The Struggle of Resizing Windows on Tahoe
Norbert Heger (Mastodon, Hacker News):
Since upgrading to macOS Tahoe, I’ve noticed that quite often my attempts to resize a window are failing.
This never happened to me before in almost 40 years of using computers. So why all of a sudden?
It turns out that my initial click in the window corner instinctively happens in an area where the window doesn’t respond to it. The window expects this click to happen in an area of 19 × 19 pixels, located near the window corner.
[…]
But due to the huge corner radius in Tahoe, most of it – about 75% – now lies outside the window[…]
That’s right, folks, the solution to resizing the corner of a window in Tahoe is to click outside the edge of the window. I can’t even.
The accompanying gif of him grabbing a plate captures the experience perfectly.
The annotated images (green “expected” area, blue dot, and the “accepted target area” sitting in empty space) make the point better than any amount of hand-waving, and we need more of this to make it obvious that Apple needs to reverse course on the whole thing.
Yes! All the time. The opposite also occurs: trying to click something behind a window and accidentally resizing the front most window instead.
I’ve noticed that resizing windows on macOS Tahoe seems to fail 2-3 times each time I perform the action. How did Apple break so many interactions in a single release?
I have struggled with this every single day since Tahoe was released. I fail on nearly every first attempt at resizing a window.
[…]
Imagine taking one of the most core, we-take-this-for-granted features of a windowing system and throwing it away. And why? Oh, because iPhones have rounded corners and therefore so should all windows on every Apple platform.
Things like this make me want to switch to Linux and build my own Desktop environment and window manager.
Like, gather all the macOS devs who still understand how desktop UX is supposed to work, take an Apple HIG from the 90s or and let’s build ourselves a new home.
And when we are done with that (shouldn’t take longer than a couple decades, right?), we fork the open source component from Android and do the same for mobile UX.
ugh this is one of the things that drives me most insane in #macOSTahoe. Basic desktop-isms are just so broken. I fear that more and more folks who don’t understand the history of the desktop are running the show at Apple. I hope I am wrong but then what explains this mess?
One can argue with the logic behind these changes, 15 years ago. I’ll repeat that I think it was a grave error to make scrollbars invisible by default. I would argue that while the visible grippy-strip isn’t necessary, it’s nice to have. (As noted above, its presence showed you whether a window could be resized.) But there was, clearly, logic behind the decisions Apple made in 2011. They were carefully considered. The new logic was that you no longer look for a grippy-strip to click on to resize a window. You simply click inside the edge of a window. And of course Apple added a small affordance to the hit target for those edges, such that if you clicked just outside the window, that would count as “close enough” to assume you intended to click on the edge. Most users surely never noticed that. A lot of nice little touches in UI design go unnoticed because they’re nice little touches.
Until MacOS 26, most of the hit target for initiate the resizing of a window was inside the window. Because, of course, right? Even though MacOS (well, Mac OS X) stopped rendering a visible resize grippy-strip 15 years ago, the user could simply imagine that there was still a grippy area inside the lower right corner of every resizable window. It would make no sense whatsoever for the click target to resize a window to be outside the window. Why would anyone expect that? It would work against what our own eyes, and years of experience, are telling us. You pick up a thing to move it or stretch it by grabbing the thing. Not by grabbing next to the thing.
I worked on Finder/TimeMachine/Spotlight/iOS at Apple from 2000-2007. I worked closely with Bas Ording, Stephen Lemay, Marcel van Os, Imran Chaudry, Don Lindsey and Greg Christie. I have no experience with any of the designers who arrived in the post-Steve era. During my time, Jony Ive didn’t figure prominently in the UI design, although echoes of his industrial design appeared in various ways in the graphic design of the widgets. Kevin Tiene and Scott Forstall had more influence for better or worse, extreme skeumorphism for example.
[…]
Here is my snapshot of Stephen from the time. He presented the UI ideas for the intial tabbed window interface in Safari. He had multiple design ideas and Steve dismissed them quickly and harshly. Me recollection was that Steve said something like No, next, worse, next, even worse, next, no. Why don’t you come back next week with something better. Stephen didn’t push back, say much, just went ok and that was that. I think Greg was the team manager at the time and pushed Steve for more input and maybe got some. This was my general observation of how Stephen was over 20 years ago.
I am skeptical and doubtful about Stephen’s ability to make a change unless he is facilitated greatly by someone else or has somehow changed drastically. The fact that he has been on the team while the general opinion of Apple UX quality has degraded to the current point of the Tahoe disaster is telling. Several team members paid dearly in emotional abuse under Steve and decided to leave rather than deal with the environment post Steve’s death. Stephen is a SJ-era original and should have been able to push hard against what many of us perceive as very poor decisons. He either agreed with those decisions, or did not, and choose to go with the flow and enjoy the benefits of working at Apple.
Previously:
- Liquid Glass Disbelief
- Alan Dye Leaving Apple for Meta
- How to Turn Liquid Glass Into a Solid Interface
- Tahoe Window Corners
7 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
Every time I hear "Tahoe is mostly fine" from someone I know who updated to it, yet another anecdote like this appears that makes me wonder how the average person uses their Mac. This is simply maddening -- how was this not a story on beta 1 day 1?
And diskzero puts into words (with firsthand knowledge) why my Steve Lemay enthusiasm is blunted. I hope he asserts all that talent everyone says he has, but he's been there throughout this entire Ive/Dye slide, so I can't feel any hope or excitement until I see something that looks like evidence of a better day ahead.
Will the praise for Anal Dye the irredeemable UI "design" moron never end? This genius bulldozed through decades of careful design and interaction work in only one year. Have fun at Meta you dumb idiot!
I'd argue that windows don't need any corner radii at all, like they were in classic MacOS. Every Mac is a square screen with 90 degree angles in all 4 corners. It's an OS with multiple windows on the screen that will surely at some point be tiled or split screen adjacent to one another. Having corner radii just makes it look weird by creating a bunch of unnecessary gaps and losing potential information density (granted, a minuscule amount, but still). These choices by Apple make no sense.
Every time I see screenshots of Mac OS 9 I am marveled at the clarity and elegance and can’t help but wonder how they GUI would look in modern hardware.
Joachim Kurz's sentiment is becoming less of a "would be nice"-daydream and more of a "this is the only option we have left"-imperative.
