This has been a serious problem since macOS Tahoe. Whoever signed off on the UI for Tahoe needs a serious schooling in UI/UX design principles - it's incredibly hostile to users. Not only does it make it impossible to distinguish between overlapping windows as this tool seeks to mitigate, there's many confusing UI elements and lack of contrast not to mention why it has so much padding on everything - you're left with far less usable space.
It’s not too much of a stretch to imagine why someone from that world would prioritize things looking good in promotional photos/videos, and not care too much about human factors and fundamentals of interaction design.
Blaming any one person doesn't seem very useful without extraordinary insight into the development process. It could be this approach was dictated, and it's not like the rest of the product team didn't have say, and it allows scapegoating them even if both the above are true.
Being on the E team is literally about being the one person to blame when things aren’t right.
When you’re an exec in charge of a whole area, the buck stops with you and, to quote Steve Jobs - the reasons stop mattering.
As a user I don’t care about having “extraordinary insight into the development process”. All I know is you’re vice president of interface design and the interfaces are getting worse over time.
Well that's all well and fine when you're trying to scapegoat someone in the corporate hierarchy, but it doesn't make very much sense to respect if you're trying to make sense of it in general.
Isn't that the point of a hierarchy, though? The important decisions come from the top.
When I worked for someone else (now self-employed), some bugs were my fault. But with features and other intentional changes, the bosses had to sign off on them, and in some cases there were vigorous internal debates, but the bosses had the final say and could overrule objections.
Even when everyone is to blame, one person is to blame. That's why prime ministers resign when they can't hold together a government. That's why leaders step down.
There are tens of thousands of interface designers who would be able to make a better interface than what is Tahoe and iOS 26. One of them should have the job.
Similarly, when you switch to another app via command+tab, the keyboard events are being sent to the previous app for a couple of hundred milliseconds.
I cannot remember the number of times I quit the wrong app because of this or pasted something to the wrong window. I genuinely have to wait a second on every app switch.
It seems mindbending that this would pass any stage of testing. As a non macOS user, this feels like a complete dealbreaker for ever considering a switch. But macOS is demonstrably popular, and I haven't heard this complaint before. Is it less of an issue in reality than I imagine it would be?
This also happens on switching virtual desktops, even with reduce animations there is a 100ms+ delay before any input on the new desktop will be sent to the correct app.
Indeed. Here’s an article from Don Norman, author of The Design of Everyday Things and former Apple employee, that talks about Apple’s decline in usability back in 2015:
Apple had usability experts like Bill Atkinson (RIP), Larry Tesler (RIP), Bruce Tognazzini, and Don Norman. At one point, what differentiated Apple products from competitors was Apple’s focus on usability and consistency. However, it seems that sometime during Apple’s revival under Steve Jobs, there became a big focus on appealing design. Beige desktops and black laptops gave way to colorful desktops and metallic laptops, and the Platinum interface was replaced with Aqua. Nothing was wrong with this; in fact, this was peak Apple, IMO, with usability and visual appeal. But somewhere along the line, Apple lost the plot. Apple became less about usability and more about visual appeal, but with usability taking a hit.
To be fair, Apple makes world-class hardware, and I still prefer macOS to its competitors. The problem is that I prefer 2000s Mac OS X and even the 1990s classic Mac OS (from a UI perspective, not necessarily a UX perspective due to stability issues) to modern macOS.
Seems everyone has. Which is weird, given how bad everything looks despite this focus.
I'm not sure what's going on in the design world. I mean, of course there's the influence of the web design spheres. The web didn't have the GUI standards that e.g. Macs were known for. In the beginning, they couldn't emulate the desktops. Toolkits like ExtJS tried, but you stated with the basic problem that you didn't know what desktop you wanted to emulate. Windows? Mac?
By the time the browser caught up, the damage already had been done, and the stop-gap solutions and styles more suitable for ads created a "web style". Flashy, flat, deserts of whitespace. The aesthetic stranglehold this had then not only persisted, but crossed over first into mobile (the somewhat standardized look & feel of early iOS quickly vanished), then the desktop.
And now nobody knows where they're going, despite having more people solely focused on "UX" than ever before. But you need to do something to justify your position/salary, and that's how we get the Microsoft/Apple designs of the last decade or so. And not having any ideas beyond type systems or init replacements, the open source world just emulates that.
Bizarre that this has not been fixed by Apple, it has been an annoyance well before Tahoe. Relying on the three dots in the top left corner to see which window is on top gets frustrating.
Oh damn, this has been causing me trouble when working in half-and-half and quartered windows as recently as this week. I’ll be installing the one you linked, or the one the thread-link points to. Thanks, didn’t occur to me this would be a thing but of course it is.
if you do not wish to install another app, check "increase contrast" in the mac settings under accessibility>display. it will draw borders around windows and text entries. Much welcomed.
Thank you. Each time I see an app that does the smallest change possible (and it's a MacOS-only thing by the way) I think to myself: Does it have to be an APP?
Not a script, not a configuration, but an actual app that occupies space and RAM and does just that? How had somebody come to this weird idea that everything is an APP?
Thank you so much! I did not know I needed it! Still it does not help much to see which window is active right now (Sequoia), but makes overall experience easier.
Took a look at this and it feels like it is implemented using public macOS frameworks so it shouldn't break between macOS updates
My guess is that kAXWindowMovedNotification, kAXWindowResizedNotification, kAXMainWindowChangedNotification etc. are being listened to on the currently focused window using the Accessibility framework, and there is a callback which gets the latest position of the tracked window whenever it is fired, and uses that position as a reference to update the border position
The border window itself is most likely an NSWindow, which is why the tracking of the border with the target window feels quite sluggish
Fwiw I think this is the right approach. The trade-off between stability across OS updates vs tracking performance is a no-brainer for me - the absolute last thing that I would want is a deluge of bug reports with no other information than "it stopped working" when Apple pushes out an update
As a developer I would interpret that as "try it in the new OS and you will immediately see what is wrong so there is no reason for me to write a tedious and unnecessary message to you".
Very nice idea, thank you for developing it. With an M1 iMac, though the window border lags the position of the window quite a lot if you drag it around, so probably not usable for me.
Some lag is probably going to be unavoidable with a third-party app. The only way to have perfect synchronization of window dragging/resizing and the border is for macOS to implement this as a first-party feature.
PopOS's Cosmic DE has this baked in. I was unsure about the feature at first, but it has proved itself useful. I wonder if this will eventually be Shirlocked into macOS.
Always glad to see more software in the window management space, especially for MacOS.
Any reason to use this over JankyBorders? I'm using it alongside Aerospace right now and forget sometimes it isn't built-in. Kind of weird to me that after all this time this is such a sparsely implemented feature. But the combo with Aerospace works well. Only thing missing is support in Aerospace for a toggle to have a window expand to the size of it's container. Really liked that feature in Yabai, made working with multiple tiled terminals really nice
The recent direction of MacOS has been a good excuse to try out a few new linux distros. As someone who was away from linux for a while, the degree of UI customization continues to be both amazing and a little overwhelming, but it feels more polished than before. Taking a look at Niri and hyperland, it's hard to feel satisfied with the UI of MacOS.
Different apps on macOS use different corner radii, so I’m wondering whether the apps can use any API to get the exact window bounds in order to draw the correct corner radius.
I want the opposite, I want to remove that annoying drop shadow from the active window, something that does not exist in other OS UIs like Windows. It's simply distracting to me.
Does the Reduce Transparency option in Accessibility remove the drop shadow? If it does, I'd expect it to be all windows, but might satisfy your desire here.
This makes them always visble. But you still need eagle eyes and motor skills of a high end athlete to actually click on the darn thing. Fitts law? Actual usability?
My understanding it's a reference to Steve Coogan, who played Alan Partridge, who in one episode sees a friend called Dan, and starts shouting his name, but Dan doesn't react. Alan proceeds shouting: Dan! Dan! DAN! and eventually gives up. This scene was later parodied in a BBC programme about animals, where one animal shouts Alan! Alan! ALAN! and then realises the name's wrong: STEVE!
Am I the only one who can't see what the problem is in that screencast? Click on the window you want to use or tab through until you find the right one.
This has been a serious problem since macOS Tahoe. Whoever signed off on the UI for Tahoe needs a serious schooling in UI/UX design principles - it's incredibly hostile to users. Not only does it make it impossible to distinguish between overlapping windows as this tool seeks to mitigate, there's many confusing UI elements and lack of contrast not to mention why it has so much padding on everything - you're left with far less usable space.
> Whoever signed off on the UI for Tahoe needs a serious schooling in UI/UX design principles
Their background is in marketing/packaging/retail design, and they were at Kate Spade before Apple.
https://a-g-i.org/user/alaindye/
It’s not too much of a stretch to imagine why someone from that world would prioritize things looking good in promotional photos/videos, and not care too much about human factors and fundamentals of interaction design.
Blaming any one person doesn't seem very useful without extraordinary insight into the development process. It could be this approach was dictated, and it's not like the rest of the product team didn't have say, and it allows scapegoating them even if both the above are true.
Being on the E team is literally about being the one person to blame when things aren’t right.
When you’re an exec in charge of a whole area, the buck stops with you and, to quote Steve Jobs - the reasons stop mattering.
As a user I don’t care about having “extraordinary insight into the development process”. All I know is you’re vice president of interface design and the interfaces are getting worse over time.
Well that's all well and fine when you're trying to scapegoat someone in the corporate hierarchy, but it doesn't make very much sense to respect if you're trying to make sense of it in general.
Isn't that the point of a hierarchy, though? The important decisions come from the top.
When I worked for someone else (now self-employed), some bugs were my fault. But with features and other intentional changes, the bosses had to sign off on them, and in some cases there were vigorous internal debates, but the bosses had the final say and could overrule objections.
Even when everyone is to blame, one person is to blame. That's why prime ministers resign when they can't hold together a government. That's why leaders step down.
There are tens of thousands of interface designers who would be able to make a better interface than what is Tahoe and iOS 26. One of them should have the job.
Notably, their name is Alan (or sometimes Alain), which might be where this app gets its name?
Similarly, when you switch to another app via command+tab, the keyboard events are being sent to the previous app for a couple of hundred milliseconds.
I cannot remember the number of times I quit the wrong app because of this or pasted something to the wrong window. I genuinely have to wait a second on every app switch.
It seems mindbending that this would pass any stage of testing. As a non macOS user, this feels like a complete dealbreaker for ever considering a switch. But macOS is demonstrably popular, and I haven't heard this complaint before. Is it less of an issue in reality than I imagine it would be?
I have an electric moped that delays the throttle 500ms after the brakes have been pressed and released. Terrifying in corners now and again
This also happens on switching virtual desktops, even with reduce animations there is a 100ms+ delay before any input on the new desktop will be sent to the correct app.
I must be out of the loop - i’m using Tahoe since few months now and I haven’t noticed any difference in what you are saying.
Apple has favoured looks over function for quite a while now.
Indeed. Here’s an article from Don Norman, author of The Design of Everyday Things and former Apple employee, that talks about Apple’s decline in usability back in 2015:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-apples-products-so-confus...
Apple had usability experts like Bill Atkinson (RIP), Larry Tesler (RIP), Bruce Tognazzini, and Don Norman. At one point, what differentiated Apple products from competitors was Apple’s focus on usability and consistency. However, it seems that sometime during Apple’s revival under Steve Jobs, there became a big focus on appealing design. Beige desktops and black laptops gave way to colorful desktops and metallic laptops, and the Platinum interface was replaced with Aqua. Nothing was wrong with this; in fact, this was peak Apple, IMO, with usability and visual appeal. But somewhere along the line, Apple lost the plot. Apple became less about usability and more about visual appeal, but with usability taking a hit.
To be fair, Apple makes world-class hardware, and I still prefer macOS to its competitors. The problem is that I prefer 2000s Mac OS X and even the 1990s classic Mac OS (from a UI perspective, not necessarily a UX perspective due to stability issues) to modern macOS.
Seems everyone has. Which is weird, given how bad everything looks despite this focus.
I'm not sure what's going on in the design world. I mean, of course there's the influence of the web design spheres. The web didn't have the GUI standards that e.g. Macs were known for. In the beginning, they couldn't emulate the desktops. Toolkits like ExtJS tried, but you stated with the basic problem that you didn't know what desktop you wanted to emulate. Windows? Mac?
By the time the browser caught up, the damage already had been done, and the stop-gap solutions and styles more suitable for ads created a "web style". Flashy, flat, deserts of whitespace. The aesthetic stranglehold this had then not only persisted, but crossed over first into mobile (the somewhat standardized look & feel of early iOS quickly vanished), then the desktop.
And now nobody knows where they're going, despite having more people solely focused on "UX" than ever before. But you need to do something to justify your position/salary, and that's how we get the Microsoft/Apple designs of the last decade or so. And not having any ideas beyond type systems or init replacements, the open source world just emulates that.
That'd be true but it doesn't even look good!
They stopped favoring looks recently.
Software isn't written for users anymore, unfortunately. Users are merely an annoying side effect that attempts to impede the line going up.
i cannot wait for OpenAIPhone and then OpenAIMac to come out and make Apple wake the fuck up
Ah yes, because Jony Ive definitely made iOS better when he was in charge of its look & feel and usability. :-|
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/ios-7-interface-design-...
If openai can pay their bills
There is also https://github.com/FelixKratz/JankyBorders
Bizarre that this has not been fixed by Apple, it has been an annoyance well before Tahoe. Relying on the three dots in the top left corner to see which window is on top gets frustrating.
Oh damn, this has been causing me trouble when working in half-and-half and quartered windows as recently as this week. I’ll be installing the one you linked, or the one the thread-link points to. Thanks, didn’t occur to me this would be a thing but of course it is.
A similar app I really like is HazeOver, which is a configurable dimmer for everything on the screen except the front window.
https://hazeover.com/
That is an A+ demo video - dimming the background of the page in sync with the effects in the video is very clever.
That was surprisingly awesome.
Been using it ever since trying out the similar effect in KDE.
I love how the site reflects the darkness of the screen in the youtube video. nice touch!
HazeOver is great, even when configured to be very subtle.
if you do not wish to install another app, check "increase contrast" in the mac settings under accessibility>display. it will draw borders around windows and text entries. Much welcomed.
Thank you. Each time I see an app that does the smallest change possible (and it's a MacOS-only thing by the way) I think to myself: Does it have to be an APP?
Not a script, not a configuration, but an actual app that occupies space and RAM and does just that? How had somebody come to this weird idea that everything is an APP?
Thank you so much! I did not know I needed it! Still it does not help much to see which window is active right now (Sequoia), but makes overall experience easier.
Took a look at this and it feels like it is implemented using public macOS frameworks so it shouldn't break between macOS updates
My guess is that kAXWindowMovedNotification, kAXWindowResizedNotification, kAXMainWindowChangedNotification etc. are being listened to on the currently focused window using the Accessibility framework, and there is a callback which gets the latest position of the tracked window whenever it is fired, and uses that position as a reference to update the border position
The border window itself is most likely an NSWindow, which is why the tracking of the border with the target window feels quite sluggish
Developer of the app here. You’re correct. Accessibility APIs + timer + transparent top-level NSWindow that ignores input and draws a border.
Fwiw I think this is the right approach. The trade-off between stability across OS updates vs tracking performance is a no-brainer for me - the absolute last thing that I would want is a deluge of bug reports with no other information than "it stopped working" when Apple pushes out an update
As a developer I would interpret that as "try it in the new OS and you will immediately see what is wrong so there is no reason for me to write a tedious and unnecessary message to you".
Very nice idea, thank you for developing it. With an M1 iMac, though the window border lags the position of the window quite a lot if you drag it around, so probably not usable for me.
Some lag is probably going to be unavoidable with a third-party app. The only way to have perfect synchronization of window dragging/resizing and the border is for macOS to implement this as a first-party feature.
I really ponder what is the usecase here that requires dragging windows "quite a lot" and also makes a lagging window border "not usable".
You seldom resize, or drag windows?
I thought I take a look at the code, but I can only find readme and license?
PopOS's Cosmic DE has this baked in. I was unsure about the feature at first, but it has proved itself useful. I wonder if this will eventually be Shirlocked into macOS.
Always glad to see more software in the window management space, especially for MacOS.
Any reason to use this over JankyBorders? I'm using it alongside Aerospace right now and forget sometimes it isn't built-in. Kind of weird to me that after all this time this is such a sparsely implemented feature. But the combo with Aerospace works well. Only thing missing is support in Aerospace for a toggle to have a window expand to the size of it's container. Really liked that feature in Yabai, made working with multiple tiled terminals really nice
One difference can be seen right away - when moving a window, border made by JankyBorders moves smoothly together with window, unlike with this app.
The implementation is probably different.
I run a tool that I like much better both in terms of not being distracting on-screen and reducing the light blasting my eyes:
https://hazeover.com
I'm not affiliated, but I love it and recommended it to friends.
Does it work in dark mode? I guess if it does it would have to make the background apps brighter?
Same came here to post this. One of the first things I install.
The recent direction of MacOS has been a good excuse to try out a few new linux distros. As someone who was away from linux for a while, the degree of UI customization continues to be both amazing and a little overwhelming, but it feels more polished than before. Taking a look at Niri and hyperland, it's hard to feel satisfied with the UI of MacOS.
Insane that we need this because some people who don’t actually use macOS make decisions and implement things at Apple.
It’s probably the highest crime within Apple to state some things are not useable
I also created a hammerspoon script to do that. Especially when you're using a tiling window manager like aerospace, it's quite useful.
https://gist.github.com/cfe84/901411ee43450e7ee0e50e88cf029f...
I’m using this app: BorderMe – Where’s My Window? https://apps.apple.com/app/borderme-wheres-my-window/id67450...
Different apps on macOS use different corner radii, so I’m wondering whether the apps can use any API to get the exact window bounds in order to draw the correct corner radius.
I’m surprised this feature isn’t part of the built-in Accessibility Settings. Neat little app!
I want the opposite, I want to remove that annoying drop shadow from the active window, something that does not exist in other OS UIs like Windows. It's simply distracting to me.
Does the Reduce Transparency option in Accessibility remove the drop shadow? If it does, I'd expect it to be all windows, but might satisfy your desire here.
It does not, unfortunately. It's baked into macOS and is extremely difficult to remove, requiring all sorts of hacks which break at each OS release.
Hm? Windows has a drop shadow, GNOME has a drop shadow, KDE has a drop shadow.
You can disable it there, but not so in macOS.
Excellent. Can you do something about the 5px wide scroll bar?
You can: https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/make-scroll-bars-always-vis...
This makes them always visble. But you still need eagle eyes and motor skills of a high end athlete to actually click on the darn thing. Fitts law? Actual usability?
3 similar apps already! Apple and big tech UI designers should read this thread.
Somehow it's so cute that the name of the app is, well, a name.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Border Is a pretty famous cricketer.
That was my first thought too! but then realised Allan Border has a double L, while the app's name is "Alan"
In reading more from this guy's blog, he also wrote a game called "Steve".
https://stevethegame.com/
Has he also written a Dan?
Maybe derived from “a line”?
As an Aussie, I assumed it was a reference to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Border
My understanding it's a reference to Steve Coogan, who played Alan Partridge, who in one episode sees a friend called Dan, and starts shouting his name, but Dan doesn't react. Alan proceeds shouting: Dan! Dan! DAN! and eventually gives up. This scene was later parodied in a BBC programme about animals, where one animal shouts Alan! Alan! ALAN! and then realises the name's wrong: STEVE!
Ugh, the delay between the window and border moving is crazy. About as crazy as not having this as an accessibility option.
This is great, but do wish the border followed the radius of the native window's corners.
Just let people run sway on macOS.
It seems we have come full circle back to Win 95 days...
need this for my tmux panes!
Am I the only one who can't see what the problem is in that screencast? Click on the window you want to use or tab through until you find the right one.