What I'd like is:
* Dashboard is a special desktop that appears to the left of the main desktop
* Can be accessed with a single F-key press, or by swiping with the trackpad/Magic Mouse
* Widgets can be organised/laid out any way you like, anywhere on the screen
Apple has left behind some of the most brilliant UX/UI ideas of the century...
My understanding is that the technical foundations of Webkit-based Dashboard were always a bit flaky and this is what did it in. But now that we have modern, native widgets, it's a shame that the excellent Dashboard UX hasn't been brought back. They threw the baby out with the bathwater!
Twenty years later, I find Windows 11 and MacOS 15 to be in such a bad state, that I would rather use XP and Gnome 2 over them.
Example:
I still don't know how to install an app (*.pkg) just using keyboard on macOS. On Windows, it's simply "press tab or alt and see what happens". Another example: on Windows I can press Alt and see a letter underlined in the menu to let me know what keyboard shortcut activates it, but on macOS I have to do Cmd-Shift-/ and search for the command.
On the other hand, on macOS I get to create custom keyboard shortcuts in the Settings app while Windows, afaik, doesn't have this feature.
I can make a new folder on macOS and put the selected files in it automatically if I do Ctrl-Cmd-N, but if I want to "show package contents" of an app in the Applications, I definitely need a mouse! On Windows machines there's often a right-click button which is really useful
Have you not noticed that every MacOS menu item that has a keyboard shortcut has the entire shortcut listed on the right side of the menu? This goes back all the way to System 1 in 1984: https://web.archive.org/web/20140512112637/http://www3.nd.ed...
It's somewhat more obvious when you're using a keyboard that actually has all the same symbols on the meta keys; Apple likes to drop those sometimes and it's really not helpful for someone who hasn't learnt the cryptic glyphs. The ancient Magic Keyboard on my desk only sports a ⌘ on the Command key, and lacks ⇧ on the shifts, ^ on control, and ⌥ on the alts.
You can even navigate the menus entirely by keyboard, if you turn on "Full Keyboard Access" in the Accessibility prefs. https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/navigate-your-mac-u...
but if I want to "show package contents" of an app in the Applications, I definitely need a mouse!
With Full Keyboard Access on you can hit tab-m to bring up an app's right-click menu and navigate to it. FKA has a lot of tab-something shortcuts.
(The access key concept applies to many other types of control. Anything with a text label can have one, pretty much.)
The shortcut is indicated towards at the side of the menu bar, like macOS. The access key is indicated by an underlined letter. For example, in Firefox, the File > Save Page As... menu item has a shortcut key (Ctrl+S), and an access key (A). The A in As is underlined to indicate the access key, and there's a right-aligned Ctrl+S in that row of the menu bar to indicate the shortcut.
After doing an Internet search for it, I have learned that it is Fn-Control-F2, after enabling Full Keyboard Access in Accessibility. How could it get this bad? (Apple's other accessibility features are amazing.)
You may be looking for the "Keyboard navigation" preference that lets you tab between controls like on Windows.
Check out `man installer` for details.
Projects for Old Versions of OS X - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31164521 - April 2022 (87 comments)
I can relate. But there's one thing I really find great in Sonoma: Select Cyrillic text and hit the keyboard shortcut for Speech and it pronounces the text in Russian. Select Japanese text and it pronounces it in Japanese. And so on. Also, translations or transcripts of such texts in images. Finally an alternative to Google Translate!
But I'm still pissed that I can't install 10.14 on the latest Intel iMac, the hardware won't let me. You cannot run one of the more resource-hungry games on Intel macOS > 10.15 any more. For Apple Silicon, they don't even exist.
jonathanalland.com##*:matches-css(transform: /.*/):style(opacity: 1 !important; transform: none !important; transition-property: none !important; transition: none !important;)[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/pref...
I know this sounds fun or cool for a lot people on HN. But I much rather they kept Objective-C and keep refining old codebase for the past 10 years instead.
And as many have noted. macOS is now huge. And apart from continuity I dont know any recent macOS feature that made any different for me. We are now close to yet another remake for UI with Vision OS styles.
May be they will do a big clean up when they stop supporting x86 Mac. But I wont be holding my breath.