Hidden Bar: macOS utility to hide unused menu bar icons, written in Swift
github.com
github.com
I'm very bitter about this.
This behavior is also difficult to understand for novice users.
I understand that the implementation of systray icons were a hack. But don't remove basic functionality until there is a supported replacement.
On the other hand, this should not have come as a surprise. They have also removed menus and replaced them by incomplete, unusable hamburger menus.
/grumpy GNOME user
POSIX without being a POS
The 2015 and now 2019 MacBook pros are the best fit and finish computers on the market (yes I skipped the nonsense they did with that keyboard and thinness over heat and battery size nonsense in between). The keyboards are my favorite touch out of anything on the market. The screen, while annoyingly reflective, has great quality and pixel density. The OS despite flaws in each new release, within a patch generally is more stable than any other I touch on a daily basis. The battery life first on the 2015 laptop and now on the 2019 version was the first time I’ve experienced using a machine that I could program on and watch movies on flights across the country, without concern of running out of juice. The trackpad is better than anything else that I’ve tried on the market.
Yes, a lot of this could be due to limited experience of other systems out there, but Apple despite its missteps, generally lives up to producing a luxury brand computer that doesn’t feel like a waste of money given the joy of the overall experience.
I've owned Mac laptops since that meant PowerPC or a more exotic processor, used Mac OS since the week Macs were released. I've also been a heavy ThinkPad user since 2000. These days if you're a unix person Macs simply don't earn their price premium and they require a lot more fiddling than my openSUSE & Cinnamon ThinkPad. I'm running the bleeding edge Tumbleweed rolling release and I'm still having fewer random problems than the last couple of OS X releases gave me.
It just might be me, as I was also never able to feel comfortable with iOS but as long as I can find a solution to do my work I don't complaint much, at least less than when I was 20 :)
It was clearly a humorous comment with the "substance" OSX enjoys a lot of developer support a-la-Linux ... because of POSIX support (amongst other things)
Anyone who uses such obvious satire as an excuse to start a flamewar could start a flamewar over a lot less, I was under the impression I don't have to write with petulant children being my target audience.
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I think the most annoying thing about this is plenty of people got that without issue, the comment existed for hours with plenty of useful discussion from people who understood the satire...
Then some upset person taking it as a personal slight flags the post and now it's hidden, how silly.
There's nothing wrong with humour per se, but most people overrate the humour in their own comments. scott_s said it best: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7609289
It looks like you've been breaking the site guidelines in other comments as well. Would you mind reading them and sticking to the intended spirit of the site when posting here?
The comment was upvoted and well received, and even generated an actual discussion until it was flagged and people jumped on the bandwagon.
There was nothing wrong for people who approached the comment and "assumed good faith"
Now if I could figure out Mac style copy and paste it would be just about perfect.
But maybe that's the weird translation from English in my head.
It is still there just in the bottom left instead of the top right. Also, you know that you can use any panel or dock you like in gnome shell? For example lxpanel, tint2,...
Elementary also got affected by this.
Office menus in particular took on a shortened form with only the most used items. You had to explicitly expand them to see the remaining items that Office considered irrelevant to you. This has two major problems: the UI became incomsistemt between users, too dynamic and therefore comfusing. Amd even though users used a particular 1% subset of an Office program today, it would be a different subset the next day or the next week. This sent them constantly hunting for menu items that "should be there".
All of this was replaced with the ribbons makeover. Now, the interface is not adapting to the user, but to the current context. Although I don't like that interface very much, it is at least less surprising.
It is like having a "helper" who hides your tools.
The natural example in this context is of course the moving status items, in Windows 10, which might move just after you use them once or even on hover.
But even any list which is sorted by a volatile criteria works like this. Like the most recently used bookmarks. Maybe you want to open item 1 & 2, so you click item 2 first and then go for clicking item 1, only they have now already traded places because of the first click...
Does that always work for third-party icons too? They don't get re-added every time you start up or anything? (Curious what you do if you change your mind and want one back.)
If you want to add an application's icon to the dock, find it in the Finder and drag the icon onto the dock.
If the author is reading: the link on top of the github page is broken.
Also, a clever solution to hide the unused icons!
Edit: it apparently hides icons as well, though it does them differently than Bartender.
As a user, I need to know which operating system an app runs on, otherwise I might not be able to run it.
The language used to write it plays no role in that.
If the title said "Hidden Bar: macOS utility to hide unused menubar icons, written in JS (Electron)", I wouldn't even have considered clicking the link to read more about the project, let alone install the software, because an Electron based software to do such a minor thing like hiding menu items is never going to deliver an acceptable user experience for me.
Please don't mention anything related to software development, this upsets the hackers.
At any rate, Bartender has been around for years, works great, and has a ton more features.
Back in the days of Windows 98, it became typical for every application you installed to make a little icon in the "System Tray". Each app wanted to advertise itself and its (usually useless) features. The System Tray became a dustbin of crap. Eventually windows had to auto-hide them, just like you do with a dustbin.
Windows also burdened users with useless notifications, for things like "Battery charged!" and "Battery at 80%", that would constantly distract you. This happened so much that PhDs in Computer Science wrote entire dissertations and approaches to use machine learning to determine the optimal time to interrupt the user with notifications, in an attempt to intelligently unburden users from this nonsense. (http://reports-archive.adm.cs.cmu.edu/anon/hcii/CMU-HCII-06-...)
OSX solved this problem by abstaining from those useless notifications and icons to begin with. They didn't provide an API for app developers to add menubar icons. So few did. But then developers wrote hacks to do so. Now there are so many that they've become a dustbin again, and we need a new app to hide them. It's Windows 98 all over again.
Here's an idea -- if you are noticing useless menubar icons, get rid of them. Don't invent a new icon, that has the ability to hide other icons, and then try to come up with a UI (or machine learning system) to discern which icons need to be shown and hidden. Just get the design right in the first place.
Ahh... I know I know... Steve Jobs is dead... and now the whole philosophy of getting the design right is a minority opinion. sigh
http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.24/24.07/NS...
So I have a hard time seeing how you blame menu bar icons on Steve Job’s absence.