The Missing Pieces of the Puzzle (Premium)

I’ve written a lot about the MacBook Air I purchased last month and some of the interesting differences between the PC and Mac ecosystems. It was important to me to experience the Mac as Apple intended, without the crutch of more familiar PC software or utilities designed to make up for some of the many macOS shortcomings and inconsistencies. But now that my review is done, all bets are off.

I haven’t solved all the problems I’ve found with macOS, but it’s somewhat rewarding to discover that those problems are real, and well-understood within the Mac community. I spoke with a long-time Mac-using friend this past weekend for a few hours, and while much of that time was spent just catching up, we also ran down my list of issues and inconsistencies. And he confirmed the lot of them. I’m not crazy.

But I don’t want to focus on any of that here. In the end, this kind of technical navel-gazing is interesting on some level, but I just want to get work done. So let me instead push forward with a few more general observations about this platform, and how using the MacBook Air as much as I did over the previous five or six weeks changed me.

First, yes, I did install and configure Parallels Desktop over the weekend. I’d already written about the latest version of this incredible product last August when it first shipped, and there are no major differences to report. But Parallels factors heavily into my Mac experience going forward, so we’ll touch on this again in a bit.

Also, for those who recommended third-party utilities to solve some of the Mac’s more obvious multitasking issues, I did eventually buy/download two, and they’re worth knowing about. First up is Magnet, a $4.99 app in the Mac App Store that provides Snap-like window management functionality that’s dramatically better than the built-in macOS side-by-side views (that only work in Full Screen and only support two windows). And then altTab, which as its name suggests, provides a Windows-like Alt + Tab keyboard shortcut so you can access every window in the switcher, and not just every app. With stock macOS, getting to secondary windows is an inconsistent nightmare.

These three apps are the reason I’m writing this. Not so much to explain that they’re useful, though they are. But rather to highlight how much I missed the functionality that they deliver, from Windows to the Mac. This isn’t just about familiarity, indeed, I did everything I could to conform to the Mac way of doing things. Instead, each addresses what I feel is objectively an inferior or non-existent experience on the Mac. Something that just works better in Windows or is, curiously, only available for Windows.

In my review of the MacBook Air, I noted that moving between Mac and Windows regularly, as I did over those many weeks, was difficult. I can’t recommend doing this: If you’re going to use a Mac, just use a Mac (or vice versa). Going back and forth between the two is a thankless exercise in overloading your muscle memory, as the invisible brain-hand connection in your body tries to make sense of the simplest of keyboard shortcuts and other actions. I can’t tell you how many times I sat down at a Windows PC during this time and typed something like ALT + C instead of CTRL + C because on the Mac, this operation is accomplished with CMD + C, and on the Mac keyboard, the CMD key is where the ALT key is on the PC.

I know. This doesn’t sound profound. And to be fair, it’s perhaps one of the more minor issues, or would be if it weren’t for the frequency at which I encountered it. But when we talk about moving between platforms, whether it’s Windows and the Mac here, Android and the iPhone, or whatever else, we tend to casually ignore how this kind of thing is just the tip of a switching nightmare iceberg, a constant frustration. I will try to be a bit more cognizant of that going forward. (And if it helps, the keyboard shortcuts in ChromeOS, while being more similar to those in Windows, still deliver their own unique weirdnesses, thanks in large part to that system’s “Everything” key, or what we use as CAPS LOCK in Windows and, go figure, the Mac.)

So there’s that. But any switch, big or small, requires some retraining, some adjustment. When I moved from OneDrive to Google Drive for most of my day-to-day work, I enjoyed the reliability and performance improvements, and Google’s nag-free experience, of course. But there are so many minor differences that some of my workflow had to change. I’m used to it now, and may have even eased from being comfortable with it to preferring it. But these things take time. And they don’t always work.

And it’s worse when you get to the platform level. Keyboard shortcuts are one thing, but multitasking is a fundamental human right, to channel Tim Cook, and there is no excuse for how badly macOS handles basic functions like window switching, what we in the Windows world typically accomplish with Alt + Tab. And how the inconsistencies undermine it further—each app handles sub-windows differently, for example—as does Full Screen mode, which erases some functionality entirely. For example, if you can use the CMD + ` keyboard shortcut to switch between the various windows used by an app (again, not all apps work the same way), that keyboard shortcut no longer works if that app is displayed in Full Screen mode. Let that sink in for a moment. Because it doesn’t make any sense.

The Mac experts in the audience will be quick to defend, well, maybe just point out, that this curious regression is more than amply overcome by another byproduct of Full Screen mode: Instead of giving each app its own Space (the Apple version of a virtual desktop), macOS gives each app’s window its own Space. And that means that you can use the system’s delightfully reliable three-finger horizontal trackpad gestures to switch between these windows. Problem solved!

Except, of course, that this is inconsistent. This system puts the onus on me, the user, to keep track of whether an app’s in Full Screen mode and then adjust how I switch between it and other apps and windows on the fly. That is, if I have Microsoft Word open with two windows, each with its own document displayed, I can switch between Word and the other apps using CMD + TAB, and then use CMD + ` to switch between the Word windows. But if Word is displayed in Full Screen, I have to switch to trackpad gestures instead. Or use CMD + TAB and then a trackpad gesture. Why can’t both just work the same way all the time?

You may be thinking that keeping track of Full Screen isn’t hard. After all, it’s obvious when an app is Full Screen. And that’s true, but it’s not ever obvious whether an app will be in Full Screen. Despite researching this incessantly, nothing I’ve tried forces apps (or their windows) to always open in Full Screen. The apps I use the most, but close throughout the day, like iA Writer (a Markdown text editor) never retain this view, so I have to force it each time I start the app or create a new document. You use the Fn + F keyboard shortcut for that. Unless, of course, the app doesn’t support that. Visual Studio Code doesn’t, for example. Inconsistent. Maddening.

But here’s the paradox. I have fallen in love with Full Screen.

To be clear, there is nothing like this on Windows, not globally. I’ve experimented with auto-hiding the Taskbar and running apps full-screen, and that’s close, sort of. But it’s not really full-screen. Not like when you tap F11 in a web browser. Not like on macOS.

Aside from the issues I noted above, Full Screen on the macOS also creates a strange situation in which you have to decide what to do with the system-wide menu bar. You can auto-hide it, either in Full Screen only or globally, and I thought I’d want that. But two things undermine this experience.

For starters, I apparently look at the clock all the time throughout the day, and I only noticed that because it disappears with the menu bar and I wanted it back. (This is one of the reasons hiding the Taskbar in Windows isn’t ideal for me, either.)

Second and perhaps more problematically, the way the menu bar or the area where the menu would normally be is displayed inconsistently from app to app in Full Screen mode. And this is a problem because there is only one correct way to handle this: If the user hides the menu bar in Full Screen mode, then every app in that mode should simply fill that space, and they or the system (I don’t care which handles this) should auto-flow the app’s menu around the notch, if required. This is so obvious it hardly bears discussing. Except that many apps do not do that. It’s maddening.

Here’s the problem in a nutshell: If the app isn’t going to claim the space taken by the menu bar when it hides, then why even hide it in the first place? There’s an empty and unusable black bar there, a menu bar-sized space, instead. So I decided to leave the menu bar displayed in Full Screen mode. And then I play a video full-screen and—wait for it—yep, the freaking menu bar is displayed on-screen during playback. Because who the f#$k would ever want that? Come on, Apple.

Despite all this—and it’s more maddening than it sounds if you’ve not experienced it—I love Full Screen mode. Not for video playback. But for productivity apps. When I’m writing, iA Writer—or Word, or whatever app—fills the screen, or mostly fills the screen, creating a distraction-free one-app environment that I have really come to value. Why this works so well is nuanced in that many things play into it, but one of the major components is that three-finger trackpad swipe gesture. If you can work it so that most or all of the apps you’re using are Full Screen, there’s some magic in switching between them that way.

That has to be experienced to be fully understood, but for those on Windows PCs, I’ll just say that I review many laptops each year, and one of the first things I end up disabling on most—not all, but most—of them is three- and four-finger touchpad gestures. And the reason I do that is that most PC touchpads are too unreliable to handle multi-finger gestures accurately: After I’ve inadvertently triggered the “Show all open windows” interface (three fingers, swipe up) when I meant to scroll (two fingers, up or down) enough times, I just disable it. And I just stick with keyboard shortcuts. Which work fine, and are at least consistent and better than what Apple offers in macOS.

But there is something special about the Mac’s trackpad gestures. I miss them, and the Full Screen mode where they shine, when I’m using Windows. Just as I miss the consistency of Windows’ multitasking keyboard shortcuts when I’m on the Mac. Neither is perfect. Both offer something the other does not. I’ve never experienced this, thankfully, but each is in its own way like a mini version of phantom limb syndrome, except that what I miss is some system feature.

The utilities I mentioned above serve to help solve similar problems, help to cross the platform divide. Robbed of consistent keyboard shortcuts for window switching because of Full Screen mode’s inconsistencies, AltTab makes it OK. It’s not ideal, I guess: You have to use the ALT key instead of the CMD key, which is one key over and not as wide. But I’m glad to have it.

But being able to run Windows—no, not Windows, but specific Windows apps—has solved a sort of last-mile problem for me. A set of small things that are just better in Windows, or can be made better by Windows apps I use and love, that just don’t have any direct analog on the Mac.

A few examples. Excuse the density of these descriptions.

I use Microsoft Paint extensively. And if you just uttered an unconscious scoffing sound, all that proves is that you have no idea how powerful, versatile, and efficient this thing is. There’s a whole class of image editing functions that is easier/better done with Paint, and it’s especially true if you rely on keyboard shortcuts, as I do. I crop and otherwise edit images to specific sizes and aspect ratios in Paint like a champ. And there is nothing like it on the Mac.

Well, there is something like it. I’ve been using a Paint-like Bitmap editor called Pintar on the Mac for years, and it’s better than nothing. It has certainly stepped up to the plate and delivered when Affinity Photo or Photoshop Elements lets me down. But it is no Paint. Where’s (one reason) why. Let’s say I’m working on the book and for whatever reason I have full-screen 1920 x 1200 images that include the Taskbar, and what I want is just the app window. I can open that image in Paint, type CTRL + E, TAB, 1128, Enter, and then Ctrl + S, and I’m done. That image is perfectly cropped.

Here’s how I do the same thing in Pintar (another app that coincidentally also doesn’t support Fn + F to go into Full Screen mode). I type CMD + SHIFT + R for “Resize Canvas,” but then I need to shift to using the mouse because the resulting dialog is not keyboard-friendly. So I select “By absolute size,” uncheck “Maintain aspect ratio,” and then select the Height field, which doesn’t support CMD + A for Select All, so I also have to manually select the entire number in there with the mouse. Then I type 1128, select the Up arrow button under Anchor, and then click the “OK” button. Then I type CMD + S to save it, but it also prompts me every freaking time to select a quality level because it’s a JPG. And what the frick did I just describe? A million steps to do one thing, that’s what, and most of it inefficiently involves the mouse.

And that’s just one of a handful of things I use Paint for every single day.

Another example is viewing images. In Windows, you can open a random image in a folder full of images—you know, like screenshots, in case you’re not sensing a theme here—view it in Paint (I prefer ImageGlass, but Paint works) and then navigate to all the other images in that folder by tapping the Right and Left arrow keys. Simple, obvious, and efficient.

On the Mac, when you open an image in a folder full of images, it opens in Preview. And there is no way to navigate to other images. You open Preview, see it’s the wrong image, close Preview, navigate back to Finder, and try again. Inefficient. The workaround is to CMD-select all the images and then press the Spacebar: This displays one image in a Finder-based preview window, and that window does let you use the Arrow keys to navigate back and forth. But it’s a weird couple of extra steps, and the first image you see in the preview window isn’t always the first image in the folder. Inconsistent.

Oddly, I hadn’t thought of this before installing Parallels Desktop, but as I was doing so, it suddenly occurred that Paint and Photos, those most unassuming of in-box Windows utilities, would be available to me on the Mac when it was done. And I found myself getting excited by this: I had struggled for weeks trying to perform these actions that are so simple in Windows and so difficult on the Mac, had researched alternatives, gone down various dead-ends, and came up with nothing. But now they were just there. Now, I could exercise a muscle. Now, I could be efficient.

And they both work great. There’s a little awkwardness with Windows keyboard shortcuts on the Mac—some work interchangeably between CMD and CTRL, but some don’t, as CMD is treated like the Windows key–but it all works. This sounds like the dumbest reason to virtualize Windows, and I don’t know, maybe it is. But it’s made all the difference to me. I can page through a folder full of images easily, and I can edit them efficiently again.

For all its problems, Windows has put the Mac over the top. Even File Explorer—File Explorer!—is a welcome sight after suffering so long with the Finder, a file management app that doesn’t even arrange files in a folder automatically and doesn’t care if you tell it to do otherwise. In this scenario, Windows actually solves problems rather than creating them. It’s magic.

Has this put my Windows 11 enshittification issues in perspective? Not exactly: The problems with Windows 11 are endemic and malicious, and largely unsolvable, while the usability problems with macOS can easily be addressed. But there is a “grass is always greener” element to this experience, for sure. All I can say right now is that adding Windows and a couple of utilities made (almost) everything seem to slide into place. Were I to stick with the Mac full-time, I want to do more.

But I like that I can see a light at the end of that tunnel. I don’t get that feeling with Windows these days.