Tailscale's new macOS home
tailscale.com562 points by tosh 3 days ago
562 points by tosh 3 days ago
The notch hiding menubar icons is such a stupid problem to have. I waste hours every week trying to help people who send me frustrated emails because they bought one of my apps and they say: "it doesn't launch" or "why doesn't it have any interface??"
No amount of FAQ will help these people. And this also results in hasty refund requests and even worse, chargebacks that take 2x the amount the users paid out of my pocket.
I recently helped my brother launch a simple app for making any window a PiP window (https://lowtechguys.com/pipiri) and in the first two days, half of the sales turned into refunds exactly because of this issue. People had so many menubar icons that they thought the app just doesn't work. Not an encouraging launch for his first app.
Not to mention the fact that the best solution that helped alleviate this, the Bartender app, was completely broken by Apple's internal API changes in macOS Tahoe.
This could have been handled better.
The reason things are this way is that in Apple’s view, third party devs are effectively misusing menu items.
Originally it wasn’t even possible for third parties to add new menu extras using public APIs. That was something reserved for Apple. Third party devs had to use a tool called MenuCracker.
When Apple finally added the API used now, the intention for it was for full fat GUI programs to provide ephemeral menu item companions that disappear when the host app is quit. It was never intended to facilitate persistent third party menu extras.
So the issue hasn’t been fixed because in Apple’s view it’s a problem of third party devs’ own creation. If all third party menu items were ephemeral nobody would have enough for them to overflow into the notch area.
——
Personally I think they should offer a way to extend the Control Center and push devs who want persistence towards that. That would afford better organization for users and allow them to better control which are immediately visible (since some apps don’t offer an option to hide their menu item).
It's also abused by soo many devs, just wanting there app to be seen 24/7 by the users, regardless if there app gains anything from being in the menu bar. That's why many users run out of space. Most people don't look at settings or ways to remove them (if they even give an option), so they quickly fill up the menu bar. Back in the day without a notch, people would have so many that some menu items would disappear too.
A couple of my colleagues have so many applications running at the menu bar, so they have to use Bartender to be able to have anything resembling a functional menu bar.
I understand power users, but I don't understand these users.
… on my MBP, if we discount the icons that ship with macOS, the limit is 4 items. Past that, they're hidden by the notch.
I don't get why an overflow arrow once the limit is reached is so hard here.
Or letting users decide what the order of items in the bar should be.
Weird. I think I have about 4.
Someone is confusing the menu bar for the Dock
Try a corporate laptop. Every stupid thing you don’t need except to know it’s running is there, but you don’t know it’s running because they may just be hidden.
Jamf, zscaler, virus checkers, etc. need to all go to hell with this crap. I’m glad Tailscale are removing theirs.
Your experience is not everyone s experience. Are you one of their colleagues. No? Then they weren’t talking about you.
They don't have to be one of my colleagues to share their own perspective and experience. We're a rather large band of computer using people here, and it's good to share experiences and viewpoints.
Currently I have 6 extras, which is a rare number I see. My normal number is 3.
I am so glad that macOS Tahoe just lets me banish those apps to the shadow realm
I believe being able to remove these icons were possible since Leopard/Snow Leopard days.
I do love that change. I’d deleted Bartender when it sold out, and now I’m glad that I don’t need or miss it at all.
> Personally I think they should offer a way to extend the Control Center and push devs who want persistence towards that.
They actually added that in macOS 26. Just like on iOS, apps can now offer custom actions that you can add into the control center.
I haven’t looked into it, but does it allow arbitrary UI? It sounds like they’re just buttons that trigger a single action, which isn’t sufficient for replacing menu items.
That's not really defensible as an excuse, especially considering Apple's grooming of users to believe that they never need to quit applications.
All Apple had to do was add a "more" indicator at the end of the area, at the very least. Or... to give all applications' entries equal footing, collapse them all into a disclosure control once there are too many to show.
But no... once again, a simple and fair solution eludes Apple's "designers."
If the “simple and fair solution” makes it so lazy developers lose money over putting things in the menu bar where they most definitely should not be putting anything, then so be it.
Stop putting things in the menu bar. End of.
Yes, the number of apps that actually deserve space up there is rather small. The last thing Apple should do is enable a Windows tray style free for all.
There’s no statement or action (such as banning menu-bar-only apps from the Store or even changing the APIs) supporting that Apple still wants menu bar items to be ephemeral.
If they wanted to enable persistent third party menu extras they’d open up the same APIs that Apple themselves use.
It's such a simple problem to solve too: when there are too many menu bar icons, put them in an overflow menu. A single icon which contains a list of icons. And let me arrange which icons go into the top bar and which go into the overflow menu.
Windows solved this many many decades ago with their system tray overflow menu. Browsers solved it too, by letting you put extension icons in an overflow menu. It's not hard.
But nooo, macOS just silently hides applications from you, with no visible indication that there's anything hidden.
Even if they didn't want to have an overflow menu for some reason there it boggles my mind why the menu bar isn't just aware of what portion is covered and should be skipped (file menus or icons) in the first place!
Well there's effectively no space on the lefthand side of the notch. You must assume that side is going to be completely consumed by actual menu items.
Side note: If you want to check what icons might be buried by the notch, you can Cmd + Drag any icon from the menu bar to rearrange them. If you drag an icon through the notch, the other items will pop into view, if any are hidden.
The same problem exists on the left side of the notch, too.
File, Edit, View, History, Window, Help
Where there are too many items, it gets silently truncated. A simple dropdown icon on overflow is such obvious UI here.
One of the first things I tasked to do as a junior web developer at my first job was to make a horizontal nav menu that was responsive such that when the screen shrinks any overflow items go into a drop-down.
Baffling that a trillion dollar company can't do this.
Edit: apparently i don't know the difference between vertical and horizontal :)
An even simpler solution is allow horizontal scrolling in the area.
That would be gross. I wish devs didn’t abuse menu bars (looking at teams, zoom etc)
It's true this is a mess, but no application should have a menu by icon as its only means of access. It's OK to offer that as an option, but all applications should be capable of presenting a user interface when launched from the Applications directory (or (rarely) ~/Applications, etc).
There's really no exception to this rule. For an (tiny) minority of applications, it makes sense to hide the dock icon, and to typically access the app via hotkey or menu bar widget. But those apps should still have an icon and should still be able to be invoked by opening it using any of the standard ways to do that. That's just how the Mac works.
The truth is most apps have no business having a menubar icon, but many of them cannot even be disabled out of the box. There's a number of third-party tools that help with the issue, but really this should be handled at the OS level. I want a permission similar to notifications to control whether an app can litter the menubar or not.
One thing's for sure: No application should be allowed to have a menubar item without a ToolTip. WTF, that should have been obvious from day one.
At the moment, I have 11 of them on my system (not counting the clock), a mix of third-party and Apple ones. NOT ONE of them has a ToolTip.
Even worse, if you click on them, the resulting menu does not show the name of the owning application. This too should be forced. For example, I unfortunately have to run Microsoft Teams, and its toolbar menu gives you no indication of what application it belongs to.
It is in Tahoe, which is on the short list of things I strongly, genuinely like about the update.
I never understood the logic behind the thinking there. Why would you ever want to place menubar items UNDER the notch, if you know it's there and they won't be visible?
It's such an easy problem to fix, with such incredible usability consequences, I just don't get the thinking.
The notch itself is probably considered temporary internally. If you code a rule for the notch, then you're going to have to consider which hardware OSX is running on in order to determine if the notch is present or not for your "notch width calculation."
This is not an unknown issue at the fruit co.
Can anyone speculate on any rational if not good reasons for not solving this problem yet?
I don’t work at the fruit co but since you asked for speculations. Mine: the fruit co designers are still designing a nice interface to show the overflow, because they obviously think that the Windows tray overflow looked inelegant and are still searching for the ideal UI. But the designers themselves don’t have a lot of menu bar apps so they don’t think it’s a priority.
Or perhaps the teams at fruit co found a way to claim that their overflow is an innovative new feature and not copied from some other designs.
While they do a ton of good work, they do love to claim everything was first invented by them.
Probably the same response I just saw someone reply with in this very thread:
"You shouldn't have so many utilities running"
It's the go-to Apple user response to anything the OS doesn't support or does poorly: "Why would you want to do that?"
Windows has always baffled me with the system tray icons it is too cluttered. I grew up with a tricked out Linux desktop so I understand the need to customize. But most of the time you do not need that.
I believe a VPN should stay hidden if it works, no need to have it visible.
> I believe a VPN should stay hidden if it works, no need to have it visible.
Which is fine if you only have one VPN client or one VPN network and you don't need to turn it on/off or change it regularly.
My current day job has one VPN client but five different networks.
At a previous job I had two different clients I would need to switch on and off.
It is very on-brand with Apple though that there is one right way to do things, and everyone else either needs to change the way they do things or go elsewhere.
I disagree with this one. If a VPN is important, I want to see that it is still connected and hasn't crashed.
That’s the company response but I’m definitely not the only long-term Apple user whose go-to response is a sympathetic nod followed by a long rant about Tim Cook and his contempt for software engineering.
Considering that I need a good dozen utility apps to override absolutely bonkers macOS design descicions there is no way around that.
TBF, there isn't a computer on earth that will solve that problem perfectly. At some point, "you shouldn't have so many utilities running" is perfectly acceptable advice.
No, because their icons can simply be collapsed into a disclosure control.
That's the standard apologist response to ANY defect you point out in anything, or any question they don't know the answer to but still want to bloviate about.
See: Stack Overflow
The upcoming MacBook Pro (late this year) is rumored to have a hole-punch camera: https://www.macrumors.com/2026/02/24/touchscreen-macbook-pro...
It‘s reasonable to assume that menu bar items will be rendered differently as well, to accommodate for Dynamic Island (which changes its width as needed).
Well I mean, recently because they have no idea how to make good UIs, and have not read their own enormously detailed (and excellent) Human Interface Guidelines tomes from 10, 20, and probably 30 years go, and have basically regressed to barbarism.
But before that relatively recent fall-off-a-cliff event (whatever it was that caused it, most of us will never know), it was pretty clear that they didn't want to implicitly endorse the lazy/anti-user/Windows-equivalent-UX antipattern of having apps that intentionally made themselves accessible only from a menu bar icon.
I hate the App Store shite that goes wildly too far the other way, but I don't quite understand wwhy they couldn't figure out a way to enable the menu bar widget API in a way that failed if your app didn't also have a way to open via all the normal ways (double-clicking the icon in /Applications, asking Siri to launch it, etc)
> they didn't want to implicitly endorse the lazy/anti-user/Windows-equivalent-UX antipattern of having apps that intentionally made themselves accessible only from a menu bar icon.
The single biggest complaint I had when I switched it to Mac was lack of this feature. Still miss it. .
> and have not read their own enormously detailed (and excellent) Human Interface Guidelines tomes
This seems to also apply to all new UIs produced by apple in the last 5 years.
I'm curious if people even cared about the half-centimeter extra screen space they got when Apple introduced the notch into MacBooks. Arguably it makes a bigger difference in iPhones so I'll grant them that, even if it does hide half of the top bar of the iPhone. But did people hate the half centimeter bezel on macs that much that they wanted to lose an inch of their task bar? Genuinely curious how we got here!
The pissing and moaning about "bezels" is cacophonous in certain echo chambers.
It's sad to see Apple taking cues from a minority group of infantile users, but that's one way we got here.
I mean, I don't love large bezels, but I dislike less screen real estate even more. Are the bezel nerds happy with where are now??
My android phone (OnePlus 11) has a hole punch front camera so I don't lose too much screen real estate. It's annoying sometimes but I prefer it to my mom's iPhone's giant notch.
The hole punch design absolutely horrendous. It makes everything uneven visually speaking and it just looks like - screen defect. The notch is fine, not perfect, but fine, and leagues above that stupidity of the hole punch.
Well I guess Apple and Android both found their target markets in both of us!
Once you find out that the notch can hide app items it makes you want to throw your computer out of a window.
I’ve been looking for something like your brothers app. Used to use an app called helium for floating video windows. I’ll check it out!
There is no reason for apps to be in the menubar. Either they should have a dock icon or be hidden completely. And open a window with functions and settings when opened by spotlight.
It's annoying for end-users (and you), but why not display a window with a SUPERSHORT message explaining that MacBooks with a notch might hide the icon on the first launch? Have a button or link to explain more for people who want it.
Shouldn't have to, but it might mitigate some of the stuff a FAQ won't catch.
I forgot such messages directly. Then when It realize I saw an important message tens seconds ago I have no way of going back. I can not press undo and get that message again.
Error messages are a bad design. Error logs are ok. Global undo would be king like the undo close tab feature in browsers.
Perhaps people who have many menubar icons are hare-brained and you should check to see how many icons they’ve got before you price your product for them to account for the support overhead.
Of course you are gonna get more complains from people who struggle more with technology, this does not mean these are the only ones with menu bar icons hidden behind the notch.
Every time I get a new Mac, I run these commands to reduce the spacing between menu bar icons. Lets you fit at least 2x the number of items in the menu bar.
```
defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSpacing -int 2
defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSelectionPadding -int 2
```
This was always my biggest gripe about using a mac, the OS that "just works". I ended up a bunch of commands I had to run and a stack of apps I needed to install for it to feel usable.
When I set up a Mac I have a short list of things that I need to install. When I set up Windows I have a much longer list of things that I need to un-install. I much prefer the former.
And when I setup nixos, I have a single command which installs/configures everything.
Windows isn't the alternative if you're on hacker news, OpenBSD and linux are the alternatives.
To me, it's the difference between caring about productivity and caring about improving productivity.
If you care about productivity and want your computer to "just work", install stock Mac OS (with maybe a utility or two), and you don't have to worry about anything for the next 3 or so years.
If you want to constantly fiddle with configs and spend hours just so things work exactly the way you want them to, sure, go with a BSD or whatever.
No judgment either way, this is a hobby like any other. Some people like to paint, some people like assembling model airplanes, others like building their oS from source and making sure the window is exactly the shade of blue they want it to be. Nothing wrong with any of the three.
The users who run into issues with menubar space would probably be well served to question if they really need all that stuff. The people with the most stuff up there tend to be the same ones who are always complaining about system slowness or weird issues... because they have 2 dozen utilities running in the background that they don't consider, which are all looking for CPU time or trying to change the default behavior of the OS in conflicting ways.
My goal is genially not to have anything running in the menubar that isn't out of the box from the OS. I had a similar desire with the system tray on Windows (though it was more difficult on Windows due to some hardware requiring it).
Work is the only place I have an issue, because they install a bunch of security agents that all want a spot in the menubar, even though they never need me to interact with them or know what they're doing. Those agents sitting up in the menubar tend to be the reason my system has slow downs or issues. Though the slowdowns have gone away since moving to M1. On Intel my fan used to run all the time. Now I'm just left with the weird issues they cause.
Ah, got it, I’m holding it wrong.
> My goal is genially not to have anything running in the menubar that isn't out of the box from the OS.
My goal is to use the apps I want to use, and if they are exclusively menu bar apps, what can I do about that?
> The people with the most stuff up there tend to be the same ones who are always complaining about system slowness
The cause for system slowness on my mac are too many browser tabs eating 500 MB memory each, not a few 10 MB native Swift apps.
Basically the view I had twenty years ago vs the view I have now. After being a UI-extender explorer for some years, I became a system-as-delivered person. I'm now at a healthy (for me) mix. I have a bunch of icons in my menu bar and an app to keep that tidy.
I agree. My menu widgets aren't the primary cause if my computer feels slow. It's almost always a ton of browser tabs because I collect stuff to investigate later and I procrastinate removing them.
However, I also see the point of the commenter that a lot of people who have a bunch of shit in the menu bar might not be computer people who understand what they are or how they got there. In those cases, people exploring things they don't know how to remove might accumulate a lot of other crap that causes a slow system.
[flagged]
Empty advice like "you should want what I want, because here is how it works for me", benefits from pushback.
Another common one: responding to a commenter's device or OS problem by suggesting a platform switch. Despite the massive number of unrelated tradeoffs such a decision would involve.
And of course, the pedantic "well, it always works for me" or "really, that should work", chime-in non-advice to just not have the problem in the first place. It is tautologically effective, but ...
The advice was to question what is truly needed. I may be a bit on the extreme end, as I never stop asking this question and seeing what life is like without various things.
This doesn’t seem like horrible advice to someone who is running into UI breaking problems. This also isn’t a new notch issue. I remember this being a common topic of discussion going back to the 12” MBP 20+ years ago. People with a lot of menubar icons would have them collide with the dropdown menus. I ran into this issue on some apps, even with a 17” display at the time.
I started to treat these limitations as a positive thing. One could call that Stockholm syndrome or worse, but I found having some of these limits changed how I think about problems. I no longer default to solving problems through addition, and instead first look if a problem can be solved through subtraction. This has been one of the most positive mental shifts in my life and has paid dividends in both my personal and professional life.
Of course the obvious answer to solve the problem through addition are the apps that let you place the menubar overflow into an expandable area or dropdown (like HiddenBar); I think they can also be added to Control Center now. However, I figured someone with that many items up there would already know about those utilities and maybe doesn’t want them for some reason. Those utilities also mask the problem for those who haven’t taken the time or energy to look at their setup critically and push back on their own assumptions of what they really need.
One might say that type of user is less likely on HN than in the general public, but I have seen it at all skill levels and backgrounds. For the more technical user, they hear about something, it sounds cool, they install it thinking it might be useful someday. It never actually makes it into their workflow, but during their evaluation they remember that it sounded cool and keep it around to use “someday”. I used to be this person. I had all the popular menubar apps, geek tool displaying stuff on my desktop, PathFinder replaced Finder, I was all-in.
People can and will do what they want. I’m just pushing back on the idea of what they want, the same way you’re pushing back on what I think you mischaracterized as empty advice.
I take your points, in good faith. There is a subtle but meaningful difference between suggesting a rethink, vs. suggesting a think transplant.
And you are right, the former is completely valid.
I have seen far too many cases of the latter apparently.
I'm not even talking about app icons.
I'm talking about the file manager missing features.
Wifi issues going back years and years.
Default mice settings that make me want to throw the thing out a window. Seriously, who moves their cursor that slow?
The worst window manager I've ever used.
I could go on, but it's genuinely pointless. People love their macs like people love their sports teams. No matter what, some people will always love the maple leafs.
> The users who run into issues with menubar space would probably be well served to question if they really need all that stuff
Look, I don't even want half that stuff, but the reality is that a bunch of tools mandate by my employers, and a bunch of utilities that are needed to make modern MacOS work reliably, all live up there.
A couple of VPNs, DropBox, OrbStack/Docker, eqMac to unfuck volume control on external displays, BetterDisplays and BetterSnapTool to unfuck everything else about external displays... I'm already most of the way to the notch on a 14" macbook
iStat menus (or the new open source "Stats") is a brilliant use of the menu bar, but it can take a lot of space!
Then couple ordinary services that add menu bar icons that you don't even ask for (DropBox, Docker, Adobe, etc.) and you can overflow onto the notch quite quickly.
I use iStat Menus and I recently got one of those menu-bar expander utilities. It’s so good I forgot its name already!
Now I just click on the chevron whenever I need to access Tailscale or Postgres or CloudFlare or Creative Cloud Dropbox or Google Dropbox or ……
Really solved the problem for me.
okay, i questioned whether i need all that stuff and i've landed on still wanting the same set of capabilities i currently have at the cost of what used to be a reasonable number of menu bar icons.
so now what
Tame the clutter, by using another menubar app to hide the overflow.
Examples:
And for years and years when in discussions about Linux vs Mac, Linux was always slammed as having to be customized and "user's should never have to use the terminal" . (I agree with that, but even in 2014 I remember having to run terminal commands to tweak stuff to make it work more like I wanted to)
Ironically I ended up on linux. Windows went to crap, and I figured if I have to run a bunch of scripts to make my OS usable I may as well just use linux.
Honestly, I couldn't be happier. I get so much more out of my hardware and I enjoy the experience so much more.
On a laptop? I’m interested but have never found sleep/wake and battery life to ever remotely approach osx and a Mac.
Many Lenovos and Dells work pretty well. I use a frame.work laptop and it continually gets better. It's not flawless, but personally I accept that the many benefits of using Linux will come with some tradeoffs. To me it's very worth it. Great battery life and flawless sleep/wake on my macbook weren't worth the inferior (IMHO) UX of macos. If you really care about those things, there are some good resources out there (including a good community of frame.work people).
TBF - It still does "just work," The fact that it doesn't completely fit into your (and my) preferences doesn't really change that, and if that's the standard, then everything will fall short of it.
If the icons are just hidden and you can't find them in order to use the programs you have running, that's not "just working". That's broken functionality. Windows has solved this with the overflow menu for literally decades.
It will not only cut off icons but the menus for applications when they have a lot of them. There is no way to fix it except to change your scaling or connect a second monitor.
I should save this thread for every time someone tries to tell me that Windows is a horrible operating system that is a major reason to not buy a computer when I say things like "The MacBook Neo isn't that good of a deal and you can totally find a Windows laptop in the price range that's built well enough, has similar performance/battery life (or better)/trackpad, and leaves you with more RAM, storage, and I/O."
I've literally picked out laptops that are clearly better buys than the Neo/Air and people will tell me things like "well then you're stuck with Windows" or "but you'll have firmware problems" and then we have to remember that Apple has had plenty of that in their past.
How about those Nvidia GPUs that would fail inevitably in older MacBook Pros?
Or the butterfly keyboard?
Or how they can’t even make window corners that match with the Liquid Glass update?
Do you have a suggestion for a Windows laptop that’s a better buy than the MacBook Neo? I kinda want a Windows laptop (for being able to run simple games, mostly) but not sure which one
Walmart is selling a HP gaming laptop with 16GB RAM and 512 GB SSD for $699—same price as the Neo.
Keep in mind it's not Magic Mac Memory because someone will jump in and tell us that 8GB of Mac memory is clearly superior to 16GB of PC memory because Macs are able to swap and wear down your SSD in the process.
I have pointed out this stat before:
Global user base
Mac: 100 million (2024)
PC gamers: 900 million
A lot of Mac enthusiasts seem to scoff at the idea that someone buying a laptop wants it to be able to play some kind of video games. Apple can make the greatest computer in the world but for many customers the fact that it can only run ~5% of games or whatever is a dealbreaker.
The Neo can play many games on some level but having 8GB of RAM plus needing to share it between the CPU and GPU is a major disadvantage.
The lack of a fan also hampers performance of the chip inside of it by something like 15-30%, rather than including one for a nominal cost to maximize performance.
It’s totally fine for the intended customer but it’s a computer for a very specific customer, more niche/specific than a customer who “just wants to play some CS:Go on the side.”
Apple could swallow their pride and partner with Steam but they’ll never willingly encourage their users to use a different App Store even if it makes the computer better.
The ability to run without a fan is not a problem; it's a feature. Would you want a fan in your phone?