Comment by Eric_WVGG
5 months ago
> While it offers many features, I've refused to pay for a solution to Apple's poor design decision.
The phrasing of this kind of gets under my skin.
Like, it's fine to call it "refusing to pay" if it's some kind of Apple tax. Bartender is great little indie app, a real quality-of-life enhancement. I like to reward creative developers who come up with solutions for weird edge-case users like us.
I can understand the sentiment. It's not necessarily something against independent developers, it's anger about a problem that shouldn't happen in the first place to a device this expensive.
Windows had a similar problem with its notifications tray growing to unreasonable size, and they fixed that back in Windows Vista, after applying some auto-hiding algorithm in versions before that. Apple missing this problem or not being able to come up with a solution is simply not believable, this has to be the result of them simply not caring or refusing to address the issue for stylistic reasons.
I'm sure Bartender is great software (even without the notch problem, from what I can tell!) but Apple is the one forcing their users to pay extra for their stupid design decisions. $16 to fix a problem other operating systems fixed almost twenty years ago is a steep price to pay when you're expecting a quality laptop.
> I can understand the sentiment. It's not necessarily something against independent developers, it's anger about a problem that shouldn't happen in the first place to a device this expensive.
Especially considering how much people harp on about Apple's amazing UX and quality and how that makes the absurd prices worth it. The notch problem, as well as other UX bugs (like scroll direction having two separate toggles in mouse/touchpad settings, that toggle each other) really don't look all that polished to me.
Apple sells good hardware that's buoyed by a loud marketing department that covers its often pathetic software.
Mac users touting a bunch of third-party apps as solutions to obvious os problems (bartender, magnet, amphetamine, etc.) is tacit admission of that fact.
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> I can understand the sentiment. It's not necessarily something against independent developers, it's anger about a problem that shouldn't happen in the first place to a device this expensive.
This. Apple cultivates this myth that they only release polished devices/software. When they fail to do even the littlest things like work with a design decision they made, people, rightfully, get frustrated.
I agree. I love my iPhone and my iPad. But that touch bar era on the Mac was rough.
Polished doesn’t mean perfect. This sounds like you’ve got an axe to grind and nothing more.
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Thanks @jeroenhd for giving me the benefit of doubt and explaining it even better than I could! My intention was definitely not to bash bartender and I need to select my words more carefully in the future.
It was just the only solution I knew before yesterday for a such a simple stupid design flaw from Apple. I have nothing against Bartender or its developers. I just wish I wouldn't need to install 3rd party software to fix Apple's issues.
There was a time when I would have agreed pretty whole-heartedly with you and dismissed this as a "simple stupid design flaw". I've been writing production code for over 20 years, and the existence of solutions like Bartender is evidence that the problem can't be that hard, right?
And then I became a product manager for a large suite of capabilities for which large customers would spend millions/year, and my mind changed pretty significantly. Every release, I was forced to choose the 10-15 things that we could reasonably accomplish from a list of hundreds. Many dozens of the things that we didn't do could be classified as "simple stupid design flaws".
There was one of these flaws in particular that I was determined to fix when I took the role. "This makes us look stupid" I thought. It had been a gap in the product for years, and I always marveled at the fact that no one had fixed it. But the reality was, the product was architected to be extensible, and to allow 3rd party developers to build their own solutions. And in this case, there were numerous solutions in the community that solved the problem quite well. When faced with the reality of a mile-long backlog, and many of those items having no solution at all, and no affordance for developers to solve them, the already-solved design flaw always fell below the cut line for each release, despite my best efforts to prioritize it. And I begrudgingly had to acknowledge that this was the right choice at the time.
I have a slightly different view on these types of issues now. It's easy to call this a design flaw, but on the flip side, Apple has clearly made it possible for the community to solve this issue. I'm 100% positive someone at Apple is trying their hardest to get this thing fixed, but most likely keeps getting thwarted by more critical issues, and the realities of managing a large and complex platform/ecosystem.
"Apple has all the money; they should just scale up the dev team". And if they did, those new devs would be assigned to the next 10-15 items on that mile-long list that are still more important than a 1st party solution to a solved problem.
It does show the cracks in Apple's marketing, but it's also far more understandable and reasonable than I once would have believed.
(I don't/didn't work for Apple).
It still makes no sense to me because I don't see how it is relevant that it is fixing what you see as a design flaw from Apple.
If the gutters on one side of my house frequently get clogged up with needles because the builder planted some pine and fir trees close to the house (but not so close as to be against any codes or regulations), I'm not going to just live with it because it is the builder's fault and so I'm not going to spend money to install gutter guards or have the trees removed.
I think it is a design flaw in many car mirror systems that when a car that is overtaking you gets close enough to no longer be visible in the center mirror it isn't yet visible in the side mirror. It is never occurred to me to just live with it because fixing it means spending money to fix the car's design flaw.
I fix this by buying a cheap little stick on convex mirror and sticking it on the side mirror. Then there is overlap between what I can see in the center mirror and what I can see in the side mirror, and I can see overtaking cars at all times. (Or bicyclists and motorcyclists that are lane splitting).
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I think Apple hasn’t followed Microsoft on status item (that the name of menubar icons on macOS) management is simply because they didn’t intend for the API to be used even a fourth as much as it is.
In older releases (back when in it was still known as OS X), persistent status items weren’t something devs could do without dipping into hacks. That part of the menubar was intended solely for system stuff, e.g. the display and sound menus.
There were always APIs for transient status items, but those were intended for use by “normal” apps with a dock icon that you have open only temporarily to accomplish some tasks (which means these status items wouldn’t accumulate). Status items added this way couldn’t even be rearranged like the system ones.
So in short, there’s no management because they’re designing for the user who has a couple of status items, not 5, 10, or 15+.
This is not the same thing as Windows. MacOS users choose to have those things in the menu bar.
On Windows the notification bar was a dumping ground that you couldn't prevent apps from using.
> While it offers many features, I've refused to pay for a solution to Apple's poor design decision.
Well then you're in luck, because there's a free app called Hidden Bar[1] on the Mac App Store that allows you to hide icons which you're not interested in.
I am not affiliated with the author(s?), I am just a happy user and I would probably be using it even if the Macbook didn't have a notch.
[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hidden-bar/id1452453066?mt=12
> Well then you're in luck, because there's a free app called Hidden Bar[1] on the Mac App Store that allows you to hide icons which you're not interested in.
Author here: I did try Hidden Bar yesterday before finding this workaround and I uninstalled it today. I want to see all of the 16 apps that I have. I don't want to hide any of them. By changing the whitespace mentioned in the blog post I now can see all of them.
This is only of limited help. If I didn't want a program to have a menu icon, I wouldn't be running that program, or would have configured it to not have an icon. Hidden Bar's entire purpose is to hide the infrequently needed icons, conversely, it needs to expose them when I un-hide icons.
If there are too many, some end up under the notch, even though there's room on the other side of it for them in most cases. That's just Apple shipping a bug and not fixing it.
Hidden bar has the added benefit of not asking to record your screen, an insane thing to consent to for this very basic bit of functionality.
Still sort of insane that you need extra apps to fix an issue that Microsoft figured out decades ago. The GP says it was in Windows Vista, but I'm pretty sure even Windows 98 had it. I know XP did.
How has Apple not addressed this?
Weirder still is that they did, they have an entire expanding control panel pane with redundant pop out controls for stuff that was previously in the menu bar, they just failed to universally integrate it with the system so that third parties could use it.
98 did not, XP was the first one. So, this was addressed there merely 23 years ago, give them some slack! ;)
Besides the freeware/shareware issue, I'd like to limit the number of various little tools running on my computer, often with effectively full access to my data (since software that provides that type of quality-of-life improvements for core OS functionality is often hard/impossible to sandbox).
I can't even use most of these on my work Mac for the same reason (it's outright not allowed/possible by policy).
It is perfectly acceptable to provide a zero-cost, command-line focused solution to a single, specific user-interface constraint, while, at the same time, providing additional parametric insight to macOS user preferences.
No, that's clearly not 'I should not have to pay Bartender for its work'; it's 'I should not have to find a third-party who can sell me a fix'.
More than the cost, it's the fact that it's yet another app with its own updater, attack surface, etc that's a bother. (I don't know if this app has an App Store version available -- but in general, even if they are, they're often worse than the non-App Store versions.)
especially considering that apple is full of poor design decisions that people have already been using third party software to compensate for. for example a lack of any form of reasonable window management that the many people use stuff like magnet or rectangle to compensate for. or the fact that mouse scroll direction and trackpad scroll direction are linked. or the fact that you can't control volume on a per app basis.
30% or more of the cost goes directly to Apple, so there are some perverse incentives at play with such unofficial fixes.
You can purchase directly on their website or via Setapp. So, I would count this as an argument.
The App Store fee is down to 15% these days*, or zero if you buy Bartender from their own website.
* For entities with < $1M annual revenue.
I assure you that whatever money Apple would make from this wouldn’t make a dent in even some lower-level Apple pleb’s P&L.
This sort of unbound cynicism isn’t intelligent or useful. It shouldn’t be conflated with being usefully or interestingly critical.
It adds up when you need to pay $25 to get per-app volume control, $20 to fix to the menu bar, $10 to get window management, etc, per seat.
I don't think it's cynical to point out the perverse incentive. I think it's a useful point for discussion, especially given anyone familiar with any of the other major desktop environments (Windows, GNOME, KDE, etc.) might be surprised to learn that there's a modern desktop environment lacking these amenities.
Handling the app icons properly due to the notch IS something that Apple should have done. It's pure idgaf incompetence on Apple's part. Their software quality has been declining the past few years in respects to macOS.
> Their software quality has been declining the past few years in respects to macOS
Was there a previous version of MacOS where this problem was solved?
I remember literally running into this same problem on Macintosh System 7 when running MS Office apps that had too long menus for a PowerBook screen, there was a third party app back then as well to solve it (by replacing the "File", "Edit", etc menu names with icons to make them shorter)
“Refusing to pay for…Apple’s design decisions” makes no sense when you just spent $2000 on an Apple laptop, in order to not pay an indie dev $16
I think the point is that you shouldn't need to spend anything extra after spending $2,000 on an Apple laptop for something Apple should have already addressed.