Tailscale's new macOS home

The notch hiding menubar icons is such a stupid problem to have. I waste hours every week trying to help people who send me frustrated emails because they bought one of my apps and they say: "it doesn't launch" or "why doesn't it have any interface??"

No amount of FAQ will help these people. And this also results in hasty refund requests and even worse, chargebacks that take 2x the amount the users paid out of my pocket.

I recently helped my brother launch a simple app for making any window a PiP window (https://lowtechguys.com/pipiri) and in the first two days, half of the sales turned into refunds exactly because of this issue. People had so many menubar icons that they thought the app just doesn't work. Not an encouraging launch for his first app.

Not to mention the fact that the best solution that helped alleviate this, the Bartender app, was completely broken by Apple's internal API changes in macOS Tahoe.

This could have been handled better.

I haven't had enough menu bar icons to run into this but is it really the case that the notch just hides whatever icons happen to be behind it? Like, the OS doesn't handle this incredibly obvious edge case? Why not just put an overflow dropdown next to the notch (something Windows XP managed to figure out)? I know software quality has been going down in recent versions of macOS but this is absurd.

Every time I get a new Mac, I run these commands to reduce the spacing between menu bar icons. Lets you fit at least 2x the number of items in the menu bar.

```

defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSpacing -int 2

defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSelectionPadding -int 2

```

There's so much tailscale shilling on hn and if you say anything neutral you're voted down.

This seems like a good place to ask: What is the current state of the art for connecting back to my home network while remote? I want:

access to my home server

ability to stream US TV when abroad (by exiting from my home network)

ability to make it easy for others with non-tech backgrounds to connect with their devices (parents, kids, etc)

ability to have remote linux servers connect automatically on boot. This one is because I can't get OTA TV at home and want to set up a simple streaming box at someone else's house to do it that connects back to my house, so we can stream off all of our devices.

I'm guessing tailscale will be a part of this setup which is why I ask here.

Useful menu bar manager for Mac that lets you hide multiple icons behind a single icon: https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice

Isn't it true that Apple just prefers apps not use the menu bar in the first place? I'm not sure where I had read that, but it might explain why Apple doesn't improve the menu bar. Personally I'm of the opinion that they should improve it because the current situation is untenable.

But am I misremembering this?

I really thought this was going to be an Apple acquires Tailscale post

Ironically, I have trouble with Tailscale and Mac SSO. I setup my tailnet with Apple SSO and when I want to connect on my non Windows device there is not an easy way to add a new user and the new user has their own tailnet. I wish I could just use tailscale with a passkey without using third party sso.

> We’re working on a comparable UI for Windows devices

As a Linux user and fan of good GUI apps, it always bums me out I'm stuck with the CLI-only options for apps like Tailscale. Even for a simple tray icon I have to resort to buggy GNOME extensions.

I understand the fragmented ecosystem and small user-base on the desktop Linux side make it hard to justify, but I hope that changes one day!

The only reason I used Tailscale's menubar applet was to change exit nodes, I definitely don't need a whole UI.

Guess I'll just stick with CLI only for now (via darwin-nix)

> Apple, a company that traditionally favors simple functionality

but not being able to interact with an icon is DISfunctionality, though yes, a simple one. So that principle can't explain the bad design either.

i love that they posted a snippet of Swift code showing other developers how to detect this themselves!

I love Tailscale so much and when I got added to what may have been an A/B test for the windowed app, I was even happier with it. It's a great improvement.

I always assumed the justification for the notch would be FaceID on Macs. However, it’s been many generations and we still don’t see it.

Anyone know if this new windowed Tailscale view is enabled on the non-App Store version?

I guess I'll find out soon enough once I update, but I didn't see any specific callout in the article.

I’ve been using Bartender (paid) and Thaw (free) to manage my menu bar. Recently, both apps have become quite buggy. I’m not sure whether this is due to macOS or if there are better alternatives I’m not aware of.

Yes! More windowed interfaces! I hate apps that outgrow a modal. I hate losing the context. No wait I think I hate all modals.

Mullvad, your turn next please

I personally found it confusing and un-Mac-like that quitting the configuration app also now stops the Tailscale service. It was unfortunate to discover this while I was AFK.

My recommendation is to rethink it to work like apps like 1Password, Default Folder, Keyboard Maestro, Ice, etc., where I can always easily open a configuration app, but the service must be intentionally/knowingly quit via either the configuration app or the menu bar utility.

TLDR: Please separate the service from the new configuration app.