[HN Gopher] Tailscale's new macOS home
___________________________________________________________________
Tailscale's new macOS home
Author : tosh
Score : 243 points
Date : 2026-04-02 18:22 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tailscale.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (tailscale.com)
| daft_pink wrote:
| Ironically, I have trouble with Tailscale and Mac SSO. I setup my
| tailnet with Apple SSO and when I want to connect on my non
| Windows device there is not an easy way to add a new user and the
| new user has their own tailnet. I wish I could just use tailscale
| with a passkey without using third party sso.
| paxys wrote:
| I haven't had enough menu bar icons to run into this but is it
| really the case that the notch just hides whatever icons happen
| to be behind it? Like, the OS doesn't handle this incredibly
| obvious edge case? Why not just put an overflow dropdown next to
| the notch (something Windows XP managed to figure out 25 years
| ago)? I know software quality has been going down in recent
| versions of macOS but this is absurd.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| This is genuinely shocking that Apple is not handling that.
| Talk about quite a decline in one of their flagship products.
| gh02t wrote:
| Hasn't menu bar applets crowding with no official overflow
| menu been a problem with MacOS with an obvious solution (add
| an overflow menu) for... 2+ decades now? I know third party
| solutions exist and it's kind of an edge case, but still, I
| remember encountering this back in the day on my ancient
| plastic Macbook.
| re wrote:
| It's much worse than it used to be. Before it was only
| really a problem with apps with a _lot_ of menus, and you
| could access the items by switching to an app with fewer of
| them. Now, the notch takes up a lot of space, and you hit
| it really soon on a 14 " display--I can only have maybe
| three third party menu applets on top of my collection of
| built-in ones before they disappear into the notch.
| badc0ffee wrote:
| I think it's not just the notch, but that menu bar icons
| are more widely spaced than they used to be. I want to
| say it happened around Sonoma (10.14)? I was working on a
| Mac app at the time. Icon styles went from dense with a
| generally square clickable area to widely spaced, wide
| rectangular clickable area, and a highlight with rounded
| corners when clicked.
| xp84 wrote:
| I have a 16 inch and even I moved to the "no notch"
| resolution last year because a ton of apps don't let you
| choose whether to have a menu icon, and many of them are
| required corporate crapware. Apple should have bought
| Bartender and made it part of the OS 10 years ago, or at
| least before shipping this stupid notch. Apple's "we know
| what you need better than you do" approach is so
| exhausting.
| lloeki wrote:
| My workaround was to restore pre-notch behaviour by picking a
| resolution from the "show all resolutions" list that is
| conveniently+ _exactly_ screen res height minus notch height.
|
| I theoretically "lose" that much height but gain a) zero
| notch b) non-rounded top corners and c) a traditionally
| heighted menubar instead of the giant one that is so big only
| to cater for the notch.
|
| + I thought this was thanks to BetterDisplay but it turns out
| no third party tool is needed and it's all first party
| probably because someone at Apple is as annoyed by the notch
| as I was and so that's their solution.
| freehorse wrote:
| I think it is because they want to send to apps resolution
| list that includes or excludes the notch area to choose
| from for full screen modes (eg in games). Selecting "show
| all resolutions" basically shows this list.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| From what I can tell, OS X is no longer one of their flagship
| products.
| fyrabanks wrote:
| they kindamostly cared when it was OS X. everything's been
| a bit of a mess since it became macOS while trying to make
| a unified platform for all their hardware
| MoonWalk wrote:
| iOS is a POS too, now.
| airstrike wrote:
| macOS UI/UX has been declining at an accelerating pace with
| each new version.
|
| My only hope at this point is it gets _so_ bad it becomes an
| absolute meme and they get around to fixing it.
| Kovah wrote:
| The weird duality of Apple: their hardware becomes better
| with each devices, while their software gets worse with
| each version.
| longislandguido wrote:
| You're shocked that the company which released iOS 26 and
| macOS 26 to great fanfare, despite being chock full of visual
| glitches, some of which hobbled core functionality, and have
| still not been fixed or even addressed by the third point
| release, is not handling this?
|
| My personal winner is breaking Mail on the iPad mini: the
| message list and message window now always display at a
| bizarre fixed width. On the Mini's smaller screen every
| single subject line is truncated in portrait mode. Did Apple
| fire all their testers? Are they letting the developers test
| their own crap?
| latchkey wrote:
| One of the mentioned apps, Bartender, was sold to a third party
| [0].
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40584606
|
| I think they've cleaned it up since then [1], but in the age of
| supply chain attacks, very concerning. Personally, even as a
| paying user of Bartender, I moved to the open source solution,
| at least I can watch the github for changes.
|
| [1] https://www.macbartender.com/b5blog/Lets-Try-This-Again/
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| The other mentioned app, Ice, is unmaintained and no longer
| works on Tahoe. There's a maintained fork called Thaw.
| latchkey wrote:
| Thanks, I'll check out Thaw. I've been using Ice without
| problems:
|
| https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice/releases/tag/0.11.13-dev
| ....
| seanssel wrote:
| Yep, and there's no indication that anything is hidden, no
| dropdown/etc.
| Jcampuzano2 wrote:
| Yes it is genuinely infuriating that this is the case for a
| company that for so long was praised for their superior UX.
|
| This along with the tons of other paper cuts they've slacked on
| is tarring their brand.
| javawizard wrote:
| > I know software quality has been going down in recent
| versions of macOS
|
| Note that this particular problem has existed for well over a
| decade. It's atrocious, but let's not pretend it's anything
| new.
| paxys wrote:
| The macbook notch has existed for a decade?
| simonh wrote:
| Menu bar icons overflowing. The notch just makes it a
| problem quicker, and in an exciting new way.
| data-ottawa wrote:
| If you opened an app like Xcode with a lot of menus
| options, it would extend beyond across the screen and cover
| up your menu bar icons.
|
| If I open Xcode today on a 14" MacBook, two menu items
| extend past the notch, and they still hide your menu bar
| icons.
|
| This has been the case for a long long time, and it's
| always been an obvious failure case.
| javawizard wrote:
| No, menu bar items being hidden when there are too many of
| them has happened for a decade.
|
| The notch has just made menu bar space more scarce than it
| used to be.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| I run into it when using Rider. I have text size increased on
| my Macbook and Rider has 8000 menu items, so my menu icons (all
| of which are default macOS, no third-party stuff) will be
| hidden to make room for Rider's stuff. I have to switch over to
| another workspace or window (i.e. away from Rider) if I want to
| access one of them. It's annoying but I'm not sure who I blame
| here; Rider I guess, for having a zillion menu items.
|
| Screenshot: https://imgur.com/8y0QbZN
|
| The gap between "Run" and "Tests" is the notch, which I don't
| usually notice is there unless I'm in Rider.
| whimblepop wrote:
| Why not blame Apple for having a busted-ass menu bar design?
| The behavior of "if the menu is busy, icons just disappear"
| and advice like "apps shouldn't rely on menu bar icons" are
| just bad ideas. They don't work well with how people use
| computers or how developers write apps. It's a bad design.
| crazygringo wrote:
| To be clear: this is not really new with the notch. It's been
| menu bar icon behavior for _decades_ where if there isn 't
| enough space for all the menus plus menu icons, menu icons
| disappear with no way to get to them. The notch just acts like
| the last menu item now (albeit even if there's space between
| the last menu item and the notch, for applications without a
| ton of menus).
|
| And yes, it's completely bizarre that macOS doesn't provide an
| overflow menu. Instead, again yes for decades, you've had to
| buy/use something like Bartender for this. It is utterly
| bizarre and inexplicable.
|
| With Tahoe, Apple has finally provided a _half_ -solution,
| which is that in System Settings you can _entirely hide_ select
| running menubar utilities to regain some space. But of course
| that 's only helpful for utilities you never need to look at or
| click.
|
| tl;dr: yes this is utterly absurd but it's been absurd for
| decades. It's nothing to do with recent versions of macOS.
| oaweoifjwpo wrote:
| This is a real problem, but when I complain about it I get told
| to just "hide the icons you don't care about" as if that's a
| solution.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47346079
| wlesieutre wrote:
| Especially bad for people with poor eyesight who have to use
| the display scaling set toward "Large Text" instead of
| "Default" or "More Space"
|
| Between the larger display scaling, losing space to the
| notch, and the IT department setting up new computers with 8
| little pieces of preinstalled bullshit up there, Apple's
| perspective on this seems to be "if the Ivanti VPN menu extra
| disappears I guess you didn't really need that anyway!"
|
| Having the sound, bluetooth, wifi, and other system stuff
| removed from the bar and accessible in control center helps,
| but is not sufficient.
|
| They're too busy solving important problems like "how can I
| use part of my screen as a videoconferencing light source"
| and chasing yearly iOS new feature parity to deal with pesky
| things like menu extras. It's only been 25 years since OS X
| came out.
| devilbunny wrote:
| Poor eyesight? How about just being over 45?
|
| My visual acuity at distance has not changed from when I
| was 20. My ability to read tiny, poorly-contrasted text at
| phone distance has.
|
| Enlarging text size is a massive benefit to everyone as we
| age. It's one of the reasons that older readers were among
| the first to adopt e-ink readers and tablets: every book
| suddenly becomes a large-print book. In the world of
| accessibility this is one of the easiest things to do with
| one of the largest impacts. Not everyone is blind, not
| everyone is hard of hearing, but everyone gets presbyopia
| if they live long enough.
| harikb wrote:
| I struggled with disappearing icons (like our company VPN
| client - which wasn't tailscale by the way) thinking the app
| was somehow "stuck". I would go kill the app, restart machine
| etc - during restart it would get fixed "automatically" by
| being an app earlier in the order!
|
| Took me months to figure out it was running afterall and just
| hidden by the notch.
|
| How hard is for apple to move the "least used icons" to a
| fold? (but still accessible)
| Kovah wrote:
| I would love to get a Windows-like overlay which collects
| all those damn menu icons. The least Apple should do is
| giving developers proper APIs to build that, but instead
| Tahoe broke so many menu bar managers it's not funny
| anymore. Ice, Sanebar, Bartender,... none of them work
| reliably.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| You can going command and drag the icons under the notch to
| make the invisible ones eventually show
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| > If the programs you're using refuse to let you remove those
| icons (or they keep re-adding them against your wishes) then
| those programs are bad citizens and you should probably stop
| using them!
|
| I always love these types of arguments. Program does one
| thing bad so stop getting value of out it. lol.
| pxc wrote:
| If you're visually impaired, you can hit it even with just a
| few icons on a 14" laptop. Fonts anything other than tiny +
| overloaded menus + even a handful of app icons means I always
| hit this unless I'm docked.
|
| Hacky menu bar modification tools are basically an
| accessibility requirement for me, and my vision isn't even that
| bad. (Best corrected is 20/30 or 20/40 or so.) People with
| serious impairments are totally screwed by this on macOS,
| sometimes even with large external monitors.
| izacus wrote:
| Yes, it's terrible and something even Windows handles better.
| It's one of those utterly bizarre Apple things which make me
| wonder which old product guy has dirt on everyone else at the
| company.
| fragmede wrote:
| Just take Ice's source and have Claude whip you up the features
| you want. Keep it to yourself. Takes an afternoon and doesn't
| have other people calling you a sloplogist.
|
| https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice
| Oanid wrote:
| It was Windows 7 when Microsoft added an overflow for tray
| icons, not XP.
| xp84 wrote:
| Not true. XP had a feature to set each icon to always show,
| "automatically," or never. Will send you screenshots if you
| demand them, when I get home to my XP ThinkPad.
| noisem4ker wrote:
| It's documented here:
| https://umidevi.blogspot.com/2010/09/how-to-make-windows-
| xp-...
| MoonWalk wrote:
| It's not even an edge case. It should have been considered an
| inevitable case.
|
| Really depressing design dereliction and/or incompetence.
| TYPE_FASTER wrote:
| Yeah, I was surprised that something this obvious wasn't
| addressed.
|
| Investing in a visual redesign (Liquid Glass) but not an
| obvious UX issue of the notch hiding icons seems like a mis-
| prioritization.
| lobochrome wrote:
| It is ! I'm "solving" it with an app called bartender. It's
| hacked and sometimes doesn't work but was the only way I could
| manage this problem...
|
| Apple software sucks so bad!
| dwedge wrote:
| With some apps, I can't remember if tailscale is one I don't
| think so but another vpn we use is, it's even worse because
| opening them only creates the menubar icon. I spent 15 minutes
| trying to figure out why the vpn wouldn't start before I
| realised it was just hidden. No feedback at all
| al_borland wrote:
| I always assumed the justification for the notch would be FaceID
| on Macs. However, it's been many generations and we still don't
| see it.
| azuanrb wrote:
| I've been using Bartender (paid) and Thaw (free) to manage my
| menu bar. Recently, both apps have become quite buggy. I'm not
| sure whether this is due to macOS or if there are better
| alternatives I'm not aware of.
| threetonesun wrote:
| I feel like every app I use has gotten buggier in Tahoe, I
| suppose major UI rewrites will do that.
| sadeshmukh wrote:
| Useful menu bar manager for Mac that lets you hide multiple icons
| behind a single icon: https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice
| ajyey wrote:
| I'm on mobile so don't have the link handy but there's a fork
| called Thaw that has been getting frequent updates
| CharlesW wrote:
| Oh! Thanks for that, I hadn't realized Ice's maintainer had
| stopped working on it: https://github.com/stonerl/Thaw
| raybb wrote:
| I had been using Hidden Bar but gonna give Thaw a shot now.
| Looks a bit more full featured and under active
| development!
|
| https://github.com/dwarvesf/hidden
| LtWorf wrote:
| KDE has it included!
| CharlesW wrote:
| I personally found it confusing and un-Mac-like that quitting the
| configuration app also now stops the Tailscale service. It was
| unfortunate to discover this while I was AFK.
|
| My recommendation is to rethink it to work like apps like
| 1Password, Default Folder, Keyboard Maestro, Ice, etc., where I
| can always easily open a configuration app, but the service must
| be intentionally/knowingly quit via either the configuration app
| or the menu bar utility.
|
| TLDR: Please separate the service from the new configuration app.
| ezarowny wrote:
| This was driving me nuts but at some point very recently they
| added a "Hide Dock Icon" to settings.
| creddit wrote:
| I love Tailscale so much and when I got added to what may have
| been an A/B test for the windowed app, I was even happier with
| it. It's a great improvement.
| ctippett wrote:
| Anyone know if this new windowed Tailscale view is enabled on the
| non-App Store version?
|
| I guess I'll find out soon enough once I update, but I didn't see
| any specific callout in the article.
| djsavvy wrote:
| Yes it is
| gib444 wrote:
| Yes! More windowed interfaces! I hate apps that outgrow a modal.
| I hate losing the context. No wait I think I hate all modals.
|
| Mullvad, your turn next please
| jedberg wrote:
| This seems like a good place to ask: What is the current state of
| the art for connecting back to my home network while remote? I
| want:
|
| access to my home server
|
| ability to stream US TV when abroad (by exiting from my home
| network)
|
| ability to make it easy for others with non-tech backgrounds to
| connect with their devices (parents, kids, etc)
|
| ability to have remote linux servers connect automatically on
| boot. This one is because I can't get OTA TV at home and want to
| set up a simple streaming box at someone else's house to do it
| that connects back to my house, so we can stream off all of our
| devices.
|
| I'm guessing tailscale will be a part of this setup which is why
| I ask here.
| pants2 wrote:
| Yes, you've described Tailscale + Exit Nodes + Tailnet that you
| invite your family to. Install Tailscale and enable some
| devices as exit nodes - it's pretty much as simple as that.
| paxys wrote:
| Tailscale will enable all of this.
|
| Set up a US device as an exit node, and configure other devices
| to proxy through it.
| colechristensen wrote:
| I found good success with OpenWRT/Tomato and WireGuard.
|
| The interface is bad when it comes to provisioning but it can
| be done with a QR code and once it works the native experience
| of turning on the VPN was just stunningly fast. In this day and
| age you expect things to be slow with negotiation and various
| unreliable steps but it was just amazing that I tap the VPN
| button on iOS and it's connected in a fraction of a second.
| nightski wrote:
| I just use WireGuard to connect my local network. I see no
| point in throwing a middleman into the mix.
| Diti wrote:
| This comment might be of interest to help you understand what
| Tailscale does that WireGuard cannot:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47064875
| denkmoon wrote:
| I would phrase that as what Tailscale does that is more
| convenient than wg. If you "barely know what a subnet is"
| go for it. wg is easy as pie though, and just don't
| maintain 90 tunnels... You don't need a full mesh. An extra
| hop or two, especially within a lan, won't hurt.
| fastingrat wrote:
| if you are behind cgnat (both ipv4, ipv6) then vps, have public
| ipv6 then you can connect via public domain (ddns openwrt) and
| if you have a public ip, wireguard it is
| Lammy wrote:
| Tailscale is probably what you want, but if you care about
| privacy you'll have to be sure to disable the
| telemetry/logging/spying option on each of your nodes.
|
| By default it will leak your so-called "private" network
| behavior to Tailscale (connections on what port, from what
| node, to what node, opened when, closed when):
| https://tailscale.com/docs/features/logging
| lemming wrote:
| Related question: how are people handling adding family members
| of varying technical abilities to your tailnets? Does each
| family member get a separate user so you can manage their
| access? For my immediate family I was just logging tailscale in
| as me on their devices, but that becomes a pain when they get
| logged out and need me to log in again before things go back to
| working.
| seabrookmx wrote:
| > We're working on a comparable UI for Windows devices
|
| As a Linux user and fan of good GUI apps, it always bums me out
| I'm stuck with the CLI-only options for apps like Tailscale. Even
| for a simple tray icon I have to resort to buggy GNOME
| extensions.
|
| I understand the fragmented ecosystem and small user-base on the
| desktop Linux side make it hard to justify, but I hope that
| changes one day!
| skavi wrote:
| this may have been what you were referring to with " buggy
| GNOME extensions", but in case it wasn't:
|
| https://tailscale.com/docs/features/client/linux-systray
| corlinp wrote:
| 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
|
| ```
| potatocoffee wrote:
| This is so much better, thank you for this.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| Dude. How am I only just learning this? This needs to be
| plastered loudly over the internet
| richardlblair wrote:
| 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.
| freedomben wrote:
| 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)
| sosborn wrote:
| 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.
| oaweoifjwpo wrote:
| 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.
| quietsegfault wrote:
| I have never seen anyone with enough menu bar icons to
| have them hide, nor have I known anyone who ran into that
| problem. It's a bug that should be fixed, but I just
| don't think it's as big of a deal as it's made out to be.
| oaweoifjwpo wrote:
| Just because you have never personally seen a bug occur
| doesn't mean it isn't a problem.
|
| This very article is about how Tailscale frequently gets
| reports of them being hidden.
|
| And I personally have had the icons hidden. My work
| laptop has a lot of stuff running on it (much of it is
| mandatory: VPN, custom company processes, Google Drive,
| etc) and combined with my personal preferred programs
| (f.lux, etc) it occasionally hits the limit and goes
| under the notch.
| Kaliboy wrote:
| Did we read the same article? It literally drove them to
| create a new application.
| oaweoifjwpo wrote:
| This is the fairly standard Apple defensework where "it
| just works, but if it doesn't work it's probably not a
| real problem" despite plenty of evidence to the contrary.
| inopinatus wrote:
| "I don't have any experience with that problem, it
| follows that no-one has that problem".
| cpach wrote:
| I vastly prefer Mac over Windows, but I think you have a
| good point. This is definitely one area where Microsoft
| found a more reasonable solution.
| inopinatus wrote:
| That phrase "just works" speaks more to vertical integration
| than it does to any more specific claim about UX, alignment
| to preferences, or immediate productivity, and to demonstrate
| how foundationally this is encoded, you implicitly alluded as
| much in that opening phrase "a mac, the OS" that directly
| conflated the hardware and the software.
|
| Frankly, I prefer the mac because there's so little arsing
| around with drivers. Not out of any blinkered misconceptions
| about quality, usability, or an otiose love for Apple or
| their products otherwise.
| longislandguido wrote:
| > Frankly, I prefer the mac because there's so little
| arsing around with drivers
|
| All Windows laptops come preinstalled, there's no arsing
| about with drivers there either.
|
| Unless you install the bare OS from scratch. But Apple just
| bundles the drivers for their hardware with their OS.
|
| Good luck with plugging in anything non-Apple branded or
| not using standard USB audio or Ethernet and you're 100%
| having to muck about with sketchy kexts.
|
| You can do this for Windows too, that's how most corporate
| images are built. One image and 30 different laptop models,
| that's basically every competently run megacorp IT
| department.
| vladde wrote:
| i love that they posted a snippet of Swift code showing other
| developers how to detect this themselves!
| eviks wrote:
| > Apple, a company that traditionally favors simple functionality
|
| but not being able to interact with an icon is DISfunctionality,
| though yes, a simple one. So that principle can't explain the bad
| design either.
| danslo wrote:
| The only reason I used Tailscale's menubar applet was to change
| exit nodes, I definitely don't need a whole UI.
|
| Guess I'll just stick with CLI only for now (via darwin-nix)
| nozzlegear wrote:
| Isn't it true that Apple just prefers apps not use the menu bar
| in the first place? I'm not sure where I had read that, but it
| might explain why Apple doesn't improve the menu bar. Personally
| I'm of the opinion that they _should_ improve it because the
| current situation is untenable.
|
| But am I misremembering this?
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Yes, it was a huge mistake to allow any random app developer to
| claim such a prominent and limited piece of screen real estate.
| But it's been an option for so long now that everyone will
| scream bloody murder if they try take it away.
|
| Apple's opinion seems to be: running out of space happens to
| only a few people running tons of menu-bar-loving apps, so if
| you are dorky enough to run into this problem, you should be
| dorky enough to solve it yourself.
| jasomill wrote:
| Not exactly, though many apps violate Apple's Human Interface
| Guidelines for macOS menu bar extras[1]:
|
| _Let people -- not your app -- decide whether to put your menu
| bar extra in the menu bar. Typically, people add a menu bar
| extra to the menu bar by changing a setting in an app's
| settings window. To ensure discoverability, however, consider
| giving people the option of doing so during setup._
|
| _Avoid relying on the presence of menu bar extras. The system
| hides and shows menu bar extras regularly, and you can't be
| sure which other menu bar extras people have chosen to display
| or predict the location of your menu bar extra._
|
| _Consider exposing app-specific functionality in other ways,
| too. For example, you can provide a Dock menu that appears when
| people Control-click your app's Dock icon. People can hide or
| choose not to use your menu bar extra, but a Dock menu is aways
| available when your app is running._
|
| [1] https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-
| guideline...
| alin23 wrote:
| 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.
| mort96 wrote:
| 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.
| bredren wrote:
| 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?
| kccqzy wrote:
| 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.
| tmd83 wrote:
| 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.
| quietsegfault wrote:
| 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.
| hu3 wrote:
| Ahh yes, blame the clients for a broken OS that should "just
| work".
| freehorse wrote:
| 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.
| matt_daemon wrote:
| I really thought this was going to be an Apple acquires Tailscale
| post
| comrade1234 wrote:
| There's so much tailscale shilling on hn and if you say anything
| neutral you're voted down.
| rtaylorgarlock wrote:
| Being a principled, critical thinker sure has its costs these
| days. Yeah, that's right, I said it. Flag me (lol).
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| It was way worse before AI
| wrs wrote:
| > no options to rearrange the menu bar items
|
| This, at least, is not correct. Hold down Command and drag an
| icon to rearrange the order.
| ryanisnan wrote:
| I think they mean developers have no way of requesting or
| specifying order.
| wrs wrote:
| Long experience with Window Taskbar icons has demonstrated
| you should not give developers that sort of control, only
| users.
| bilalq wrote:
| I use a wallpaper with a horizontal black bar at the top to make
| the notch invisible, so this catches me off guard pretty often.
| dsl wrote:
| Tailscale is really losing the plot to the movie.
|
| It is an app that sits in the background and provides
| connectivity. Occasionally you need to change a setting.
| Absolutely nobody wants a rich windowed UI, or a menu bar widget
| that drops down a complex detail card.
|
| I hope they can see this is exactly what killed desktop anti-
| virus: something that was supposed to be quietly doing its job in
| the background started getting in the users way. It needed to
| poke its head up and scream "hey remember me?" at the behest of
| some product managers or growth hackers. Eventually it got so bad
| Microsoft just baked it into the OS. Tailscale is on even worse
| footing here because Apple is even quicker to act when you
| destroy user experience.
| likecarter wrote:
| I feel like you don't use tailscale. Because I use it every day
| - and I get confused when I can't find it.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| I have too many toolbar icons, so I do actually want the window
| to switch to so I can copy and paste IP addresses. I already
| keep it open so I can just command-tab to the window, and it's
| way better this way.
|
| I use tailscale every single day.
| joshryandavis wrote:
| You're the one losing the plot. It's optional, still closes to
| the system tray without you explicitly docking it. It doesn't
| emerge at random like McAfee.
|
| > Eventually it got so bad Microsoft just baked it into the OS.
| Tailscale is on even worse footing here because Apple is even
| quicker to act when you destroy user experience.
|
| So Apple are going to bake Tailscale into the OS? Also, read
| the blog. It's a response to Apple's bad user experience.
| varenc wrote:
| I always change my screen resolution to avoid the notch on my
| Mac. It's non-obvious how to do this but you end up with a
| slightly shorter resolution than the default.
|
| I know this means I'm wasting potential pixels, and wasting all
| the engineer effort that went into the nearly bezel-free design,
| but worth it IMHO.
| KellyCriterion wrote:
| I stumbled across TailScale while I asked ClaudeAI regarding
| switching off of VPN: I wasnt aware of the tool.
|
| Im "shocked" how perfect it functions! It worked out of the box
| for a fairly simple but old windows setup where I could apply it:
| Everything was perfectly fine, super user friendly in the
| beginning.
|
| Actually one of the tools that you could use to admin your mum &
| dad computer
| ed_mercer wrote:
| > Apple could certainly make some changes to prevent this being
| an issue at all.
|
| Why Apple still hasn't fixed this in 2026 baffles me. The fact
| that a company the size of Tailscale has to find workarounds for
| an Apple blunder like this speaks volumes about how terrible
| Apple's software management is.
| koinedad wrote:
| The hidden notch issue is a pretty big problem. I had to look for
| tools to shrink the width spacing just to survive, and it just
| looks bad
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