Comment by jeroenhd
5 months ago
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.
I would argue that in general, third-party apps to customize macOS are an expected part of a healthy ecosystem. I use Karabiner for keyboard customization, Moom for window management, Hidden Bar to hide the menu icons I use infrequently, and that's not a complete list. I don't think any of those need to be part of the core OS, Moom in particular is one of several ways to manage windows, it's the one I prefer but it being built-in to the OS wouldn't help me, or people who like it better some other way.
I don't consider the menu bar notch bug to be part of that general case, though. That's just a long standing bug and it's obnoxious.
> 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.
How many trillions of dollars does Apple need before we can complain about menu bar items?
Sounds like you're just a wee sensitive. No axe, just telling like it is.
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).
> 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.
No, you'd complain to the builder until they fix their fuckup.
You're right and anyone can fix this same issue with Bartender too. You can also fix this issue by using your MacBook solely with external monitor :D
My point was just to raise awareness that there's a free alternative which doesn't require any 3rd party apps.
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.