Friday, February 14, 2020

SwitchGlass 1.0

John Siracusa:

SwitchGlass adds a dedicated application switcher to your Mac.

[…]

Apple provides APIs to activate applications, optionally also bringing all of their windows to the front. Sometimes, when a call is made to one of these APIs, nothing happens. Or sometimes the app activates but none of its windows come to the front, even though the API call asked for all windows to come to the front. These bugs have existed in macOS for many years, and I’ve not yet found workaround for them in SwitchGlass.

[…]

Q: Why can’t I use SwitchGlass to quit apps?

Sandboxed Mac apps cannot tell arbitrary other applications to quit.

[…]

The area of the preferences window used to set the app switcher’s positon on the screen is meant to show a tiny version of each display’s desktop background image. Unfortunately, sandboxed Mac apps cannot read images from arbitrary locations without asking for permission first. SwitchGlass can access the desktop pictures that come bundled with macOS, but it cannot see any of your personal pictures. I decided it wasn’t worth prompting for permission for this visual frill, so if SwitchGlass cannot read your desktop background image, it will just show a gray box instead.

Brad Ellis discusses designing the icon.

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Nice privacy policy.

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