Prior to MacOS 10.11, Mission Control was good: you would swipe up with four fingers and it would show you a preview of all of your spaces. Then in 10.11, for no discernable reason, they changed it to suck: rather than showing you a preview, the bar just says "Desktop 1", "Desktop 2", etc until you mouse over it; the practical effect is that using spaces is disorienting and requires memorization.

Some third-party software pretends to restore this functionality, but they do it by repositioning the mouse to simulate a hover, which introduces a delay and doesn't integrate correctly with the animation. Someone wrote a patch that works by disabling SIP and injecting code (https://github.com/briankendall/forceFullDesktopBar), but eventually stopped maintaining it.

A decade later, I doubt anyone at Apple remembers that this bit of user interface used to be good.

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ebbi 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Agree! That "Desktop 1", "Desktop 2" view is so annoying, and given we have higher res monitors now, it serves no purpose if the intention was to save space.

	▲	josho a few seconds ago \| parent [-]
		I loathe that I can't even rename the desktops. Wouldn't it be great to have them named "Design", "Dev", "Productivity", "Games". Or whatever makes sense given your needs, instead of simply desktop #.

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willtemperley an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> rather than showing you a preview, the bar just says "Desktop 1", "Desktop 2"

I never noticed that behaviour because I only use mission control in full-screen mode. If you swipe up with three (or four) fingers from a full-screen window the previews are visible immediately. I have no idea why we need a different preview for desktop vs full screen however.

The part of this UX that annoys me is the spaces get re-ordered for no apparent reason. I usually have a few IDE windows open and it's tiring to have to double-check the window hasn't moved.

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jimrandomh 24 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

The full-screen mode handling might be a clue about what went wrong: if you swipe up from a space that contains a full screen app, it has an animation where the app goes into a slot in the preview strip, but that animation doesn't make sense visually for a non-full-screen space. So, perhaps someone was implementing that animation, didn't want to implement an alternate animation for the non-fullscreen case, and decided to minimize the preview strip instead? And because this was after Steve Jobs had died, there was no one left in charge of UX to explain why that was a bad idea?

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fragmede an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

that's a setting you can turn off. settings -> desktops and spaces -> reorder spaces

	▲	brigade 11 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Unfortunately that also forces new fullscreen apps all the way to the rightmost space, which is slightly more annoying than being unable to predict what clicking on a dock icon will do.
	▲	willtemperley an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Ah thanks! The setting is "Automatically rearrange Spaces based on most recent use" which explains why the behaviour felt so intermittent.