Are there situations that make more sense to use a tiling manager like on larger (where all the tiles are usable) or smaller screens (where full expansion makes sense)?

An overlapped/stacked interface is fine a lot of the time, but the flexibility is important.

What really drives me crazy is the 100% tiled-interface. I feel like something important is just below the tiles, but I can't see it.

I have this set to 15px, so when I drag my app windows around, they snap to a grid with 15px spaces between the windows. Dunno why I find it so satisfying, but it really scratches an itch in my brain.

So when Joe Windows considers switching over to Mac, they see that there's no equivalent to the Windows snapping feature that's been in their OS since Windows 7, and they might think macOS is inferior.

I personally don't need this feature from Apple but I think they needed to add it for their own business needs.

I get a bunch of ui issues doing full screen, and though I use Magnet for snapping, I want something that stays snapped. Looks like this will do it.

1. focus follows mouse, the window you are pointing at gets the focus. This feels very strange at first. but pulls a surprising amount of friction out of working with multiple apps. However you have to pair this with.

2. don't raise on focus. this let you work on a lower window. to raise you click on a specific part of the window, usually the title bar. if you don't have this focus follows mouse is terrible. this lets you have the main window(usually the documentation or reference) open on top while you type away on the lower window.

3. At this point I heard of i3 and it made perfect sense to me. I have never said "boy I sure am glad this window is half covered up" I ether want one app full screen, two apps side by side(reference and work) or many small apps(terminals). why not just have the window manager enforce this instead of me fiddling with windows. these days I use mainly use spectrwm because it fills that perfect middle ground between too sparse(dwm) and too featured(i3).

That said, for my day to day operations(I sys-admin, so lots of terminals) it works great. however there are many apps that do not play well. for example, I recently set up a linux box for steam games and steam was not happy with i3(all menus were separate windows) this is probably fixable but I just went with a normal wm. And when I do actual work on it I am reminded why I like tiling wm's as I find myself shuffling windows all the time.

Closing thoughts, an example of a tiling wm internal to an app is blender, even before I started using tiling wm's I thought blender had a very good ui for getting work done, much better than the mdi type apps that were common at the time. so just imagine your whole desktop working that way. And tabs, really tabbed interfaces should be a function of your window manager not the app, but that ship has sailed and I don't think there is any way to fix it now.

I have a 49" ultrawide so it's super useful to have precise control over where a window goes. I also use 3 desktops (as Apple calls them) and have different windows sizes depending on what I'm doing. Having overlapping windows would just be super annoying now!

[0] https://github.com/jigish/slate

Fiddling with the mouse to resize windows manually or having windows overlapping and covering up information on each other is not really a great way to interface with them. Maybe it's helpful to locate the windows and bring them into focus, but once they're in focus and in use, I want to be maximizing their screen real estate and making sure they're 100% readable.

And, really, it's something the OS should have had at the very least as an optional feature for over a decade now. Windows introduced this feature in Windows 7. It's been a sore spot of a missing feature and it's especially detracting for the Windows users that Apple wants to have switch over to the Mac platform.

Compared to peek and switch it provides more usable space since windows can be maximized without leaving space for another window to peek out, less manual arrangement since Windows need not be carefully arranged. Also I normally switch because I want to do another task or in resource to a notification.

That said however we choose to analyze it it's in part subjective matter of taste. There is no singular correct answer.

I really hope there is a "automatic tiling" option, otherwise this is just mouse support for the current "Move Window"/"Tile Window" options already available on the OS (and easily bindable via custom shortcuts).

There are floating window managers with window snapping on the free Unices, of course. But none of those claims to be a tiling window manager and nobody confuses them with such.

Now so just need a clipboard history manager, a way to make cmd+tab behave like Windows alt+tab, a way to mute the mic in the status bar, and a different setting for the trackpad/mouse wheel direction, and I won’t need to install random apps for basic features anymore.

I believe the new control center API is intended to push seldom used icons into the control center

> searching through open windows by typing

The new Siri is context aware once the developers include their data through new APIs. The Microsoft version which was snooping through private browsing, secure apps, and logging passwords in open databases was not the right way to go.

More than just cleaning the menu bar (I don't care about that), I want a guarantee that I can see and click on every menu bar icon somewhere. Whether that's the present vision or not, this sounds like a clear step in the right direction!

While I have lots of gripes about macOS and I understand that probably some of them are things Apple will just never go for, it does almost seem like Apple is giving some neglected desktop fundamentals much needed improvements. Fixing linear mouse movement on the last major release was nice, as is the new window snapping thing.

> > searching through open windows by typing

> The new Siri is context aware once the developers include their data through new APIs. The Microsoft version which was snooping through private browsing, secure apps, and logging passwords in open databases was not the right way to go.

I don't want any kind of internet-connected AI assistant on the desktop at all. I just want the ability to task switch efficiently by fuzzy filtering on basic stuff like window titles and descriptions like can be done easily with Plasma and GNOME built-ins. (On Windows, PowerToys can do it but I don't love that interface and even though it's an MS thing I don't quite think it counts as built-in, either.) I guess many people do rely on proprietary screenreaders but that seems unfortunate tbf.

Filtering windows based on their contents could maybe be a little bit cool but I think it'd probably mostly get in the way, even if there were an app I trusted doing the searching with appropriately limited APIs. I wouldn't readily trust a proprietary, internet-connected service to do that kind of searching, though— neither from Apple nor from Microsoft. If such a feature required me to enable Siri I wouldn't even be interested in trying it.

But your comment inspired me to Google anew and... I guess it was always intended to only kind of disable sleep?

A 3840x2160 monitor run at 1x means a framebuffer of 3840x2160.

At 2x, the effective resolution is 1920x1080, and this also uses a framebuffer of 3840x2160.

At 1.5x, the effective resolution is 2560x1440. This is implemented by rendering at 4x (5160x2880) and then downscaling that.

At 1.25x, the effective resolution is 3072x1728. This is also implemented by rendering at 4x (6144x3456) and downscaling that.

The difference between all of these is quite noticeable.

Edit: Apparently Apple has been shipping its laptops with non-integer scaling for a while, which is interesting.

The laptop displays work by scaling down 2x/3x too.

Stage Manager was the most interesting and useful thing to happen to window management in over a decade, and I was really hoping we'd see Apple do more with it. Its dynamic nature (windows don't always live in just a single context!) solved a lot of problems inherent in Spaces, and yet there's still plenty of room to build on its foundation.

I was hoping we'd at least see the window snapping behavior ported over from iPadOS. It's a really well-thought-out way to simplify window resizing and overlapping, and it would go a long way on MacOS (perhaps with a toggle in Control Center for those edge cases where you actually want pixel precision). Maybe in MacOS 16...

… really? I’ve tried to use it a few times but it’s just… not good. Not very intuitive, full of idiosyncrasies, and it doesn’t solve the basic "I want to snap 2 windows side by side" problem. Maybe it’s more interesting on iPad?

I’m glad they finally bring window snapping to Mac.

I've personally been infuriated by the absence of Send Later feature. I can't fathom that I could do it with a "stupid/inferior" Windows Phone that wasn't obscenely priced like an iPhone.

They lost their technological leadership since Steve Jobs. End of Story.

I bet I'm gonna keep Rectangle as well.

Ever since I've been using a Mac since Nov. 2023 that's been one of the things that I've battled with, and I've assigned a heck tons of shortcuts to make that happen.

On macOS, the moment I fullscreen an app, it's taken out of that flow. So for so many years, I've had my terminal full screen on workspace 2. Meta+2 it in my muscle memory for "go to terminal".

My heart dropped for a second when I saw Sequoia only supports iMacs from 2019, until I saw it supports iMac Pros from 2017. I wonder how much longer I have before Apple stops releasing updates, and corp IT decides the iMac Pro is now e-waste.

It's really unfortunate that they don't do Target Display Mode anymore. These iMacs have panels that are still top-of-the-line 6 years later. (A Studio Display is basically an iMac Pro with Apple Silicon in Target Display Mode.) I wonder if there will be a Linux distribution to convert these things into monitors when they go obsolete.

One thing I can tell you though is that Intel has EOL’ed the chip in the iMac Pro. Meaning no more security support for the chip.

So I’m not sure the iMac Pro will get the next update. Though possible Apple has found a way to mitigate any security issues.

This is the best article I found on the topic. Note also that once the iMac Pro is out of support, it’s os will still get security updates for two years past that.

So with this announcement today we are guaranteed security support until Oct 2027 or so.

I own an iMac Pro and was pleasantly surprised today. Had been concerned the Intel EOL might end things.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/with-macos-sonoma-in...

Hell, I have an O.G. iPad 1 that still works perfectly as it did the day I bought it, but most of the built-in software no longer works, and the App Store is basically empty. What a sad state of affairs.

5-6 years of fully functioning hardware with official OS updates is much better than the Android phones I had before it.

Also you dates are wrong, measure from the last device sale, not the first

So far, it's 6 years (2018-2024), and probably it'll end at 7 years (assuming they drop its support next summer). That's the same number of years as Google and Samsung are currently supporting their flagship models, and it's many years more than e.g. my previous (unrootable) Huawei phone was supported. Compared to the competition, I'd say that number is good.

If we want to push up that number across all players in the market, then we need legislation as a forcing function. I'm all for that – especially legislation that would require manufacturers to allow easy rooting/jailbreaking when the official support ends so that third parties can provide unofficial support. (Like how you can install Linux on old MacBooks when they're not supported.)

> and it had no relation to the original point

I'm not sure how you interpreted the "iOS obsolescence program" then.

> Also you dates are wrong, measure from the last device sale, not the first

It's not wrong, it's a different measure.

If you choose to buy a 3 year old phone, you know that it will be officially supported for 3 less years, and should factor that into your (price)/(lifetime) calculation. I choose to only buy new electronics models (not necessarily the flagship) so that I can replace them less often, and then my measure is the relevant one.

Very weird and very annoying. Especially since they are used by millions of people every hour.

If this is a better AirDrop I'm all here for it. AirDrop was already leaps and bounds better than email my android phone to my PC.

And SolidExplorer is a good app to transfer data from/to Android.

I'm a long time Mac user, but I really dislike Apple's walled garden on the iPhone and thus switched to Android some years ago.

Apple, however, in their infinite wisdom made MacOS pop open iTunes when you connect an iPhone as a USB device. You can "import" them into Photos (another Apple walled garden), but they don't show up as a filesystem, and you can't use normal filesystem operations or terminal commands to move them over.

It fails completely for my use case, which is that every 6 months or so, I want to back up the 2000 or so pictures I've taken to a Samba share on a home server that I control. The closest equivalent would be iCloud, but I refuse to mortgage my family memories to vendor lock-in for a monthly fee.

You mentioned not wanting to mass-select 2000+ photos. If the photos you're uploading fall within a certain date range, you can open the Photos app, search for the date range of photos you want to upload (e.g. "April 20 2024 to today", or "sept 21 2018 to mar 2020"). It'll return photos taken in that date range, where you can tap 'See All', then 'Select' > 'Select All' at the top of the screen. Then you can hit the 'Share' dialogue and upload to your server through Files without having to scroll and select tons of individual pics. Keep in mind that you can't use a '-' in place of the word 'to' when specifying a date range for some reason.

If your images are family memories, you might be interested in Immich[1] (if you're open to making changes to your photo storage setup). Stand up and configure the local server, install the smartphone app, enable automatic sync, and it'll automatically upload new photos from your phone when you open the Immich app. No need for you to manually keep track of your photo syncs. Built to be a local Google Photos replacement. Has features like shared albums, face recognition/person naming, smart search, etc. AI tasks, like everything else, are done entirely locally. It's a nice piece of software, and lots of people (including privacy advocate Louis Rossmann) vouch for it.

[1] https://immich.app/

As an alternative, here's a tiny script through iOS' Shortcuts app that selects photos in a date range and sends them to a Samba share through Files.[1] This time I actually tested, and was able to successfully run the Shortcut to copy a date range of photos/videos from the Photos app to my Samba share.

Quick instructions, in case you need them:

1. Create a new Shortcut and add a "Find Photos" module (You can search with the bar at the bottom). Add a filter, set it according to the screenshot[1], starting from "Date Taken" and ending at the stop date.

2. Add a "Save File" module beneath the Photos module (icon visible next to "Save Photos" in the screenshot). Shortcuts should auto-populate the selected photos as a variable so it reads "Save Photos". Hit the ">" next to "Save Photos" and tick any options you need.

3. Make sure to modify the date range each time you need to run the Shortcut.

You can also add/modify filters in each module to better suit your needs. For example, instead of "Date Taken" you could select by "Creation Date", or add in a "Media Type" filter so you only return photos and not videos (or vice-versa).

One thing to know: There's no progress bar so it's helpful to run the Shortcut from the Shortcuts app so you can see when it finishes executing/transferring. You should see a little 'stop' button with a semicircle around it when a Shortcut is executing from the app; it'll turn into a '...' button when it finishes.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/LPsQ8au.jpeg

A few things to note (applies to my above comment as well):

-If you have a less powerful iOS device, your screen may go semi-unresponsive during the upload process. My iPhone XS goes unresponsive until the upload finishes (less the ability to terminate the shortcut via the "stop" button), but my 2017 iPad Pro is totally usable during upload.

-You may get an error along the lines of "This Shortcut is trying to share more than [x] photos." You can allow this by going to iOS Settings > Shortcuts > Advanced, then toggling on "Allow Sharing Large Amounts of Data"

-Again, there's no progress bar, so it may help to run the Shortcut from the editing pane in the Shortcuts app. That way you can at least watch the app step through the script.

[1] https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/d3258e1d720548cd9e635bbe090...

And it's fairly easy to select all 2,000 files -- in your camera roll, tap Select at top right, then just start dragging from the first photo. This lets you select a range rather than tapping them individually, and just keep dragging at the bottom and it will keep selecting while scrolling downwards. 2,000 photos might take a minute or two to select, but it's not that bad. Then just AirDrop.

Obviously you'll then need to move them from your Mac's internal drive to your desired SMB share.

You're saying that if i select AirDrop I can send photos from my phone directly to my mac's file system?

No Photos app or iCloud drive shenanigans?

It also has a Quick Transfer feature so you just drag and drop a file to your target device, and iMazing gives you a choice of apps to send the file to. It's similar to AirDrop but also works for Windows and seems a bit faster and more stable.

What’s the point of this qualifier?

Why not use the current, up-to-date default app for photo import that has been there since 2002 to literally serve this purpose? Yes it has a lot of extra functionality, but that doesn’t mean you have to use it. You can get originals from Photos and be done with it…

I suspect it will only be useful for emergencies as latency will be terrible, though.

Based on what? AirPlay mirroring is great today, and this is that with data in the other direction. Current Wifi is perfectly capable of bidirectional voice and video. Adding touch/key events is incremental.

I really wish Apple would just force companies to enable their iPhone/iPad apps on Apple Silicon. But if I could display a video from my phone onto my 15" laptop screen, that would be a nearly as nice.

> I suspect it will only be useful for emergencies as latency will be terrible, though.

If they can make the macOS display feature in visionOS usable, I imagine they can make this work too.

Also I will use this often to approve okta 2factor requests.

And of course, there are all those MFA apps which I need for work...

(Also, I miss the old widget Dashboard from old versions of macOS. Wish they'd bring that back with the new widgets tech).

Maybe I’m misunderstanding you, but did you know you can pin widgets to your desktop in Sonoma? They don’t have to be tucked away in the Notification Center anymore; the entire bottom half of my second monitor is a big widget dashboard.

However, it still doesn't sound as good as the old Dashboard, where widgets effectively got their own desktop (available for quick access at any time with a single keypress or touchpad gesture). This would also be more consistent with iOS, where you can just swipe to the left-most home screen to see a dashboard of widgets.

I like to maintain a "clean desktop" look so not sure if I love the idea of cluttering it up with widgets, but I'll give it a try!

Depending on the implementation, I am however looking forward to this. I need to use some systems that only provide 2FA via a mobile app (i.e. Push OTP), and having to reach for my phone during work hours is pretty bad for my productivity and flow.

(I really prefer TOTP, which I can just let 1Password handle…)

"Chrome isn't just an App, it's a password provider. We're not throwing that away for Apple."

I don't think that was anyone's intention. Just to support filling passwords from other sources. But he locked into a single use case that was a straw man. "I can understand how some users might want that. That's not a priority for us."

I keep family members' social security numbers, security questions and answers, passport numbers, etc in there, and I don't want to split that data between a passwords app & secure notes.

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/icloud-passwords/pe...

> The iCloud Passwords extension is compatible with macOS Sonoma and Windows versions supported by the iCloud for Windows app. To enable the extension on a PC, download the iCloud for Windows app from the Microsoft Store and enable iCloud Passwords.

So AIUI no Linux? (vested interest as that would be my use case)

> However, it’s a bit annoying since you need to authenticate each new browser session with MFA

Well I'd be annoyed if iCloud-stored passwords weren't protected by MFA.

Tangent: I wish the EU would crack down on behemoths that borderline on being utility providers to publish protocol docs on grounds of:

a) auditability

b) interoperability

One can dream...

The screenshots had no indication of it, and it doesn't seem to have a web counterpart.

One of the major PITA for keychain was the association with your logged in AppleID. If it 's still that way, I don't see a real appeal for people who already went their way to pay for a full-fledge product.

Imagine killing your phone and asking a nearby friend to borrow theirs to quickly cancel an appointment to give you time to deal with it. That's the kind of situation that should be gracefully handled by a password manager service.

> Watson became very popular, and stayed that way right until Apple released Mac OS X 10.2 with Sherlock 3. In that release, Apple added just about everything Watson could do to Sherlock's own interface.

But now...

- Windows is full of AI/Adware bloat with more getting added every few months

- Linux's gaming/nvivia support has come such a long way that in some games it's beating Windows in some benchmarks now

- Apple's app store policies over the last 10 years have caused so many issues that our company is switching everything to webapps.

So I'll probably be switching from Windows+MacOS+Linux this year to just Linux next year.

Thinking of using the KDE or Cosmic desktop environments for personal computer and NixOS for development computer (just so I can test/rollback changes, and if the computer ever dies I can be up and running again in under an hour if I need to meet a deadline).

And sometimes apple will just mess up your developer account so you can't do the notarization meaning the apps stop working for users until apple fixes their mistake.

- Build app to finished state and release

- Loop a few times so you have more apps

- Apples changes notarization process

- Spend a few weeks troubleshooting with your users because Apple's notarization works on some machines and not others

- Now cycle through all apps adding only notarization/packaging changes instead of spending that time releasing real features / bug-fixes

- Repeat this each year because they keep changing their own requirements

- Randomly have apple shut down your development account so you can't release any updates. Go through 2 months of jumping through hoops over the phone including getting elevated to the top developer account support team and getting them to admit that their own rules have created impossible catch-22 scenarios that they can't change.

- End up having to create a brand new developer account

- Re-release all apps under new account's notarization

- Somehow convince users to download the new app just so they can get their updates because the old apps can't be auto-updated anymore

- Apple's changed their notarization process again so time to re-release all the apps again

- Continue to deal with customers who complain about issues that have been fixed years ago in the new updates that they aren't getting because they aren't using the right app.

- Spend time, resources and sanity to provide IT support to reassure users that no, they are infact still using the old app and they need to remove the old app and download the new app

- Apple's changed their notarization process again

All that, and the iOS app store is worse.

Dealing with Apple has cost us and our users our sanity.

No. Just no.

As for the other platforms, Android requires only about 2-3 weeks per year to keep apps releasable, And Windows requires only a few hours a year.

Everything we have is being reimplemented on the web now. Our first migrated app is being released in 4 months with another 2 new apps released shortly after (thanks to shared code). After some project post-mortem analysis early next year, and some v1.1s based on user feedback, we plan to start porting over all the others.

Windows 11 is behaving more and more like the viruses and adwares I spent so many years defending against.

That one really makes me happy.

1Password was a bliss until they went all in on subscriptions, and Bitwarden, for all its benefits is, I gotta say, rather abysmal when it comes to GUI and UX of their native app.

The Passwords app looks like the best of both worlds in terms of UX and functionality.

> apple sherlocked 1Password today, so i'd like to remind you that your Apple ID is only as secure as your carrier. if you have 2FA on and get SIM swapped, attackers can lock you out of it PERMANENTLY. last month it happened to me. make sure it doesn't happen to you

[1] https://x.com/blader/status/1800263787746066646

I'm really looking forward to this – big fan of Apple Pay, but I'm not switching to Safari and rebuilding my shopping cart for non-logged-in purchases, and that's where it's arguably most useful.

Word is that it'll work via QR code scanning from an iPhone anyway, in all browsers! Very clunky, but much better than Webkit only.