Let's Chat About MacOS Stage Manager: Experiences, Tips, and Tricks!

[MacMan988]

Hey MacRumours Fam,

I hope you're all doing fantastic! So, I recently started using Stage Manager, and I'm really curious to hear your experiences with it.

1. Have you been using the Stage Manager feature in MacOS? What do you use it for?
2. How have you incorporated it into your daily workflows? Any tips or tricks you'd like to share with the rest of us?
3. What are your favorite and not-so-favorite things about Stage Manager?
4. Do you use any other window management apps?

The impression I got so far is that it probably has some potential but needs some polishing up.

I can't wait to hear your thoughts!

 

[jchap]

Have you been using the Stage Manager feature in MacOS? What do you use it for?

1. How have you incorporated it into your daily workflows? Any tips or tricks you'd like to share with the rest of us?
2. What are your favorite and not-so-favorite things about Stage Manager?
3. Do you use any other window management apps?

I hate to start off with a negative comment, but Stage Manager is something I find to be useless for me, both on macOS and on iPadOS.

On the Mac, I already use Moom, Witch, Swish, and Apple's own window resizing tools built into the toolbar buttons for window management. I find that all of these tools serve my needs just fine.

Stage Manager requires a certain amount of screen space to place the active and inactive windows, if you want to take advantage of it. Especially for users of Mac laptops and even the entire lineup of iPads, why would anyone want to reduce the already limited screen space, just to have the Stage Manager window groups display? What was ever wrong with just using the Dock and ⌘+Tab?

Perhaps Stage Manager offers some kind of superficial convenience for iMac users and Mac users with widescreen external displays, especially users who are not too familiar with computers to begin with. For everyone else, I think it's a bit of wishful thinking on the part of Apple, trying to solve a problem that never really existed, and not even adding value and convenience to the user experience. It reminds me a bit of Cover Flow, the view that used to be available in Finder, iTunes and so on, popularized on the iPods of lore, where it was arguably more useful than Stage Manager anyway for showing available content.

These are opinions, of course.