menu bars belong global at the top of the screen.

@icedquinn you mean, like this?

@pasture @icedquinn
So like Gnome3 tried to do it. From my experience, that becomes a pain in the but fast. Seems nice at first, but it's horrible when you have multiple smaller windows, and need to work with the menu in each of them. There's a lot more mouse movement and clicks suddenly taking place.

@alyx @pasture true but contemplate why is there a separate menu in each window.

the global menu at top is objectively superior and has been proven so scientifically. it has an infinitely low navigation distance (all 4 corners of the screen do, because slamming the mouse gets you there with no nimbleness), takes up less space, and the user always knows where it is.

if you see well designed mac software (and well, the amiga did it too) it’s not really a problem. it’s only a problem when you try to hack it like that one gtk patch but people still design the UI like donkeys.

@icedquinn @pasture
There's so much wrong there.

No, the navigation distance isn't low. The lowest navigation distance to the menu is gonna be lowest when it's in the window, cause you're most likely already working with said window.
Not to mention that if you are switching from window A to window B, you need to first click window B and then go up to the global menu to access the menu for window B. In normal local menu style, I just go with the mouse over window B and click it's menu directly.

>well designed mac software
Nothing in a mac is well designed. Stop believing the lies. Macs can literally have fans that are not even close to the heatsinks they're supposed to cool down.

@alyx @pasture navigation difficulty, sorry.

@icedquinn @pasture
You're still wrong.

@alyx @pasture i’m literally not.

Placing layout elements on the four edges of the screen allows for infinitely large targets in one dimension and therefore present ideal scenarios. As the user’s pointer will always stop at the edge, they can move the mouse with the greatest possible speed and still hit the target. The target area is effectively infinitely long along the movement axis. Therefore, this guideline is called “Rule of the infinite edges”. The use of this rule can be seen for example in MacOS, which places the menu bar always on the top left edge of the screen instead of the current programs windowframe.[28]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law

@icedquinn @pasture
It works for Photoshop, Gimp, Blender, Premiere etc. As in, it works for when it's a single program you're using, and placing panels on the edges.

It doesn't work when you're dealing with multiple programs, and have to switch between them and use another program's menu.
I've tried it, and am speaking from experience. You'd think it's better, but it's not. The only reason it "works" for MacOS, is because it's a piece of shit software, running on a piece of shit hardware, that was designed for low brained users, that barely use 1 program at a time.

Real life doesn't work like some stupid textbook. This is a common problem with UI design. Things that the math says should work, don't actually work, because humans aren't robots. If UI design actually worked like in a textbook, you'd be typing with a dvorak keyboard right now, and you're not.

@alyx @icedquinn @pasture
>The only reason it "works" for MacOS, is because it's a piece of shit software, running on a piece of shit hardware, that was designed for low brained users, that barely use 1 program at a time.

is that why Macs are mostly used by Musicians and Graphic Designers ?

@TheMadPirate @alyx @icedquinn @pasture on a completely unrelated point, the reason they're used by musicians is because that's where all the software is and the windows sound subsystem has a bug that makes it quite literally impossible to do low-latency audio recording, this bug also creates audible pops and distortion. No studio engineer worth their salt would be on windows, therefore the only option is mac.

Graphic designers use them because of the color profiles and licensing of colors that comes with the OS, and also because mac monitors are relatively accurate to color, you see a lot of people using macs, windows isn't suited for color work and doesn't have the same built in abilities as windows. Also, that's (again) where the software is, and if you, as a business that deals with graphic design, can get an all-in-one solution with minimal in-house support then Mac is it. Since the only other option is windows, and Mac has arguably better support for this situation, they pick Mac.

I still think the Mac OS UI is appalling for how much it relies on the mouse and how unintuitive the keyboard shortcuts are, and I still think finder sucks, I still think Apple products are overly delicate, overpriced, vertically integrated, unethical, and that their devices are slowed down and otherwise forcefully rendered obsolete through planned obsolescence, I still know that Apple is shit for anything but those two things (Printing color-accurate images and recording audio at low-latency). Its *only* other use is developing for iOS but that's not a good reason.