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Is Apple Phasing Out Menu Bar

R

Rich.Cohen

macrumors regular
Original poster
Oct 28, 2013
193
3
Washington DC
To some degree I'm trying to start a food fight. (Shame on me. :eek:) However, my question is serious.

Apple has been getting a lot of experience in iOS with applications that don't use a menu bar. It seems to be that there has been a trend from Lion to Mountain Lion to Mavericks to demphasize the menu bar. I'm not sure if that is a valid observation or not. I'm not sure whether or not I would like that to happen. I've been happy using the menu bar since my first Mac in 1985. On the other hand, I notice that I'm using it less these days because many applications have other more accessible controls.

Any comments?
 
Hmmm, interesting. You could be right. If you look at the newly designed iWorks apps (Pages/Numbers/Keynote), these all have a very heavy (right)sidebar.
 
With bloat in applications you see more palettes and whatnot these days in general. But with 16:9 monitors, you also have space on the side.

They can't put lots of stuff in a window's bar cuz that would be, well, Windows.

But I don't see the menubar disappearing for utilities, etc. If anything it's getting VERY crowded. Seems everybody wants to be there.

If we're gonna be stuck with lots of discrete applications, something besides the Dock or the menubar is needed. I use the keyboard and LaunchBar, but I think something to replace the Finder is in order. And iOS style application icons aren't gonna be it.

Rob
 
illusionmist said:
What? Where? Care to elaborate?
Click to expand...

Good questions. At this moment I can't put my finger on the issue that triggered my thought. It happened when I installed Mountain Lion on my MacBook Pro. My Mac Pro 1,1 can't run 10.8 so it's still running Lion. Over a few months I noticed that it seemed easier to do without the menu bar in Mountain Lion. I haven't installed 10.9 anywhere yet. I'm waiting to buy a new Mac Pro. Some of the product announcement and demo material for Mavericks reinforced my thinking, but I can't give you a specific issue.

If I can think of something specific here, I'll post it. OH, here's one item that did get me thinking - the ability to go to full screen display for a window. As I recall that was added to Lion. In full screen the menu bar is a bit less accessible. Not much, but one issue that got me thinking.

This is all very speculative, but isn't that one of the fun elements of a forum like this?
 
Yes and no. Yes, a lot of the more frequently used items are appearing as icons instead of text, but I don't think the menu bar is getting phased out - too many programs use it, and removing it would destroy backwards compatability for almost every app.
 
Personally I dont think so. The menu bar has been iconic for OS X and letting it go would be quite a stark move for Apple. Maybe at some point in the future, but I dont expect this to happen at least for the next few releases.
 
As long as everything is OPTIONAL, I won't care how its done. I dont want to be FORCED to have only palettes in photoshop or something along the lines.
 
Well, it's already happened if you run apps in full-screen mode.

I think that's as far as it goes, though. If you like the bar, just keep using the things the old way. If you just love your iPad to death, run your Mac in full screen mode and rarely see the bar. I'm fine with the choice existing that way.

(Although it does open the door for "full screen mode" and "classic mode" to get treated different ways in the future. We'll see how segregated they get.)
 
clukas said:
Personally I dont think so. The menu bar has been iconic for OS X and letting it go would be quite a stark move for Apple. Maybe at some point in the future, but I dont expect this to happen at least for the next few releases.
Click to expand...

Well, the menu bar on top was a primary characteristic of the first Mac. I thought it was wonderful at that time. However, a lot of the constraints that made it the optimum solution have changed. Apple has certainly shown that it is willing to take a new look at things.

In this case, I still want to keep the menu bar, but I think Apple and the software development community have begun to make it optional. Sometimes I wish they would spend more time thinking how to make the menus work better and less time replacing them, but I understand the issues.

Come to think of it, Mavericks ability to put a menu bar on every screen may be a sign that Apple is trying to improve the usability of the menu bar. I know that moving across two screens to get to the Edit menu is sometimes a pain for me with Lion on my old Mac Pro.

Has anyone hear read Tog on Interface?
 
You're apparently not the only one with this idea, AppAdvice reported on one Andrew Ambrosino creating an iOS 7 inspired OS X look-and-feel.

This artist also removed the menu bar, instead opting for a single drop-down for the whole app in the upper left corner:

image196.jpg


Never read Tog on interface, putting it on my to-read list.
 
Launchpad and Full Screen Apps get you closer to having an iOS like interface on the Mac. For simple users, the Finder / Desktop could be optional.

Those of us who use Macs for work rely on the Finder, a real file system, complex commands usually in the Menu Bar, etc.

I think Apple will continue to make the make OS X more iOS like. But I also have faith that they won't kludge it up like Win8.
 
It Would Be Really Great

If Menu Bar default behaved as it does fullscreen.
 
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