Post #1824598
2025-06-12 19:45 UTC
Replies (35)
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@tuomas_h@mastodon.social 2025-06-12 19:50
After booting into Tahoe for the first time and spending a bit of time opening up apps, I had a feeling that my 16" MacBook Pro just got smaller, because things are bigger and less of my stuff can fit on the screen. What good is a larger screen if the UI keeps eating up all that space? On the Mac we have the mouse pointer. It's a precision pointing device. Things don't need to be sized to work with touch. We can deal with higher UI and information density – we got by for decades.
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@GuyDudeman@beige.party 2025-06-12 20:01
@tuomas_h@mastodon.social THANK YOU! You are 100% correct.
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@leoncowle@hachyderm.io 2025-06-12 20:03
@tuomas_h@mastodon.social Great comparison, Tuomas! (/cc @siracusa@mastodon.social )
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@amonduin@mastodon.social 2025-06-12 20:14
@tuomas_h@mastodon.social Turns out toolbars had a purpose - who knew ;)
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@chrisw_b@social.chriswb.dev 2025-06-12 20:18
@tuomas_h@mastodon.social at least with 11-15 you could merge the tabs with the url bar; it was smaller than 10 that way!
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@rhysmorgan@mastodon.social 2025-06-12 20:20
@tuomas_h@mastodon.social @stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social I suspect one of the reasons _everything_ seems to have gotten bigger with Tahoe is potential touchscreen Macs, and minimum touch targets.
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@dmitriid@mastodon.nu 2025-06-12 20:46
@tuomas_h@mastodon.social And at the same time they manage to show less information and actions while taking up more space
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@grishka@mastodon.social 2025-06-12 20:48
@tuomas_h@mastodon.social this is happening to all desktop UIs over the last 15 years. Even some Linux DEs, like Gnome. I call it "the touchscreen scourge".
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@lasombra_br@mas.to 2025-06-12 20:53
@tuomas_h@mastodon.social I keep saying this: the more padding Apple adds to macOS components the more convinced I am that they are planning for touch input. Maybe it be macOS on iPad or adding touch screens to MacBooks
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@sijt@mastodonapp.uk 2025-06-12 21:51
@tuomas_h@mastodon.social At the same time they’ve removed the option to collapse the tab bar and address bar in to a single row. So for people who used that option the account of chrome has increased significantly.
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@dnanian@mas.to 2025-06-12 23:55
@tuomas_h@mastodon.social Ah, but you see, you have to count the content you can't read that you can sort of see under all those controls and the title bar.
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@simsaens@mastodon.social 2025-06-13 03:13
@tuomas_h@mastodon.social @stroughtonsmith@mastodon.social they took away the compact tab bar layout. That was the best thing they ever did to Safari. The compact layout was smaller than Yosemite and got completely out of the way
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@frankreiff@mastodon.social 2025-06-13 08:53
@tuomas_h@mastodon.social there are several false beliefs at work: - blurred content under the UI chrome counts as “content” This is somewhat true for photos (the only use case being designed for apparently) and totally false for text. - a Mac is essentially an iPad with a keyboard The macOS 26 UI is now derived from the iPad. The biggest problem for the iPad with its full screen paradigm and “big iPhone” UI has always been “what do we do with all the leftover space”? Answer: add a sidebar and whitespace.
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@check123@mastodon.social 2025-06-13 12:27
@tuomas_h@mastodon.social I don’t know what you’re doing wrong but my tabs are in the title bar (where the traffic light buttons live) and take up no additional space
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@austinha@mastodon.social 2025-06-13 13:57
@atpfm@mastodon.social @marcoarment@mastodon.social @siracusa@mastodon.social
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@miketaffet@mastodon.social 2025-06-13 14:49
@tuomas_h@mastodon.social pro tip: most people expect the progression of oldest to newest to go left to right. At a quick glance I thought Tahoe was the right-most image.
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@ashkendo@mastodon.social 2025-06-13 14:50
@tuomas_h@mastodon.social @marcoarment@mastodon.social Not that I agree with the choice, but when they say “gets out of the way of your content” I think they really mean the UI is clean and “less busy” and not attracting the eye away from the content. The end result may oddly be leaving less space for content as blank dead space of the app UI grows.
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@lo_fye@mastodon.cloud 2025-06-13 14:55
@tuomas_h@mastodon.social @marcoarment@mastodon.social Put your site nav across the bottom of the site instead of across the top, and then see how Tahoe Safari fares. Content is visible, but unnavigable.
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@LauraLangdon@hachyderm.io 2025-06-13 16:26
@tuomas_h@mastodon.social @marcoarment@mastodon.social I think people with brains like mine must be in charge of UI lately, because I while I can absolutely see what you mean about less content fitting on the screen at the same time, the extra space and lower density actually let me take in more of the content. In high-density UIs I feel like my eyes can't rest on any one thing and it takes a lot more effort to read. It's like a light that's too bright, except it's information? Extra whitespace feels calming and comfortable to me. I wonder how complicated it would be to implement a setting for density choice, like we have in some UIs (email comes to mind), where we can choose like “cozy” for high-density or “relaxed" for lower-density.
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@yemeth@mastodon.social 2025-06-13 16:53
@tuomas_h@mastodon.social After all these years I'm still mad about the loss of color in the finder's side bar. The icons there _were_ the content. Now it's all blueish shapes.
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@drewpickard@mastodon.social 2025-06-13 17:04
@tuomas_h@mastodon.social Still ahead of Chrome. (below) Fun fact: in designing Edge for Windows 10 I took screenshots of every single browser and made sure that the UI exactly met or beat the tightest of them. I was so stubborn about it I refused to use the proposed system button size because it made the ui too tall and horsey. The controls team gave me shit about it, but then ultimately changed the sizing of all controls to match and that's how I saved hundreds of millions of Windows users an extra 4 pixels.
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@belovedmelody@mastodon.social 2025-06-13 17:30
@tuomas_h@mastodon.social most valid critique I’ve seen so far.
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@AliveDevil@tauri.earth 2025-06-13 17:55
@tuomas_h@mastodon.social Mmh, yummy, delicious soft padding. @fi@chaos.social
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@gabert@troet.cafe 2025-06-13 18:35
@tuomas_h@mastodon.social What is why I was so excited about tree style tabs for Firefox being implemented. And not very excited that windows 11 loses the ability to have the task bar on the left side. But dock o the left and tree tabs, amazing!
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@misty@digipres.club 2025-06-13 20:04
@tuomas_h@mastodon.social It's interesting, I feel like it's an unintentional throwback to the older Safari designs. The version here from Tiger, with its larger three-row UI, looks a lot like the Tahoe Beta 1 version. Not sure that's a good thing or not, but interesting to see it come back around. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2005/04/macosx-10-4/
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@devolute@mastodon.social 2025-06-13 23:24
@tuomas_h@mastodon.social Conspiracy theory take: MS kept IE such a crap browser for so long to damage the web and thus keep a better grip on Windows apps as a platform. Apple are now doing the same.
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@gregatron5@vmst.io 2025-06-14 23:25
@tuomas_h@mastodon.social @chartier@toot.cafe I bet they’re prepping touchability on the Mac and want it to be less of a touchability nightmare than on windows. Lay the groundwork in the UI first, then roll out the hardware. Everyone I know has been trying to scroll on their MacBooks by touching the screen for at least a decade. Apple knows the demand is there.
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@arquitetomovel@bolha.us 2025-06-16 11:29
@tuomas_h@mastodon.social yep , but when you scroll down the main bar overlays showing the content.
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@mbishop@mastodon.social 2025-06-16 16:31
@tuomas_h@mastodon.social Perhaps counter-intuitively, it would appear that border-lines, color changes, shadow, and texture-shifts between sections *preserve* space because without them, you have to use extra margins to disambiguate the visual hierarchy.
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@wezm@mastodon.decentralised.social 2025-06-20 07:46
@tuomas_h@mastodon.social curious how a version before the merged title bar would compare to the Tahoe one. Would be funny if they threw away the usability of the title bar to make more room for content only have have the UI eat it back up again.
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@SamantazFox@infosec.exchange 2025-06-21 16:22
@tuomas_h@mastodon.social That's what we can call an Apple to Apple comparison ^^
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@Lily_and_frog@mastodon.art 2025-08-26 15:01
@tuomas_h@mastodon.social That's because the lead designer is getting older and hasn't accepted yet they needed glasses.
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@lasombra_br@mas.to 2025-08-26 16:07
@tuomas_h@mastodon.social I'll keep saying this is the preparation for a future touch friendly macOS
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@amd@gts.amd.im 2025-08-26 16:46
@tuomas_h@mastodon.social my kingdom to go back to just 19 pixels.
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@gumnos@mastodon.bsd.cafe 2025-08-26 18:31
@tuomas_h@mastodon.social @romanzolotarev@mas.to Hah, that makes me extra thankful to have a window-manager (fluxbox on Xorg) that lets me completely remove window-chrome and completely maximize any window to fill the entire screen, allowing me to use 100% (minus internal application controls like tabs in Firefox) of my screen-real-estate for my work/content. No borders, no title-bars, no taskbar, no dock, no menus, etc. 🥰