Reduce the menu bar item spacing and padding via UserDefaults. It is clear that this is a widespread problem that users are having. I figured it was worth making a separate post about this specific issue to list all of the workarounds and alternatives. For this reason alone, Bartender is an essential Mac utility that’s easy to recommend to anyone running a Mac. macOS should at least have a way to handle an overflowing menu bar. I feel a bit sad every time somebody asks me how to recover an icon that “disappeared behind the notch.” I still believe people should not have to download a third-party app to deal with Apple’s hardware and software decisions that lead to the notch and its tendency to swallow menu bar icons. The menu title positions cannot be accessed without accessibility permissions, so I have to hard-code them for each localization and hope the font metrics don’t change. The best workaround I’ve found is to get the coordinates of the icon and then use a pile of hacks to try to figure out whether it overlaps the notch or a menu title. If there are too many icons, I want to be able to warn the user so that they can rearrange them or access the functionality in a different way. So SpamSieve instead offers its own menu that’s visible in Mail. This has caused problems for me because in Sonoma it’s no longer possible for SpamSieve to add commands to the Message menu in Apple Mail. NSStatusItem.isVisible tells you whether the app or user wants the icon to be visible, but it will return true if the icon is hidden in the notch-or even if it’s hidden behind a menu title. It is shockingly lazy regarding attention to detail, and results in an outright disruptive and confusing user experience.Īside from the problem of the icons being hidden, there’s no API for an app to tell whether its icon is hidden. Yet on the Mac, how the notch interacts with macOS is laughably incompetent. In fact, they actually provide a better user experience. How hard could it be to add an overflow menu with a “«” (or should it be “»”?) button that shows the remaining apps and icons that can’t be displayed? This entire situation with the notch is ironic, because the iPhone notch and “dynamic island” are so thoughtfully designed with zero compromises regarding the functionality of iOS. It is utterly ridiculous to me that this is still how it “works” two years after the introduction of the redesigned MacBook Pro with a notch. This “design” (or lack thereof) is so dumb. On the 14” M3 MacBook Pro, ironically a machine with a larger display, at least 3 icons get hidden. On my 13” Intel MacBook Pro, the icons reached to about halfway across the screen.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |