Remove the Notch | Hacker News Reader

Remove the Notch

topnotch.app

50 pointsomarfarooq83 comments

The iPhone 6S Plus is able to have landscape mode home icons, which they "accidentally" had to deprecate to support the stupid notch on future iPhones. This was a horrible degradation that was obviously meant to guide people to iPad sales if they want a portable machine instead of using an iPhone with a bluetooth keyboard. It's frustrating to spend so much money on a company that literally shits on it's professional class of customers/users. Now, they are introducing a notch on computers for literally no good reason. Apps like the one shown in OP are honestly sad. Nice work making it but this isn't a good long term thing to need to have.

I don't know what to say, Apple might just be a lost cause. Too bad I have spent 10K on computers since 2015 because finally they reintroduce ports and all the shit the spent half a decade saying we would "move beyond" - hopefully there is a class action lawsuit for selling shit that is in retrospect extremely unusable.

Tired of this, it's pretty fucked up

But where's the app to _add_ a fake notch for old Macs?

https://imadethis.app/notch-pro

i'd have much rather that apple remove the camera entirely to support a nearly bezel-less, notchless screen.

then for folks who want a camera, apple could have added a smart connector and magnets near the top back of the lid to clip on a camera when needed. it would have been a real win for privacy[0], and they can do their little trick of excessively marking up accessories to boost revenue. it's even better than a physical on-off switch, since 'off' literally means off. the camera could then be thicker, which means no need to compromise on image quality due to the physical limitations of the bezel/lid.

[0]: unlike the theater of their 'privacy report' (in beta), which doesn't let you block any of the trackers they surface.

What percentage of laptops do you think are sold without a webcam? Maybe 0.01%? Probably less.

I thought this feature was built in, but maybe not? All I can find is https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212842 which seems to be on a per-app basis.

Apple's solution is per-app and when you go full screen otherwise you can't avoid it.

Does anybody know if the notch is an obstacle for the cursor? Does the mouse pass through the notch or does it need to go around?

Passes through

Unless you have a menubar that spans across the notch, in which case the behavior changes for some reason to teleport your cursor across the notch. Mind you that this is not the same behavior for statusbar icons for whatever reason, they will reside underneath the notch (yet still accessible for) unless the aforementioned global menu expands beyond the notch, in which case it just starts hiding random statusbar icons until it fits.

> behavior changes for some reason to teleport your cursor across the notch

Which was always the cardinal sin in mac os HIG - never move the mouse.

It doesn't though. You still have to move it yourself, only instead of it going underneath the notch, it teleports across. Not automatically. You need to move it.

"Some reason" being so that moving from a menu to the adjacent menu with the notch in between is the same short mouse movement as between other adjacent menus, instead of having a longer move through the dead space of the notch.

I tried one in the Apple Store but didn't think to check any software with a >50% full menubar to see if that feels weird or not.

If they hadn't done this, someone would be complaining these menus are supposed to be 10 pixels apart, but I have to move my mouse 100 pixels instead. If it bugs you, hit cmd-I on the application and put it in the no-notch mode.

Through it

There is a third option: https://twitter.com/marcedwards/status/1450798991633833992

It's really interesting that the notch was basically only an option on a Mac laptop. It doesn't work at all with Windows or KDE. It almost works on Gnome.

But with macOS, the menu bar has been there since the very beginning, and the center of the bar has been increasingly empty as resolutions increased. A fortunate coincidence.

The notch is here to stay, until good cameras get a lot smaller. It just makes a ton of sense as a solution.

Gnome Phosh has gained an option to cope with screen notches by shifting the top bar clock away from the cutout area, so that it remains visible. Presumably, Gnome-Shell will be doing the same on these devices.

Why didnt Apple just strip the camera out entirely and just let users connect one with a thunderbolt cable or a dongle. After all Apple users seemed happy enough with dongles when they had fewer ports on laptops.

There's just no pleasing people.

"Here's more screen real estate, but it's not contiguous."

"No! I hate you! This is an abomination! I will black it out and make it useless."

If they hadn't made any camera updates people would also be ticked about that.

Edit: I thought people were using this to push their menubar down below the level of the notch and creating black dead zones on the left and right of the notch. But I still think it's silly and picayune for people to quibble about the color of the menu bar.

I can't help but thinking that there is an option in between those two choices.

What exactly would be between "we put a screen next to the camera" and "we put a bezel next to the camera"?

we put a small bezel next to the camera

Punch hole cameras are a thing now in smartphones, would be better than a big block. I just feel like this was the wrong compromise. Not that my opinion matters, I bought the Surface Laptop Studio like the MS cuck that I am, which is full of bad compromises itself.

It doesn't become useless though, the menubar is still there. It just makes the menubar black so the notch is less noticeable.

oh it's literally just a thing that styles your menu bar? I thought it was people who were pushing their menu bar beneath the notch and creating black no-man lands on either side of the notch.

When the whole menu bar is made black with these modifications, it’s going to look a little bit weird probably because then you don’t see where the notch that “interrupts” menus is, so there will be a more strange looking gap.

I’m still on MacBook Pro M1 2020, so not planning to buy a new machine for a while. But if the notch is there in the model I buy, I’m keeping the notch the way it looks.

But in the end it’s all personal preference, so I’m not trying to protest against what other people choose to do on their desktops. That would be silly of me to do.

I don't understand it either, but it can and should have been easily fixed by a built-in OS feature instead of having to get a separate app for it. Android allows this, for example in developer settings for applicable phones.

AIUI, the Android feature does not actually "hide" the notch properly by turning the top bar dark. It just moves the top bar below the notch, which wastes that portion of screen space. Proper notch hiding is available in many custom ROMs however, it works quite nicely there.

Huh? The menubar is not "useless", it works the same as it always has. It's just styled differently.

It's just that Apple will have you think that nobody has ever developed a laptop screen with a smaller bezel, and thus the revolutionary and innovative approach is to just obstruct the display.

The macbook has basically gone from having a comically huge bezel to something people will consider a nuisance.

Dell did similar with the XPS 13 when they put the camera lens on the bottom corner of the screen, and it wasn't too long before they sorted that one out.

Well, nobody has without terrible cameras. On launch day, some people were saying, "Well, Razer did it!" but Razer's webcam quality is absolutely hot garbage by comparison to even the old 720p Apple webcams.

It's either notch and good camera, bad webcam and no notch/bezel, no webcam and no notch/bezel, or a thick bezel and good camera. Take your pick.

That’s true, but the XPS 13 camera and angle is terrible and that’s certainly not preferable for me in the age of Zoom.

XPS 13 camera has been back on the top for a while already.

Yea. I was responding to the suggestions that below the screen might be an acceptable alternative.

The XPS camera is still bad but the angle is fixed at least.

They suggested people considered the bottom camera a nuisance.

The XPS 13 is also a 720p camera

Apple’s camera is not just the camera. There is a true tone / ambient light sensor there too. It’s not the most compact component. They may be able to reduce it at some point but not so far.

I strongly encourage folks to think about the the notch not as "space taken away from a 14in display" but rather that a smaller display was expanded to fill all usable space. macOS UI paradigms lend themselves very well to a notch in the top, as top area can be split into two regions, one for menus and one for status widgets as we have long been doing anyways. Just like iOS utilizes the left region for time and the right region for status.

I think with a couple of usability tweaks, and giving folks a little while to get used to it, they'll get over it. And probably really like it.

Kvetching will continue until boredom ensues.

[edit] Sent from my M1 Pro 14" MacBook Pro... ExtraPro. Did I mention it's for Pros?

> but rather that a smaller display was expanded to fill all usable space.

We used to call it a "New Second Display" back in the day. But that assumes that you're properly hiding the notch by using a dark background for that area.

> top area can be split into two regions, one for menus and one for status widgets as we have long been doing anyways

Some people use lower resolutions or apps with more menus than you apparently.

There's definitely going to be edge cases, although if I were still a macOS software developer, I would update my app immediately to nest my menus more when operating with a notch. I think there's more that Apple - and also third-party developers - can do to make this a well-crafted experience. This is definitely a V1 but I see paths to it getting better! Never could say the same for the Touch Bar haha.

I'm certainly not going to say you're holding it wrong. I sympathize with the frustration of this breaking your use case. Apple's never been one to avoid scrambling a few eggs.

The only problem with the touch bar was it replaced a row of keys.

Lots of menus isn't an edge case for the kinds of people Apple said the MacBook Pro is designed for.

Having different menu layouts on different screens isn't what I'd call a well crafted experience.

It's interesting you assume it's my use case. I just know not to speak for everyone.

Couldn't agree more I was definitely in the 'notch wtf?!' camp (and still don't own a notched device) However I've managed to adjust to various devices having all manner of weird pixel/aspect ratios - and I'm definitely a fan of this after the everything has to be 1080 wilderness years.

I can't help but think a lot of this could have been avoided, if notched screens had just been positioned as the dimensions without the notch - and then offered a 'screen plus' mode that extended the published resolution to use the space on either side of the notch. ~We're not ripping you off, we're offering you extra pixels if you want.

Maybe late adoption of OLED is also to blame - with an OLED a notched screen can look just like a shorter one - and then you're given a choice.

I think what folks tend to miss is if you subtract out the notched area, you're left with a bog standard 16:10 display. It really is extra bonus space.

That's my point. If they had just advertized notched screens with the minimum square resolution and positioned the pixels on each side of the notch as an optional bonus, I think we'd all have been grateful.

Setting expectations is critical to success.

> I will black it out and make it useless

I'm so confused, do you think this app disables the camera or something?

no I thought people were using this to push their menubar down below the notch and making the space on the left and right of the notch unused. Which was incorrect!

With all of Apple's liquid cash I was kinda hoping they'd find a way to have their cake and eat it too.

Personally the thing that really ticks me off is that they "don't allow" you (aka will boot your app if they catch it) to flow content smoothly around the notch.

The way it was presented to developers was super obnoxious and, honestly, I don't think anyone would care if their phone was half a centimeter taller. People didn't loathe the iphone back when it had a screen between two bars of utility space.

> they "don't allow" you (aka will boot your app if they catch it) to flow content smoothly around the notch.

I don't understand, details please.

From the HIG[1]

> Don’t mask or call special attention to key display features. Don’t attempt to hide a device’s rounded corners, sensor housing, or indicator for accessing the Home screen by placing black bars at the top and bottom of the screen. Don’t use visual adornments like brackets, bezels, shapes, or instructional text to call special attention to these areas, either.

1. https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

There are plenty of people who disagree with the tradeoff who aren't raving lunatics. Any tradeoff will please some people and displease others - it's irrational to assume the displeased are always same people, and are therefore un-pleasable hypocrites. Don't cast aspersions with so little regard.

Maybe Apple knew those who disagreed with the tradeoff would almost certainly get a third-party app like this, and so worrying about them is unimportant because then there are options for both - it's just that that anti-notch group might not like the default.

More options are better than fewer.

This app is for people who don't like the look. It doesn't address the functional problems at all.

> Edit: I thought people were using this to push their menubar down below the level of the notch and creating black dead zones on the left and right of the notch. But I still think it's silly and picayune for people to quibble about the color of the menu bar.

So, basically the original comment was posted before you'd seen the post. Got it.

Though, I did learn a new word today, picayune, so thank you for that.

I had seen someone on twitter doing what I assumed this was, and it was the only hack related to the notch I had seen on the net. Sorry pal.

(though the meat of my comment still applies here: people will find reasons to complain about everything, they're just doing a different thing about the thing they don't like)

No worries, I've been guilty of that in the past :)

And, as I said, I learned a new word - had to look up the meaning, so I'm happy.

I do agree about people finding things to complain about - like I'm still peeved about the price of the RAM upgrade and guess I'll remain peeved till I buy the damn thing and move on.

I think "there's just no pleasing people" comes off as really harsh, here. Some people prefer the extra real estate (for wallpaper), others might find the non-uniformity of the notch awkward or visually distracting. It's just a preference.

...or to put it another way, indeed, there's no pleasing people, because "people" is not a homogenous unit but instead hundreds of millions of individuals. This is why customizable software - or even open-source software - is such a boon. Let people compute how they choose.

(OTOH: offer lots of knobs and people will complain that it's hard to understand, that time would be better spent making one version work well instead of a million combinations. Open-source it and there'll be whining about fragmentation, devs not fixing the right things, and on and on. Maybe there really is no pleasing people.)

>I still think it's silly and picayune for people to quibble about the color of the menu bar.

I get you, but quibbling about minutia has been the bread and butter of software UI differentiation for so long that I don't really think it's incongruous for this kind of thing to show up as a 3rd party UI modification.

That's not the only way to hide the notch: https://twitter.com/jsngr/status/1453341112635166720

If you are doing some user facing work and the notch is actually a problem, you can always use an external monitor and the notch will go away.

FWIW this is also quite nice on non-notch macbooks – it hides the small triangle of visible background in the top corners of windows.

But does it exclude the bar from being populated _under_ the notch? I feel like that is a greater sin.

For reference, this is how the notch works with menus and status bar items. https://twitter.com/SnazzyQ/status/1453143798251339778

Yep! That was the set of tweets I was referencing. It allows items behind the notch, and it's not just iStats.

Yes, that is a bug in apps that have not been updated yet

https://twitter.com/bjango/status/1453171506263982087 & https://twitter.com/bjango/status/1453194728506216457 indicate that this uses the normal APIs and there isn't an obvious "update" that could be made to behave differently.

I wonder what API call it uses to make the menubar black.

They're modifying the current desktop image, adding a rectangle of black the size of the menu bar along the top. Menu bar transparency takes care of the rest.

Now how will the coffee shop folks know that I have the greatest newness?

hah, it works on a regular M1 sans-notch. I used to use obsidianmenubar.com for this many moons ago, glad to see a replacement.

I thought this was a petition asking Apple to get rid of it, I was almost excited for a moment.

They'll remove it in 3-5 years and congratulate themselves for listening to people.

I wish I had that kind of courage.

Objectively they do - they rolled back years of minimalist design on the new MBP: thicker body, more ports, HDMI, card reader, etc.

they gonna put the camera on bottom like earlier xps models, and then in 3-5 more years put it back on top

I hoped this would be a campaign to stop the notch insanity on phones. Give us the full screen back!

(I have a OnePlus 7 Pro -- I bought it precisely because it doesn't have that nonsense.)

If your phone had a front-facing camera, you never had the use of the full front area. (Unless it was one of the weird ones with a pop-up camera!) A notch lets you use those odd-shaped blank spaces at the top of your phone for junk like a clock, and gives you more space for apps.

Besides that the notch is aesthetically displeasing, it's also impractical when you end up with more notifications than can even fit in the area left over.

And yeah my phone is one of the "weird" ones with a pop-up camera. Solves the problem nicely.

If you mean the app icons in the menu bar, if you have a lot of them you should get either Bartender or Vanilla. They do a good job of hiding most of those icons until you need them and you can reveal them with a click.

I've had phones with pop-out, hole punch, notch, and full bar cameras, even one without any front facing camera at all. Hole punch struck the best balance IMO as it allows simple design, a decent camera, and takes up a small enough amount of space that it's not really jarring to just fullscreen content like it isn't there at all.

For the new MacBooks I'm happy they at least did something other than full bar but I don't think the solution is the be all end all.

For wishful thinking quality behind screen cameras would be the ultimate win in my book if anyone can pull it off properly without limiting other things too much.

Free?! You can easily charge $15 for this. The notch is so fugly, people will readily pay to get rid of it.

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