Fullscreen apps above the MacBook notch | Hacker News Reader

Fullscreen apps above the MacBook notch

notes.alinpanaitiu.com

75 pointsalin2379 comments

This “every single pixel” stuff reminds me of how many people will work at a tube of toothpaste for a minute just to squeeze out one more drop. It’s not really about getting more toothpaste, because you could easily just buy more. It’s also not really about getting the most toothpaste for your money, because you’re likely not also focusing on cheap tubes, bulk buys, etc. It’s certainly not about getting the most toothpaste for your time. It’s loss aversion: because you believe you should have this thing, you’re willing to accept a much higher cost to obtain it. Similarly, people doing this “every single pixel” thing aren’t necessarily also getting the biggest screens or the thinnest bezels, it’s about it feeling “wrong” to not use these particular pixels.

The problem goes away if you mentally reframe: you don’t have a 16.1″ screen with a piece missing, you have a 15.6″-ish screen, the same size as before the notch, and also a horizontal strip above it that’s only good for sensors, the menu bar, and extended backgrounds.

I'm a toothpaste last-bit-squeezer for sure. It's not loss aversion -- it's waste aversion. There's probably lots of reasons why I don't like to see things wasted, including social, or family upbringing, or personality. But I have the same impulses with food, clothes, computers, almost everything.

I don't always buy food in bulk to save on cost, or look for the best deals, but whatever I have bought I try my best not to waste. It's irresponsible. Maybe in some ways I feel it's bad for the environment, or sets a bad precedent for how I think people should behave. I don't mind what sort of things you choose to buy or like, but I would prefer you don't waste them.

Resources of all kinds are limited, so making the most of what we have is an important principle, at least for me. Sometimes it's silly -- eg. I really should replace those old socks with holes in them, I can definitely afford new ones, but if something can do a bit more before being thrown away or replaced, I'll try and get that much more out of it.

I totally relate to waste aversion but that’s also why I feel like this particular topic seems like it brings out all kinds of weird irrational instincts. There isn’t anything wasted here, just something that affords a little extra for an incomplete set of scenarios. Sometimes it’s a little more screen space for a menu to sit a little bit higher than an equivalent spec screen. Sometimes it’s just blank space with no backlight, and the remaining screen area is the same as if you never had the space to begin with. Maybe you can make better use of that space, but I’d put good odds on it being overall more wasteful to expend those resources (human and everything their efforts demand) than just waiting a few more years until the notch vanishes behind its inevitable under-screen evolution.

It's not irrational in case of toothpaste. Leftover toothpaste mean you buy more and encourage more waste in the environment. This stuff adds up.

It can be kind of irrational. If toothpaste waste is important to you, there are better ways to avoid it. My local no-packaging store, for example, sells toothpaste tablets, completely without plastic or packaging of any kind (and I'm sure you could buy something similar online in bulk with minimal packaging).

The effect on waste production that using the last few drops of every toothpaste tube will be negligible compared to the use of a waste-free or waste-minimising alternative, but I get the impression that a lot of people do the former without trying the latter out of a misplaced sense of utility.

I’m reasonably sure that arguing about leftover toothpaste on the internet does more damage to the environment than leaving trace amounts of toothpaste in its tube.

Argument about toothpaste on a public forum is not about toothpaste. Positive result of such argument is not one person buying less toothpaste but many more becoming aware about wastefulness and how mindless consumption and buying stuff in environmentally harmful packaging and not using it all (and therefore making yourself buy more) causes a lot of harm when everyone does it etc.

Besides, you are using the term "trace amounts" wrong. The amounts people routinely leave are enough for at least a week of toothbrushing.

> It’s not really about getting more toothpaste, because you could easily just buy more.

If Apple made a larger MacBook I'd buy for sure. They don't of course, and those portable screens are no better (on multiple axes).

OTOH I don't care enough to mess with all of this dancing around SIP. Mostly I'd be happy if apps with tabs (e.g. Chrome or iTerm2) had a better official way to integrate into fullscreen by just avoiding the notch like iPhone apps can do.

Author here! I agree, I don’t like the “squeeze every drop” approach either, and I get to meet it daily from people asking for not-so-needed features from my apps.

For me it wasn’t about wanting to use every single pixel. I just really prefer the look of a single app filling the screen completely.

I don’t know why, it just looks good to my eyes and I seek that instead of the large black top bar look.

I'm not sure the toothpaste thing is really about loss aversion so much as it's about minimizing effort. Throwing a tube away, opening the box of a new one, unscrewing the new cap, putting it down, and fiddling with the the aluminum or plastic cover on the new tube so you can take it off while your hand is wet is so much more effort than just squeezing the old one a bit more so you can get on with your night and go to sleep.

You described about 9 more steps than it takes me to open a new tube of toothpaste

You have a white menu bar that suddenly just gets cut off by a black square, its distracting and jarring. I can assure you the people that are giving up the entirety of length of this bar to not have the black portion stick out aren't worried about "waste".

Yes, which is why it makes some sense to use TopNotch (mentioned in sibling comments) which turns the menubar black and "hides" the notch completely. Then the menu labels and icons are more easily seen as part of a truly separate "new second display". This solution is also well tested in mobile devices with a notch-like screen cutout. In fact, even the latest Apple iPhone Pro models resort to adding a black area ("dynamic island") to hide the front-facing camera cutout.

Toothpaste etc.: Every time you do it you get better at it, so the marginal cost drops. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Regarding the toothpaste analogy. It's also about reducing waste and not causing more consumerism and fully utilizing a product. To not do so because you can't be bothered with effort is terrible. We should avoid waste as much as possible and reduce, reuse and recycle.

> It’s loss aversion

For me, it's actually satisfaction, of getting every last part out of it that I could. It's the same satisfaction I get when playing something like Factorio; efficiency.

For whatever reason, the oval “notch” on the 14 bothers me a lot less than the actually notch on my prior phone.

Just got an M2 MBA and it's such a fantastic upgrade from my old intel MBP, but the notch is a bit more distracting than I'd like. It's awkwardly large, and the corner rounding is a lot worse than the notched iPhones imo.

Its saving grace is that the screen is 16:10, and all pixels where the notch lives are bonus pixels, so it's still a net win in usable screen space vs 16:9 laptops.

Still, this is a nice workaround!

The screen is actually taller than 16:10. The space below the notch is itself 16:10, and the pixels to the sides of the notch are bonus as you said.

https://topnotch.app makes it less distracting. I've come to prefer the look, even on my (un-notched) iMac.

If you're anything like almost everyone else I've ever met, then as long as you just tolerate it being a minor annoyance for a few weeks you'll completely forget the notch exists.

Except for once a month or so when you suddenly notice it and it creates an unpleasant unscratchable itch in your brain for a minute, like when you're suddenly aware of your own breathing or how much space your tongue takes up in your mouth.

Or when you notice that your nose occupies a large space in the middle of your vision. You’ve gotten used to it so that you don’t notice your nose unless you close one eye and really look for your nose. Then it’s there blocking your vision in that area. The notch is very similar. It can be distracting initially but if you stop focusing on it and get on with your work, you quickly find that you almost never notice it.

Do you have a nose like an anteater or are you actually a cyclops? I don't think typical human's noses occupy a large space in the center of their vision.

It’s in the lower center of your visual space. You just don’t notice it because your visual system has accepted it as normal. Try closing one eye and looking toward your nose. It’s right there.

Enjoying the M2 16" as well. I thought I'd hate the notch, but I don't really notice it most of the time because that's where the top toolbar thing is.

The keyboard feels great. The past 2 (work) laptops I had to turn in because the battery swelled and messed up the keys. They got rid of the dumb LED bar, and magsafe is back. I'm more of a fan of the (previous) fat left/right arrow keys though.

The "Automatically hide and show the menubar" setting should really default to "Never" for notched displays, since it doesn't actually gain you any extra real-estate and just slows you down with a pointless animation.

I finally turned it off because on my (non-notched) external display it was too easy to accidentally activate, which would disable the thing in the toolbar that I actually intended to click on (and then I'd have to sit there and wait a second for it to re-hide before very carefully mousing to almost-but-not-quite the top of the screen to click my intended target).

It's in the Desktop & Dock section.

For productivity apps I agree, but defaulting to not hiding the menu bar would probably mean playing full-screen video still had a distracting menu bar present.

Does the notch cut into full screen video? That would drive me crazy.

No, at least not for video in aspect ratio of 16:9, since the actual aspect ratio of the screen is 16:10.

Unrelated. But anyone knows if there is a way to pin the dock to a single display?

it is kind of annoying when you have multiple displays, how the dock moves almost randomly between then when you move your mouse close to the bottom of a display. If at least it was not random, but no, sometimes you can hover your mouse pointer for hours in the bottom of a screen and the dock won't move there, other times, just looking at the display will move the Dock.

In display preferences there is a dock panel that you can drag to the side or bottom of any screen. I’ve never noticed it moving on its own. There have been times when it defaulted to displaying on an external monitor but I was able to move it back to the laptop screen and then it stayed there.

I've been looking on and off for a way to do this for years.

Surprised more people aren't bothered by not being able to use the space next to the notch... it's not even consistent with the iPhone which does allow rendering apps around the notch.

I basically never do full screen, so for that reason I'm not bothered. (In fact, now I'm _less_ bothered, since I somehow no longer feel like the menu bar is "wasting" space.)

I never use the "fullscreen" mode either, and don't understand the point of it. But you don't ever have a window that spans the full vertical space of the screen?

You can hide the menu bar and have it only appear on mouseover, thus not wasting space. Except on non-notch Macs you can place windows where the menu bar used to be, and on notched Macs you can't

Good point, but I just went through all my open apps and the only app that had empty toolbar chrome (the top part of a window that has the Close/Minimize/Zoom without anything else on that row) was Telegram and VSCode.

The rest of the apps have app UI on the same row as the Close/Minimize/Zoom buttons which would be hidden by the notch.

But empty toolbars is a good usecase for rendering an app window on the notch. I'm actually surprised how many apps utilize that space!

I'm not concerned with whether what's covered by the notch is empty or not. Chrome has tabs that would be covered by the notch, but its largely irrelevant, I can still click it or swap to that tab easily enough.

Similar to how the notch doesn't materially degrade video content, despite covering some aspects of the video. We've seen iPhone make the choice to intentionally obscure a portion of app content for years without any major concerns.

Fair enough. But it's why the notch space doesn't feel like pure waste.

If you right-click -> "Get info" on most applications, there's a checkbox for "Scale to fit below built-in camera (notch)".

I've only had to use that for one game and iirc Parallels.app that were rendering on top of the notch. It would be nice if you could force the behavior per app with that, but it's only to fix apps that, I suppose, use some drawing API that lets them render on top of the notch.

That's a fair point -- for whatever reason, I could never get into auto-hide for the menu bar (tho I do use it for the dock). I think maybe because I tend to trigger showing it accidentally too much (vs the dock on bottom where it's not an issue because usually there isn't other actionable stuff down there)?

But definitely, if you like menu-bar autohide where you're coming from makes sense.

Yeah.

Modern videos are so wide that a little extra vertical space barely enlarges the video if at all.

Games usually can't use the space since the notch covers their UI.

For me it's just free space for the menubar.

Not to say you can’t be bothered, but I look at it this way. I’m honestly only really looking at a small amount of my screen at a time…. I suspect I use that space very little.

So why ever get a larger screen?

Maybe you feel that way, but it's not a commonly shared belief. There is a marginal value to having additional screen space, and its silly to block use of it via software gates.

More applications on my screen at a time?

So you say space isn't important, because you look at a small portion of the screen at a time, yet having a larger screen is useful to have more space to place apps?

So, in the end you're saying screen real estate is important? Or not? You have to pick one to be logically consistent.

I’m not OP, but I don’t see an inconsistency about what they actually said. They didn’t say screen real estate doesn’t matter at all, only that the specific space under discussion isn’t a concern to them. I imagine many Mac users can relate, especially long time Mac users who remember when the menubar couldn’t even be hidden.

As far as the value of larger versus smaller screens, I can also relate to OP. When I’m sitting with my laptop on my actual lap, I definitely have fewer things on screen at any given time than when I’m using my comically large 43” desk monitor. I’m generally not looking at more things on that monstrosity at any given time! But being able to “switch” to them without interacting with a mouse/keyboard is a convenience that the larger screen affords. Even if I don’t care about trying to shove more of my active focus into the top few pixels of either screen.

> They didn’t say screen real estate doesn’t matter at all, only that the specific space under discussion isn’t a concern to them

"More space matters, but not if it's 100px at the top of the screen"

If you are a believer that additional screen space provides some marginal value, as the majority of people do, then you cannot at all argue that there's nothing lost by losing screen space. If you believe that you only need 15" and anything beyond that does not provide additional marginal value, then you can be logically consistent with these two statements.

If you don't see the logical inconsistency, I can't help you, sorry.

I have a comically large 43” monitor sitting on my desk, so maybe you’re not engaging the things people are saying in good faith.

There is no faith. Either screen real estate matters or it doesn’t. If you have a 43” monitor and think its useful, then you must agree that having 100 extra pixels on a 16” screen is also useful.

You absolutely cannot argue in good faith otherwise. Its a provable mathematical fact that the beliefs are incongruent.

You are free to choose to hold logically inconsistent beliefs though. You do you

Same. I just use topnotch and hide it. At first it bothered me but I’m used to it now.

I've actually been debating getting a 14 MBP M1 for about $1500 on open box stores etc (woot), or on sale or what not but cannot justify spending 1.5k on a laptop lol.

I have a desktop and a Thinkpad T430 if I need to go somewhere. Also have a tablet and such. I definitely do need a "better" laptop but my justification is that I'm not outside the house often enough for me to buy the MBP.

Which, realistically, is true. I'm not.

On the other hand, shiny fast device lol.

I spent 3.4k on my m1 64gb and tbh its some of the best money ive ever spent

A client of mine has just issued me an M2 MBP as a bonus, and wow. Night and day difference to my previous i9 MBP.

The battery on this is incredible - not to mention my limbs no longer get burnt.

On the old ones, my fan used to run constantly at full power.

Now, my external platter drives make more noise than the laptop.

The only problem I've had with my M1 is that my nightmares about losing it are dreadful, but waking up and realizing it was only a dream and it's still there is a huge relief.

I use mine 10+ hours a day as the primary tool in the work I do and enjoy it a lot. It's a bargain to me. Everything works and the OS stays out of my way so can completely focus on the primary apps I use. I remember the early years of work with a computer, dealing with drivers and networking and huge CRT displays and other drama. It's very rare that I notice or think about the notch, and I never use the camera.

If you're price-sensitive and not already doing so, include the M2 MBA (or, hell, even the M1 MBA) in your calculations. Great machines, way more than sufficient for most. Though there are some nice, fun luxury (again, for most) features on the MBPs, too.

Agreed. I switched from a 2015 MBP to an M1 MBA a few months ago after the 2015 died a sudden death. Went into Apple convinced I'd get an M2, winced at the prices, agonised in-store over all the different models until I said screw it, the low-tier model seems good enough and if not I'll just eBay it and get a more expensive one.

It's been a phenomenal machine with outstanding battery life. Most definitely happy with my choice.

I’ve been doing ReactJS development with both the M1 and now the M2 MacBook Air for a year now. My app’s transpiler production build takes about 5 seconds and any development incremental is essentially instantaneous.

I can’t imagine most developers work even stressing an M2 unless you are compiling chrome or something.

Best thing as a contractor I don’t even bother to bring a power adapter. I work for 8 hours and leave with 20%-40% remaining every day.

As a Dell XPS user I'm so jealous of laptops with competent power management.

My 16" MBP would be a perfect device if they could either put the webcam/sensor array behind the glass or just get rid of it. If I want to FaceTime I can use an iPad or iPhone as a peripheral attachment. At this point, virtually perfect hardware is being ruined by a notch. :( It's a reminder every time that there are still design limitations to overcome and engineering feats to be achieved for the next 1,000 years. 8D

By "behind the glass" you mean underneath the display? Because it's already covered in glass, right?

well, at least you've given a very generous timespan for them to resolve it

I imagine this will come to iPhone first, then MacBook’s (maybe limited to the Pro’s?) a year or two later.

faceid under screen on iphone is still several years out

you really don't notice it after a few days

laptop stockholm syndrome? :)

I think it's probably closer to the thing where everyone has blind spots in their field of view where the eye has blood vessels but you just don't ever notice it because your brain fills in the details.

Not to say that I can't see it, it just doesn't affect the way I interact with the machine.

It’s just how the human visual system works. How do you feel about the large amount of your visual space is blocked by your nose. Close one eye and look at your nose. It’s surprising how much is blocks but you are essentially blind to it.

Vivaldi Browser on macos uses some non-standard window that can be dragged above the notch and dragged to 'full screen' manually.

I appreciate the free extra screen real estate actually quite a lot and always use it sized to the max.

I want to use full-screen on apps in Mac OS, but the insanely long and slow transitions when switching between them makes it unusable. A few years ago you could remove those transitions with a few commands, but no more.

And it makes no sense, since the application is taking inputs while the transition is running. You're just stuck looking at the old app fading away while the new one fades in, also flashing you with a bright white screen in the process. Ughh!

I find the notch distracting and have found this app helpful to "hide" it.

https://topnotch.app/

Trying this out because this has annoyed me in certain apps. Mostly fullscreen games.

Another wrinkle the author does not mention: If the application in question is x86_64, you will need the x86_64 version of frida running through Rosetta.

I just use top notch to turn the menu bar fully black. The notch only bothers me because of how ugly it looks, I don't care about using those extra pixels for fullscreen apps.

This is fine, but I (and many others) want the exact opposite. I'm so tired of the distracting notch, I just want the OS to render the desktop environment at a vertically cropped resolution so that the top of the rendered area ends at the bottom of the notch, effectively completely getting rid of it.

The author self-promotes his app "Lunar" which apparently does this, but it's paid and closed-source. Anyone know of a FOSS alternative?

Since Ventura 13.3, you can access those hidden resolutions yourself from System Settings by Option-clicking on a scaling option.

Also, Lunar is mostly open-source and many apps borrowed code from it (even competitors). For example here is the Notch button implementation: https://github.com/alin23/Lunar/blob/master/Lunar/Data/Displ...

The Notch disabling function is free and doesn't require paying for a Pro license.

There are also free utilities that make the menubar black so the notch doesn’t stand out so much. Have you tried that? At least then you don’t loose the top part of the screen.

Can hammerspoon be used to accomplish this same effect?

No. You need to run code in the context of the process you want to full-screen, Hammerspoon can't do that. HS can only use the Accessibility API to modify some attributes of the windows.

those notches are so damn ugly, and apple is supposed to make pretty things? the world has gone mad

I tried to play Slay The Spire in fullscreen on my M1 but the top on the UI is hidden under the black bar that Apple added to hide the notch. Can't see the potions and golds.

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