You're making multiple desktops sound very confusing when it's really not. Every desktop OS has them and macOS' implementation is quite good. You want bad virtual desktops, try Windows.
It sounds like you don't actually want the app in fullscreen. Fullscreen is "I only want to be in this one app window with no distractions." I pretty much only use it for watching videos.
If you want the window taking up the entire screen while staying on the desktop, double click the window chrome and it'll expand to fill the screen. And if you want the dock not taking up space, there's a setting to auto hide the dock (which I always enable)
> It sounds like you don't actually want the app in fullscreen. Fullscreen is "I only want to be in this one app window with no distractions." I pretty much only use it for watching videos.
I do want that. Every other OS has no issue with what I'm describing. Who said I don't want distractions? I want the video content to be expanded as widely as possible, that is what "full screen" means. Who said "full screen" means a separate desktop?
Ridiculous tbh
> And if you want the dock not taking up space, there's a setting to auto hide the dock (which I always enable)
> The fact that a full screen window creates a whole new virtual desktop is hilarious and I dare you to justify it.
I can kind of see the idea here. The alternative is that all the other windows in the working desktop get hidden behind the fullscreen window. That's pretty bad UX. I personally avoid it on Linux by always moving a window to its own desktop before fullscreening it.
That said, the implementation is awful, and exposes the rotten foundations of Mac's window management paradigm.
IMO floating windows always fall apart and should be reserved for modals and transient dialog boxes only. Everything gets a lot easier to understand when applications can't occlude one another or occupy the same space.
> The alternative is that all the other windows in the working desktop get hidden behind the fullscreen window. That's pretty bad UX.
How? It means I could have a full screen video and then overlay something smaller over it, or maintain my alt-tab behavior as it plays in the background, etc. I'd maintain the same UX. Why would full screen have such a weird behavior?
You're right that it's more consistent to have windows behave as you describe, and Windows and Linux both treat fullscreen windows this way. I posit that Apple cares more about not hiding windows behind others than it does consistency. This also shows with their new window placement algorithm that results in an absolute mess of windows all partially occluded but with some corner or edge peeking out of the stack for a user to visually identify and click to focus/being-to-top. Compare to Windows that (at least when I last used it) opens new windows at a slight diagonal offset from the last focused window, almost like building a neat deck of cards. Apple's ethos is also on display in the design of Stage Manager, which groups windows into these messy clumps and creates a visible shelf to swap between window bundles. Everything is optimized for hunt-and-peck visual users. If you're the type to organize your windows and workflows then you're fighting the system.
In editable text fields you can tap a word a few times and it'll select the whole paragraph, if that's any help.
What drives me insane though, is double tapping a word is supposed to select that word. But I think starting in iOS 18 it started selecting the word and a random amount of surrounding words, but only about half the time. I couldn't tell you what it could possibly be trying to do but it's maddening.
It’s using AI to try and determine if it’s a proper noun or other scenario where multiple words are really one semantic term. Except it’s really really bad at it and it’s almost never the behavior I want, but there’s no way to turn it off. (I vaguely remember there was a WWDC talk sometime a couple years ago where they went into how this works)
Word segmentation has been a longstanding problem in CJK languages too. Coupled with the terrible text selection in iOS it makes it really hard to select substrings.
It works surprisingly well on Android; expanding to grab a full address, for instance, or complete phone number. Sometimes it needs tweaking, but mostly it's directionally correct and helpful rather than harmful
Just keeping my finger on the word works for me every time to select it. Double tap works only works in the edit fields. Also works reliable for me here in the hacker news post editor, as long as I do it in the middle of the word.
The desperation for feedback is grating. You have a monopoly position, you know I cannot switch from this, why waste my time with this dialogue? Not like you take user opinions seriously anyway.
Everyone's gonna give you shit for this answer and there's a hundred things I could tell you about their software that pisses me off, but the bar is so low for software these days, their stuff is still in the high end of quality (they need to do a lot to get back to where they were 10 years ago though)
Only other software I regularly use that I think is overall high quality and I enjoy using are the JetBrains IDEs, and the Telegram mobile app (though the Premium upselling has gotten kinda gross the past few years)
Their lessons aren't bad because they want to stop you from being proficient in the language; they're just uninspired and unchallenging. Their gamification is nonsense and totally non-addictive. No one is addicted to Duolingo, otherwise they'd be doing hours of lessons every day.
People just don't want to break their streak - that's the reason they continue to use it. It's an obligatory thing you do once a day, it takes 2 minutes, and they get to show you an ad.
I've used it for a couple years learning Spanish, essentially because it introduces me to new words I'm otherwise not encountering in my regular Spanish usage, and that's all I need it for. Duolingo actually used to be better, and I was paying for it for a couple years. But they did a giant AI overhaul last year that made the content worse overnight. The stories are regularly nonsense because they're LLM-generated and seemingly not vetted properly. And they somehow even broke the TTS which hasn't been able to say certain consonant sounds for months now. But I digress.
I use StartAllBack to replace the Start menu with more or less the Windows 7 one, and it also has features to restore file explorer to the more sensible Windows 7/8 versions.
That's called malware. Like that's literally malware by any reasonable definition. The fact that it's branded by and distributed by a multi trillion dollar corporation does not make it not malware. Your PC has been compromised, and it would be wise to solve your problem instead of trying to make the best of running malware.
And don't forget the safety in getting to say "our systems are down because of [X TRUSTED SOFTWARE FROM LARGE KNOWN BRAND] and we're just waiting for them to fix it" instead of "our shitty internal tooling is broken and no one knows how to fix it"
NO ONE CARED THAT THE WINDOW CORNER RADIUS DIDN'T MATCH AN IPAD, IT DOESN'T NEED TO
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