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Stage Manager - What's the Big Deal?

N

NevilleB

macrumors member
Original poster
Jul 24, 2014
81
30
Durban, South Africa
I am battling to get my head around all the hype about Stage Manager.

Where's the advantage?

If I have opened multiple apps on my Mac, the dock will indicate the running apps with a little dot under each app icon. If I need to swop from my active app to another app, all I need to do is click on the app icon in the dock, and my active app is minimised and the new active app is front and centre, and in full screen.

What does Stage Manager have that the existing scenario does not have?

I like working in apps that fill the full screen, yet Stage Manager uses smaller window sizes which I don't like.

Somebody please enlighten me.
 
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I have no clue either. I don't even like it as much on the iPad, although it makes more sense there. On the Mac, it's just a gimmick for me. Obviously, many of the codebase is shared between iOS/iPadOS and macOS. What Apple does by porting such features on all platforms is smart - they develop it once and make it available to the other platforms, claiming that it is a new feature for all of the platforms. It looks like as if they have added something new, but, at the end, they have really done the bare minimum. To me, macOS Ventura and iOS/iPadOS 16 are as mediocre updates as macOS Monterey and iOS/iPadOS 15 were. I hope stability and performance will be better, although, obviously, this is something we won't know for the next few months.

I will be looking on the forums and YouTube to see how people will utilise the Stage Manager both on the iPad and the Mac.
 
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I'm still wondering whether to keep SM enabled or not.

Likes: When I open another app to quickly do something, the other windows close out of the way, and then re-open when I'm done.

Dislikes: I have to "zoom" all the apps I usually have on zoom each time I open them, otherwise they stay windowed. Also, my desktop icons (and right-click on desktop) don't show/work until I click once on the desktop. And that's hard to do when by default a click picks an app that's been "stage managed" and opens it.

I guess I'll eventually get used to it, and maybe the UI will improve over the betas as people log complaining Feedbacks, but then I still miss the Dashboard, so maybe there's no hope for me 😆
 
Well, just my opinion: I‘ve been a mac user for long time (since System 7) and I’m into computers, more or less.
But I observe my wife’s use of her recently acquired iMac. She’s new with computers, and like her, a lot of newcomers are transitioning from iOS or Android, in fact. My wife forgets to close apps, forgets open documents for weeks… being the only clue a very small dot in Dock. The use of Spaces is arcane to her. And nowadays some apps are closed just by closing the window, but not others (and this was the normal and a special behavior in macs). Even Apple is confusing with this: prior to Monterey, the Stocks app was closed with the window (as AppStore), but NOT in Monterey (app keeps open, who knows what for!). This confuses my wife, and lots of people, for sure…
The thing is making MacOS a really kind and easy experience for newcomers, I think. Other parts of system are also being simplified, and this is a useful idea for people like my wife. It’s making things more “visual“ (and I’m sure it’ll be optional).
…And, by the way, I do like the feature also, having 27” of screen and not loving Spaces…
 
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It's a redundant window management system for macOS, what they should have done instead, is improve and fix bugs in mission control. There's still no way to display windows of single application that are in the current space only, window restoration does not work reliably with multiple spaces, unexpected space switches. Fixing these would be improvement, but instead they add another layer of complexity, for more unexpected bugs, thankfully it's an opt in.
 
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It would have been good if it was in the Right side of the Dock. Then you can save configurations of Apps and just keep those configurations in the Dock.

The way they did it floating on top of the Desktop is ugly and they made it look like Windows Vista Task Switcher. FFS did Apple hire Microsoft engineers?

If they keep it the way it is now I just won’t enable it.
 
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I could use this in my daily work flow, but I have 2 monitors and it's forced on for both. If I could just find a way to shut it off on one!
 
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It's one step on the ladder of unifying the experience of using MacOS and iPadOS, in a slow softly-softly way.
It is of course a way bigger deal on iPadOS where for the first time '16 is bringing us a full-sized desktop on an external display and, via Stage Manager, a method of viewing all our open apps on our 'desktop'.
 
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Having used it for a few hours today it's actually better than I thought it would be, it's nice to keep a number of windows open I don't full screen and just bounce between them. It's also nice to get instantly to the desktop by just clicking it.

The elephant in the room of course is no window snapping, yes I know there are 3rd party solutions but the fact we're in 2022 and all we have is the clunky will it/won't it work split screen is a joke. Windows has it, Chrome OS has it, Samsung Dex has it, yet here we are.

With window snapping and the ability to full screen windows you'd be able to do away with the whole concept of Spaces/Mission Control entirely and replace it with Stage Manager which would streamline the UI. As it stands there's quite a lot going on.
 
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Reminded me of Project Looking Glass, but I too fail to see the real usage for it....but hey I might change my mind when it is released and I get to use it.
 
I can see it being useful in a ultra wide monitor, with smaller side icons and if it allows you to properly tile windows instead of how it works now. for a default 16:9 or 16:10 monitor it would consume too much of the working area to be usable, specially with the zoomed out windows.
 
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I tried it out and didn't like it at first glance on the 14" MBPro. I agree that it could possibly be better on a bigger screen such as an external monitor or iMac.
 
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Not only is it unifying an experience between Mac and iPadOS, but it's interesting to think wider. This would be useful to present a computing experience on AR/ VR.
 
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I'll be frank. I was ecstatic when this was announced. Window management on macOS is terrible compared to the competition. This makes it better.
 
My main reaction to this part of the macOS announcement was "huh, iPad mode." It definitely isn't for me, but I could see it being for people who dislike having their entire screen covered with a thousand tiny windows like I always have, heh.

Full-screen mode is still around, incidentally, so this is in addition to it. In my personal experience, full-screen mode has some inconveniences (like not being able to do the show-desktop shortcut on command-Exposé, or not being able to have another window open next to it for workflows that involve multiple things at once), so I'm not opposed to this concept, at least. I just don't particularly like it, haha.
 
joker00 said:
I could use this in my daily work flow, but I have 2 monitors and it's forced on for both. If I could just find a way to shut it off on one!
Click to expand...

Apologies if this is a silly question as I don’t have the developer beta. Do you mean when using this feature your 2 monitors are displaying the exact same content? Or that Stage Manager creates two separate spaces for each monitor where you can work with different apps using the feature? If it’s the former, that would be extremely disappointing.
 
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It looks very good to me. Although I expect there to be resistance because it's a big change radical change. Leaving it off by default is an interesting design decision that won't rock the boat, but will leave power users the option. I really hope I like it as much as I think I will, and I'll probably install a macOS (public) beta for the first time ever, just to try it out. It also looks like a nice option for non-power users.

I'll tell a brief story as to why this is for me.

I think Expose was initially onto something... "zooming out", showing all your open stuff, but it wasn't "organised" enough for me, too much of a randomness in layout, especially when you have lots of apps with lots of windows each.

Then later on, a future OS release, mission control spaces... suddenly I can organise/group my little projects/tasks windows better, and switch between them. Good in theory. But practically, after trying it out, those spaces are so disparate and separated. I also don't like the space switching animation. Feels disorientating. It's all a bit jarring and nasty. I always had a thought that it would be more useful if you could turn off the animation, and keep the little thumbnails at the top for switching visible at all times...

... well, look at this, Stage Manager is pretty much exactly that. Holy ****, all the advantages of mission control spaces (grouping apps and windows into little silos), but all on the same screen with a thumbnail switcher. It's like they read my mind but did it even better.

I adore whoever in Apple pushed for this. The idea that we will still be doing "basic" OS/Window paradigm basically for the 1980's forever was starting to pain me. Especially when I see how other people struggle with loads of windows open (and me at times, even though I would consider myself decent at keeping them under control)

As for the space it takes up...personally hide my dock and have montors that are plenty wide, I don't see it being a problem, especially if you can auto-hide it. Reducing the dock to being just an frequenty-used-app launcher that auto hides... good riddance to it as a window management interface. I always made my dock as massive as I could just so I could squint at the minimised windows and identify them better... now that will be completely unnecessary!

But jeez, this is all in theory, I hope I actually like it in use! I hope there isn't some weird caveat about it that I hate.
 
DoctorFedora said:
It definitely isn't for me, but I could see it being for people who dislike having their entire screen covered with a thousand tiny windows like I always have, heh.
Click to expand...
I see a lot of people saying this is a non-power user feature, and maybe they are right, and it does seem like it would be good for a certain type of average user. But I'm interested in this as a power user feature.

So instead of "1000 tiny windows", can you have "500 tiny windows" in one "stage" and 500 in another "stage". It looks like there are limits to how many recent "stages" are kept.. 5 I think. But is it possible to have loads of apps in each one? It certainly looks like you can have a bunch of them... someone with the beta needs to tell me.

What I would typically use in a project is two windows of tabs, maybe 2-3 finder windows, a terminal (or two), maybe a document, notes, code window (or two). And it would be nice to have a bunch of these 'desktops' that I can flick between by clicking a thumbnail without being as jarring as mission control spaces.
 
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Until a few minutes ago, I've been using Spaces with most of my apps set to open on a dedicated Space and in Zoom mode (ie filling the screen apart from the menu bar and dock, which I have on the left).

I've now deleted all my Spaces and enabled SM. I have "hide recently used app" enabled so they now appear flat when I hover over my dock.

I'll give it a few days to see if I get used to it and then see which method I prefer.
 
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