried under other buttons.

Microsoft pulls the same BS. Look at Edge. Absolute mess. No menu. No title bar. What application am I even using?

This stupidity seems to have spread across Windows. No title bars or menus... now you can't tell what application a Window belongs to.

And you can't even bring all of an application's windows to the foreground... Microsoft makes you hover of it in the task bar and choose between indiscernible thumbnails, one at a time. WTF? If you have two Explorer windows open to copy stuff, then switch to other apps to work during the copy... you can't give focus back to Explorer and see the two windows again. You have to hover, click on a thumbnail. Now go back and hover, and click on a thumbnail... hopefully not the same one, because of course you can't tell WTF the difference between two lists of files is in a thumbnail.

And Word... the Word UI is now a clinic on abject usability failure. They have a menu bar... except WAIT! Microsoft and some users claim that those are TABS... except that it's just a row of words, looking exactly like a menu.

So now there's NO menu and no actual tabs... just a row of words. And if you go under the File "menu" (yes, File), there are a bunch of VIEW settings. And in there you can add and remove these so-called "tabs," and when you do remove one, the functionality disappears from the entire application. You're not just customizing the toolbar; you're actually disabling entire swaths of features from the application.

It's an absolute shitshow of grotesque incompetence, in a once-great product. No amount of derision for this steaming pile is too much.

Amen. Good riddance to Jony Ive and his embarrassing emoji bar.

Meanwhile, I can't convince my dad that he doesn't need to pay for AOL anymore...

Gotta love the derelict USPTO.

Totally valid gripe. I agree.

"The first iPhone technically wasn't a smartphone (unlike its competitors at the time) because it did not have a way to install third-party programs"

What a laughably wrong assertion. The iPhone handled all kinds of PIM data and synced with computers. There was no requirement (or even expectation) that a "smart" phone had third-party applications.

You have confused "Web functionality" with gatekeeping.

You can use WebKit to visit any site you want; whether it supports every technical feature you might encounter on a site is irrelevant. I'm not arguing that it's a good engine or even competitive. I don't question your objections to missing functionality, and probably agree with all of them. But that is not gatekeeping. That's like saying black-&-white TVs were "gatekeeping" by not showing color, or some Bluetooth speakers are "gatekeeping" by not being stereo.

Anyway, the point is moot because Apple has to allow other browser engines now. If you think it through, this will simply allow Chrome to completely dominate the Web and take us backward to the bad old days of "this site works best on..."

WHEEEE!