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The notch hiding menubar icons is such a stupid problem to have. I waste hours every week trying to help people who send me frustrated emails because they bough
by alin23 6mo ago
The notch hiding menubar icons is such a stupid problem to have. I waste hours every week trying to help people who send me frustrated emails because they bought one of my apps and they say: "it doesn't launch" or "why doesn't it have any interface??"
No amount of FAQ will help these people. And this also results in hasty refund requests and even worse, chargebacks that take 2x the amount the users paid out of my pocket.
I recently helped my brother launch a simple app for making any window a PiP window (https://lowtechguys.com/pipiri https://lowtechguys.com/pipiri) and in the first two days, half of the sales turned into refunds exactly because of this issue. People had so many menubar icons that they thought the app just doesn't work. Not an encouraging launch for his first app.
Not to mention the fact that the best solution that helped alleviate this, the Bartender app, was completely broken by Apple's internal API changes in macOS Tahoe.
This could have been handled better.
- cevn 6mo agoOnce you find out that the notch can hide app items it makes you want to throw your computer out of a window.
- apple4ever 5mo agoAgreed. I hate the notch. I run "Just Say No to Notch" from the App Store to avoid the problem entirely.
- mort96 6mo agoIt's such a simple problem to solve too: when there are too many menu bar icons, put them in an overflow menu. A single icon which contains a list of icons. And let me arrange which icons go into the top bar and which go into the overflow menu. Windows solved this many many decades ago with their system tray overflow menu. Browsers solved it too, by letting you put extension icons in an overflow menu. It's not hard. But nooo, macOS just silently hides applications from you, with no visible indication that there's anything hidden.
- zamadatix 6mo agoEven if they didn't want to have an overflow menu for some reason there it boggles my mind why the menu bar isn't just aware of what portion is covered and should be skipped (file menus or icons) in the first place!
- butlike 6mo agoWell there's effectively no space on the lefthand side of the notch. You must assume that side is going to be completely consumed by actual menu items. Side note: If you want to check what icons might be buried by the notch, you can Cmd + Drag any icon from the menu bar to rearrange them. If you drag an icon through the notch, the other items will pop into view, if any are hidden.
- dpacmittal 6mo agoAn even simpler solution is allow horizontal scrolling in the area.
- hombre_fatal 6mo agoThe same problem exists on the left side of the notch, too. File, Edit, View, History, Window, Help Where there are too many items, it gets silently truncated. A simple dropdown icon on overflow is such obvious UI here.
- abustamam 6mo agoOne of the first things I tasked to do as a junior web developer at my first job was to make a horizontal nav menu that was responsive such that when the screen shrinks any overflow items go into a drop-down. Baffling that a trillion dollar company can't do this. Edit: apparently i don't know the difference between vertical and horizontal :)
- bredren 6mo agoThis is not an unknown issue at the fruit co. Can anyone speculate on any rational if not good reasons for not solving this problem yet?
- kccqzy 6mo agoI don’t work at the fruit co but since you asked for speculations. Mine: the fruit co designers are still designing a nice interface to show the overflow, because they obviously think that the Windows tray overflow looked inelegant and are still searching for the ideal UI. But the designers themselves don’t have a lot of menu bar apps so they don’t think it’s a priority.
- tmd83 6mo agoOr perhaps the teams at fruit co found a way to claim that their overflow is an innovative new feature and not copied from some other designs. While they do a ton of good work, they do love to claim everything was first invented by them.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- toraway 6mo agoProbably the same response I just saw someone reply with in this very thread: "You shouldn't have so many utilities running" It's the go-to Apple user response to anything the OS doesn't support or does poorly: "Why would you want to do that?"
- VerifiedReports 6mo agoThat's the standard apologist response to ANY defect you point out in anything, or any question they don't know the answer to but still want to bloviate about. See: Stack Overflow
- biztos 6mo agoThat’s the company response but I’m definitely not the only long-term Apple user whose go-to response is a sympathetic nod followed by a long rant about Tim Cook and his contempt for software engineering.
- quietsegfault 6mo agoPerhaps people who have many menubar icons are hare-brained and you should check to see how many icons they’ve got before you price your product for them to account for the support overhead.
- cosmic_cheese 6mo agoThe reason things are this way is that in Apple’s view, third party devs are effectively misusing menu items. Originally it wasn’t even possible for third parties to add new menu extras using public APIs. That was something reserved for Apple. Third party devs had to use a tool called MenuCracker. When Apple finally added the API used now, the intention for it was for full fat GUI programs to provide ephemeral menu item companions that disappear when the host app is quit. It was never intended to facilitate persistent third party menu extras. So the issue hasn’t been fixed because in Apple’s view it’s a problem of third party devs’ own creation. If all third party menu items were ephemeral nobody would have enough for them to overflow into the notch area. —— Personally I think they should offer a way to extend the Control Center and push devs who want persistence towards that. That would afford better organization for users and allow them to better control which are immediately visible (since some apps don’t offer an option to hide their menu item).
- VerifiedReports 6mo agoThat's not really defensible as an excuse, especially considering Apple's grooming of users to believe that they never need to quit applications. All Apple had to do was add a "more" indicator at the end of the area, at the very least. Or... to give all applications' entries equal footing, collapse them all into a disclosure control once there are too many to show. But no... once again, a simple and fair solution eludes Apple's "designers."
- osicjwjxiwu 6mo agoIf the “simple and fair solution” makes it so lazy developers lose money over putting things in the menu bar where they most definitely should not be putting anything, then so be it. Stop putting things in the menu bar. End of.
- cosmic_cheese 6mo agoYes, the number of apps that actually deserve space up there is rather small. The last thing Apple should do is enable a Windows tray style free for all.
- dsalzman 6mo agoI’ve been looking for something like your brothers app. Used to use an app called helium for floating video windows. I’ll check it out!
- alsetmusic 6mo agoIt's annoying for end-users (and you), but why not display a window with a SUPERSHORT message explaining that MacBooks with a notch might hide the icon on the first launch? Have a button or link to explain more for people who want it. Shouldn't have to, but it might mitigate some of the stuff a FAQ won't catch.
- emj 6mo agoI forgot such messages directly. Then when It realize I saw an important message tens seconds ago I have no way of going back. I can not press undo and get that message again. Error messages are a bad design. Error logs are ok. Global undo would be king like the undo close tab feature in browsers.
- amjd 6mo agoIce is an open source app solves this problem through an overflow menu: https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice
- FireBeyond 6mo agoIce is no longer actively maintained. You might want to look at Thaw.
- jwr 6mo agoI never understood the logic behind the thinking there. Why would you ever want to place menubar items UNDER the notch, if you know it's there and they won't be visible? It's such an easy problem to fix, with such incredible usability consequences, I just don't get the thinking.
- bongripper 6mo ago[dead]
- leptoniscool 6mo ago"Think Different"
- VerifiedReports 6mo ago"Courage"
- butlike 6mo agoThe notch itself is probably considered temporary internally. If you code a rule for the notch, then you're going to have to consider which hardware OSX is running on in order to determine if the notch is present or not for your "notch width calculation."
- veidr 6mo agoIt's true this is a mess, but no application should have a menu by icon as its only means of access. It's OK to offer that as an option, but all applications should be capable of presenting a user interface when launched from the Applications directory (or (rarely) ~/Applications, etc). There's really no exception to this rule. For an (tiny) minority of applications, it makes sense to hide the dock icon, and to typically access the app via hotkey or menu bar widget. But those apps should still have an icon and should still be able to be invoked by opening it using any of the standard ways to do that. That's just how the Mac works.
- Etheryte 6mo agoThe truth is most apps have no business having a menubar icon, but many of them cannot even be disabled out of the box. There's a number of third-party tools that help with the issue, but really this should be handled at the OS level. I want a permission similar to notifications to control whether an app can litter the menubar or not.
- kstrauser 6mo agoIt is in Tahoe, which is on the short list of things I strongly, genuinely like about the update.
- VerifiedReports 6mo agoOne thing's for sure: No application should be allowed to have a menubar item without a ToolTip. WTF, that should have been obvious from day one. At the moment, I have 11 of them on my system (not counting the clock), a mix of third-party and Apple ones. NOT ONE of them has a ToolTip. Even worse, if you click on them, the resulting menu does not show the name of the owning application. This too should be forced. For example, I unfortunately have to run Microsoft Teams, and its toolbar menu gives you no indication of what application it belongs to.
- carlosjobim 6mo agoThere is no reason for apps to be in the menubar. Either they should have a dock icon or be hidden completely. And open a window with functions and settings when opened by spotlight.
- abustamam 6mo agoI'm curious if people even cared about the half-centimeter extra screen space they got when Apple introduced the notch into MacBooks. Arguably it makes a bigger difference in iPhones so I'll grant them that, even if it does hide half of the top bar of the iPhone. But did people hate the half centimeter bezel on macs that much that they wanted to lose an inch of their task bar? Genuinely curious how we got here!
- VerifiedReports 6mo agoThe pissing and moaning about "bezels" is cacophonous in certain echo chambers. It's sad to see Apple taking cues from a minority group of infantile users, but that's one way we got here.
- abustamam 6mo agoI mean, I don't love large bezels, but I dislike less screen real estate even more. Are the bezel nerds happy with where are now?? My android phone (OnePlus 11) has a hole punch front camera so I don't lose too much screen real estate. It's annoying sometimes but I prefer it to my mom's iPhone's giant notch.
- osicjwjxiwu 6mo agoThe hole punch design absolutely horrendous. It makes everything uneven visually speaking and it just looks like - screen defect. The notch is fine, not perfect, but fine, and leagues above that stupidity of the hole punch.
- abustamam 6mo agoWell I guess Apple and Android both found their target markets in both of us!