Dock Background Mac Has Lost#

Dock Background Mac Has Lost

The dock does not appear, nor does the bar at the top. It boots up, apparently fine, she logs in, but is then confronted with a blank screen - as in a desktop background image but no desktop interaction elements. Sidebar: TranslucencyMy friend's Mac has lost its dock. Simply dock your.Pixel Envy Written by Nick Heer. The history of macOS, Apples current Mac operating system formerly named Mac OS X until 2012 and then OS X until 2016, began with the companys project to replace its 'classic' Mac OS.That system, up to and including its final release Mac OS 9, was a direct descendant of the operating system Apple had used in its Macintosh computers since their introduction in 1984.The first and only Apple MacBook docking station with a built-in security feature to protect your MacBook, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro.

There is subtly more space around many interface elements, and there is a clearer sense of structure. Rows in the Finder were squished together like every pixel on the display remained precious real estate.Big Sur changed all of that for the better. Icons and text in the menu bar were not as well-aligned. But, screen fidelity aside, it was clear after a day that using Catalina felt cramped and messy. 1 I needed a workaround for my day job — my old MacBook Air running Catalina hooked up to my Thunderbolt Display did just fine. Over the holiday break, I took it in for a new display which required leaving it at the Apple Store for about a week.

Application toolbars, once metallic, changed to a sheer grey gradient, and sidebars went from a solid light blue fill to yet another light grey glassy texture.There seem to be some rules for translucency in the post-Yosemite MacOS environment that should, in theory, give it a sense of structure:Translucent elements are only visible in foreground windows.Elements in background windows are always opaque.The Dock and Menu Bar — including the elements they spawn, like Notification Centre, pull down menus, and Dock menus — are always translucent.However, in practice, these rules introduce all sorts of problems for legibility, logic, and clarity.Let’s start with the first rule and foreground windows. The linen texture in the login window and Notification Centre became a sheet of frosted glass. No longer was its use confined to the Dock and menu bar. But it was only with Yosemite in 2014 that Apple began using translucency more liberally throughout the system.

For example, take a look at the sidebar buttons in Reminders:That is dark grey text atop a mid-grey button texture in a light grey sidebar. There are different levels of transparency and blur — what Apple calls “ materials” — available to developers, and stacking them tends to produce bizarre effects. Elements with Vibrancy also blur what is in the background, and blend it with the foreground texture in ways that are intended to improve legibility no matter what the background layers contain. The translucent textures in MacOS are called “Vibrancy”, since it is not a simple matter of dropping the opacity of the foreground elements. A sidebar that shows through some of the colour of a very dark background element, for example, will necessarily reduce the contrast between the dark sidebar text and the now mid-grey sidebar fill.MacOS attempts to mitigate contrast problems through more blending effects. But adding translucency to those elements, a la rule one, negatively impacts contrast.

Here’s Reminders again:If the window control widgets were in full colour instead of grey, you would be forgiven for assuming this is just what the app looks like all the time. Often, this means background windows actually have better contrast than windows in the foreground. 3Nevertheless, the rest of the system behaves as though the foreground window is comprised of panes of glass, and the background windows are made of solid plastic. But if translucency is supposed to help differentiate the frontmost layers of system components, surely the notifications behind it should be opaque. In Notification Centre, this manifests as stacks of notifications where all of them appear to be translucent to background windows but the foreground notification is not translucent to the notifications apparently stacked behind it:It would surely be a terrible idea to treat each notification as a translucent sheet I can imagine how much that would compromise their already-shaky legibility.

This makes everything opaque — though, unfortunately, it is indiscriminate, and I think the Dock works just fine as a translucent smear — but foreground and background windows in Big Sur are still similarly bright. To borrow from a Lewis Black sketch on the “Daily Show”, it’s like Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, except it’s just two degrees and Kevin Bacon is translucency.There is a way to switch all of this off: in System Preferences, under Accessibility and then Display, you can tick the Reduce Transparency box. This is not directly because there are translucent elements in foreground windows, but the wildly insufficient contrast in background windows is necessary because foreground windows in Big Sur are already lower-contrast — because of their translucent elements. This makes it more obviously an inactive window, but it is so bright that it clashes with the active window and makes it hard to quickly see what is in the foreground:Translucency in these areas has been part of MacOS for years, but Big Sur’s redesign introduces brighter windows that look nearly the same in the foreground and background. When Mail is in the background, the text labels and icons in the toolbar and sidebar become a mid-grey that, on the light grey background, is difficult to read. But because the sidebar is often a critical interface element, compromising its legibility in foreground windows means going to more extreme lengths of illegibility for background windows.

On an iPhone, an app is always running full-screen on an iPad, there are more options, including apps that float over others. Compared to the Mac, iOS devices have strict rules about where application windows will be. But I think this effect works far better in iOS than on the Mac.The translucent glass effect was adapted from iOS 7, introduced the year prior to Yosemite. The smeared background of a toolbar looks worse in screenshots than it does in use. I disagree I think translucency only makes sense when using MacOS or iOS. But no matter how much I appreciate Apple’s accessibility efforts, I can’t help but think it is strange that there are two systemwide preferences for different degrees of making interface elements readable.One of the critiques I often see of Apple’s recent visual interface direction is that it looks better in screenshots than in actual use.

Making elements of the foreground window translucent provides no new information. It encourages the use of multiple windows stacked haphazardly. Translucency here adds depth to an interface with a singular context.MacOS is messier than this. Translucency in apps only affects the contents of that app: toolbars give an impression of what lays beyond the current scroll view contextual menus sit in a layer overtop the app area.

Translucency is fine as a background for some windows, but every item on top of it should be opaque.Translucency in toolbars can remain, as its effects are limited by the window’s boundaries. But if I were in charge of these things, here’s what I would change:Stacked translucent elements — like the Search field in the Help menu, and buttons in dialog boxes — have also got to go. Everything has become lower-contrast necessitating the use of preferences to make the system readable.That doesn’t mean translucency should go away entirely.

I disagree I think Big Sur is generally a positive iteration, particularly for its clearer structure. There are some people who think Apple should return to previous eras of visual interface design.

Mac Os Dock Background