Comment by mechanical_fish | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mechanical_fish | Hacker News Reader

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mechanical_fish

If it makes you sad because Apple is no longer devoting thousands of pixels at the top of each window to a big "drag this window" control, you'd better brace yourself, because the next step for many consumer applications is to have windows that cannot be dragged at all.

This design looks like an iPad screen to me. Did the implications of Apple's stated mission to "make the Mac more like the iPad" not sink in? The iPad doesn't have draggable windows. And putting big title bars on a nondraggable window is a waste of pixels.

As for the critique of various shades of gray and nonscalable text and laggy performance: It is launch day, people. We are lucky the app works at all. (It apparently doesn't quite work for everyone; those bugs are going to need to be fixed first.) It is hell on earth to meet a Steve Jobs launch date, I'm grateful to all those who made it happen, and I'd like to encourage the rest of the peanut gallery to be patient and see if revision 1.0.1 brings some improvements.

I highly doubt that that Apple will remove dragable windows. Their iPad-ification of applications is the full-screen mode that can be toggled.

More likely: a bar-wide drag handler that takes precedence over widget clicking.

Sure, that is what I meant. My guess is that this app is giving us an early vision of what apps will look like in the upcoming full-screen mode. When that mode comes out, not long from now, the App Store will continue to look exactly as it does now.

Why design the window twice inside of a year when designing it once will do?

Of course Apple won't take away OS support for draggable windows. That would be silly. What will happen, though, if the new full-screen mode takes off, is that app developers will redesign their windows to be more suitable for full-screen. And that may well involve smaller or nonexistent title bars.

That's already happened to some extent. Xcode and Final Cut both run in multi-window yet effectively fullscreen mode, but act as IDEs for their respective workflows. In fact, this IDE mentality could be the new big divisive topic in the Mac world: Coda vs Textmate and Safari and CSSEdit and Versions and... Really, it's the same war as Vim vs Emacs (somewhat), just with GUIs. Does the application need to be full-screen and kitchen sink, or multi-window and able to integrate with others?

I do agree, this could be a nuclear, apocalyptic scenario. But while photo, video and code workflows can be condensed nicely into one app, traditional mac workflows have been multi-window, multi-app in that most common tasks aren't IDE-oriented, and constructed from many different apps running on the Mac platform.

But, to counter your point about app laziness: most mac developers came to the platform to make really good apps. If it was about just throwing something easy out there, they'd have run to Windows or enterprise apps already.

>Their iPad-ification of applications is the full-screen mode that can be toggled.

The problem is that app UIs are going to pick a paradigm and it's going to feel out of place if you use a different one. The dragbar being replaced is a pretty good example of this.

It's a lot of why I'm not particularly looking forward to Lion.

I would prefer to see an X Window style alt to drag system, makes life moving windows much easier.

OS X only has one corner for resizing windows, so it wouldn't surprise me.

It's launch day at Apple. We expect no peanuts!

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