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Not many people realize that the original Mac had a screen that was roughly the same size as a modern iPad Mini. So many fundamental desktop #UX features, like overlapping windows and a global menu bar, make so much more sense given that constraint.
How would they change now that we have MUCH larger displays?
@scottjenson I’m not sure I get why the small screen would be a factor for having a global menu bar?
@scottjenson relatedly, I also think it's instructive to think about the ways the ipad mini is constrained vs that original Mac via various hardware and especially software engineering choices.
Because it's incredible power in comparison is absolutely unable to be brought to bear on a whole host of use cases due to Apple's decisions.
@scottjenson The global menu bar also makes sense from a Fitt's Law perspective, if you are moving the cursor around with a mouse. Less so, if you are using your finger or a stylus to tap on things.
<Present-day Apple coder: “Fitt's Law? What's that?!”> 😉
@MichaelPorter agreed! But as our screens approached 4K even Fitt's Law seems to have diminishing returns. It's just SOOOOO far away....
@scottjenson I wonder if anyone's contemplated tweaking mouse acceleration so that the cursor slows as it reaches the edge of a window, to make it hard to overshoot the window menus…
(Just kidding, no-one's paying attention to this stuff)
@MichaelPorter While fits law certainly favors the Mac menu bar over Windows, it was shocking to me how little the windows menu bar actually affected people in a negative way. Sure it's not as nice, but it didn't really matter.
@scottjenson are you aware of the state-of-the-art on tiling and scrolling desktops? Niri is a good example: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri
there’s also the Mosaic concept: https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2023/07/26/rethinking-window-management/
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