{"id":29426,"date":"2020-07-03T16:43:05","date_gmt":"2020-07-03T20:43:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=29426"},"modified":"2021-09-07T15:29:27","modified_gmt":"2021-09-07T19:29:27","slug":"big-surs-narrow-alerts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2020\/07\/03\/big-surs-narrow-alerts\/","title":{"rendered":"Big Sur’s Narrow Alerts"},"content":{"rendered":"

Craig Hockenberry<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Why do I have this
\nhuge ass screen on
\nmy Mac and am now
\nreading alerts with
\nfour or five words in
\neach line?<\/p>\n

Seems like a bad
\nidea when a majority
\nof Macs have a
\ndisplay with landscape
\norientation. Portrait
\nmakes sense on a phone,
\nbut I find it hard to
\nuse on a Big
\nSur desktop.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

The reason is to make it look more like iOS, perhaps so that iOS apps running on macOS 11 fit in better. We’re continually told that macOS and iOS are not merging<\/a>, and that the Mac will still be the Mac, yet Apple continues to make changes to macOS like this that degrade the user experience in favor of consistency with iOS. Look at the Catalyst apps. Even the praised<\/a> Messages app is gaining bugs and losing features like transcripts, AppleScript, and good keyboard support that weren’t in the iOS version.<\/p>\n\n

Apple<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Alerts are cardlike rectangles that use the same corner radius as all windows in macOS 11. Within an alert, most content is center aligned.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Centered text is difficult to read when there are multiple lines. It’s also disorienting that sometimes the buttons are arranged horizontally and other times vertically. And it introduces an incosistency with dialogs<\/a>, which often are just alerts with more content, but now they have different text alignment and a different style of button.<\/p>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n