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Stage Manager - What's the Big Deal?

nortonandreev said:
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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Honestly, I don't think any OS update since 10.6 has really impressed me since. It just set the bar so high that every OS update after that has just felt "meh". None of the changes since has really been useful to me, or there has been an add-in that does it better.
 
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During the keynote I thought it was a pointless feature. Spaces already exist, it takes up too much space on the right of the screen, my current workflow is fine, etc. My immediate conclusion was this feature is coming to iPad and Apple simply want feature parity.

After watching Luke Miani's Stage Manager on macOS video I'm not going to write the feature off, I want to give it a go in my workflow wherein I keep a lot of windows open in one space for a given task.

Meanwhile, it looks like a complete disaster on iPadOS.
 
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Alright.

So after I choose the second Stage Manager option (Hide) in the Control Center I like it better.

The flat icons look much better than the perspective icons.

It not only looks more high quality it automatically Hides off screen so its not distracting.
 
NevilleB said:
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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Most likely answer: they developed it for iPadOS (where it's an improvement), had absolutely no idea for other new features for macOS, and then just slapped it into Ventura to have something to talk about.
 
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"Most likely answer: they developed it for iPadOS (where it's an improvement), had absolutely no idea for other new features for macOS, and then just slapped it into Ventura to have something to talk about."

Strongly agree.

I also suspect that they are thinking about killing off/sunsetting Mission Control...or are recognizing that MC is always going to be Mac only, so this is a windowing system that can work for both Macs and ipads.

Long term? This is part of how iOS and MacOS come together at last—it wouldn't surprise me if in a few years these two OSes are growing together and becoming the same thing.
 
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well the hype is mostly from ipad pro users. Im not sure its that useful for mac users. It seems a bit nicer than mission control spaces but I don't know if it will get in the way or not. I like windows side by side a lot.
 
Wel, look at my typical workflow. I’m working on a project, so I have multiple code editors open, a terminal window, a gut client window, a browser, a spreadsheet application and probably some more things. And I could be doing this for multiple projects at the same time. Stage manager could be really helpful for such scenarios. Sure, there are spaces, but they are awkward to use if you have to switch between things quickly.
 
leman said:
Wel, look at my typical workflow. I’m working on a project, so I have multiple code editors open, a terminal window, a gut client window, a browser, a spreadsheet application and probably some more things. And I could be doing this for multiple projects at the same time. Stage manager could be really helpful for such scenarios. Sure, there are spaces, but they are awkward to use if you have to switch between things quickly.
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I feel like the fact that all of your windows disappear as soon as you create another one in some app, is quickly going to get annoying in such a scenario.
 
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tkermit said:
I feel like the fact that all of your windows disappear as soon as you create another one in some app, is quickly going to get annoying in such a scenario.
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Oh, sure, the current implementation is... lacklustre, to say mildly. We need at least:

- the ability to attach labels to the window groups
- a better default behaviour for creating new windows
- sensible interaction between Stage Manager, Mission Control and tab selection
 
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leman said:
Wel, look at my typical workflow. I’m working on a project, so I have multiple code editors open, a terminal window, a gut client window, a browser, a spreadsheet application and probably some more things. And I could be doing this for multiple projects at the same time. Stage manager could be really helpful for such scenarios. Sure, there are spaces, but they are awkward to use if you have to switch between things quickly.
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Similar use case to me then. I'm also interested in this. Most of the demos have been so basic so far, two overlapping different app windows. I want to see what happens if you push it with lots of windows and I want to know if I can have two windows of a single app visible at the same time in a stage. No one is answering this. It's treated like it's a toy for novice users (which I also think it could end up being very good for)
 
canopic said:
I want to see what happens if you push it with lots of windows
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You will have a lot of windows :) But navigating between them can be a challenge. I would love if the tab switcher for example only navigated between the apps that have windows in an active stage, exactly for this kind of scenarios

canopic said:
and I want to know if I can have two windows of a single app visible at the same time in a stage.
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Yes you can!

canopic said:
No one is answering this. It's treated like it's a toy for novice users (which I also think it could end up being very good for)
Click to expand...

If you have any more questions, ask away. I am currently running Ventura with some of smaller work projects to access whether it's stable enough as my main machine.
 
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I kinda like it, because it reduces clutter without having to minimize and resize windows.
 
Craig said in the WWDC Gruber Talkshow that they've got a few ideas for tweaking Stage Manager they are going to be implementing over the summer
 
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leman said:
You will have a lot of windows :) But navigating between them can be a challenge. I would love if the tab switcher for example only navigated between the apps that have windows in an active stage, exactly for this kind of scenarios



Yes you can!



If you have any more questions, ask away. I am currently running Ventura with some of smaller work projects to access whether it's stable enough as my main machine.
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hah. Good point on tab-switcher. Maybe command-option-tab / command-option-`or something? I like this idea.

Thanks so much for answering my question. That's brilliant. I guess you've answered my main concern, because I would often want 2/3 apps per stage, and each app might have 3 windows... all visible (tiled or cascaded)

I guess my only other two questions to satiate my curiosity are:-

  • By default it seems to put windows of the same application into the thumbnail/stack of the active stage, then you click the 'stack' and it cycles them... neat, but is it just a case of dragging that second/third safari window from the thumbnail of the active stage and plonking it alongside the active safari window to 'bypass' this default functionality? Once they are all visible, you could theoretically have a stack where clicking it does nothing? (because you have all windows visible)
  • Secondly, if I have 2 terminal windows, and 2 safari, and only one of each is visible, then I click the stack/thumbnail... does it just cycle the active application? (or does it cycle through all 4?) I'm guessing it's just the active one?
Honestly, if this is all true, I'm going to love Stage Manager! This is exactly what I've been after for bouncing between projects/tasks.
 
canopic said:
Similar use case to me then. I'm also interested in this. Most of the demos have been so basic so far, two overlapping different app windows. I want to see what happens if you push it with lots of windows and I want to know if I can have two windows of a single app visible at the same time in a stage. No one is answering this. It's treated like it's a toy for novice users (which I also think it could end up being very good for)
Click to expand...

To answer your question about multiple windows of a single app in a stage, yes you can. You can also use it to quickly flip between different windows of the same app. See the video below for how this works.

streamable.com

Watch Screen Recording 2022-06-10 at 16.44.23 | Streamable

Watch "Screen Recording 2022-06-10 at 16.44.23" on Streamable.
streamable.com
 
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AltecX said:
Honestly, I don't think any OS update since 10.6 has really impressed me since. It just set the bar so high that every OS update after that has just felt "meh". None of the changes since has really been useful to me, or there has been an add-in that does it better.
Click to expand...
I disagree, I think dark mode in Mojave was very useful as well Stacks. Now in Ventura there is a clock and weather which I wanted on macOS since well forever.

All the Continuty features that they add is good too.
 
Here’s something very annoying about Stage Manager.

It’s really impossible right now to keep open apps minimized. They keep jumping back up when you want them to stay minimized.

I’m trying to interact with the Desktop but the apps keep jumping back into view and covering the Desktop.

Then there is a problem when you want to open multiple windows in an app.

For example, I want to open two Finder windows so I can organize documents or copy from one folder to another.

So I hit Command+N twice.

The correct behavior should be that two Finder windows open and now I can copy from one folder to another.

But what happens with Stage Manager?

One Finder window opens and then when the second Finder window opens the first one becomes minimized.

This is very sloppy and annoying.
 
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