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Comment by pupppet | Hacker News Reader

I miss those early days when Apple was announcing new features for OS X. Now, macOS gets iOS’s hand-me-downs.

Or things nobody asked for like Stage Manager

Funnily enough (re GP), apparently Stage Manager was actually originally prototyped in the OS X days (2006). https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/stage-manager-was-a-thi...

FWIW, after using it for a few months I like it more than I thought I would. I decided to try it after my Average User sister said she liked it, and I wondered what I was missing. As context, I’ve used Mac OS since the late 80s and have permanently (to the degree possible) disabled the dock.

Or the new Preferences.app.

Why is it so slow? Opening proxy settings can take 5+ seconds

SwiftUI

Stage Manager is surprisingly great, IMO. Frustrating at times, but mostly great.

I don’t get it on the Mac (mind I also need to use 3rd party window management / snapping tools here), but it seems to work well now the iPad has really good extended display support.

As if anybody asked for Cover Flow, one of the most useless features in the history of OS X?

It was really useful for quickly scrolling through a folder of images. As it relates to music it wasn't very useful - but it was fun. Not everything has to be useful.

iPadOS’s hand-me-downs

I ought to mention, I really expected that Stage Manager on iPad would turn out to have been mirroring the VR headset's window management, but that doesn't seem to be the case

Or features removed a decade ago are now back, but this time they're much more locked down (widgets)

I still miss the old dashboard view so badly. It was awesome having multiple calculators and sticky notes one button press away without cluttering my desktop. They really botched it by letting it rot and not integrating it with the App Store.

The latest implementation with the desktop is... okay, but unnecessarily messy imo — I'm unclear why they can't do both kinds of views on macOS (On the desktop + full screen view like the classic dashboard), akin to a dedicated view on the left side of the Home Screen + Home Screen widgets on iOS.

I had a wonderful little widget that gave me the snow report for my local ski hill. Have yet to find anything that just worked that well. Current solution is a homemade telegram bot that messages me the report every morning.

Also, fwiw, there were always ways to break a dashboard widget out of dashboard and onto the desktop. And dashboard's precursor, konfabulator, had that from the beginning

>full screen view like the classic dashboard

They'd be admitting they shouldn't have killed Dashboard if they did this.

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