What I liked:
- I love it in general, despite seeing some users say the display is not big enough for multiple windows, I will have to disagree. It works just as fine as a MacBook Air or any other 13” laptop.
- It is close to scale with MacBooks when you enable “more space” for the display
- I like how inactive windows slightly zoom out
- The animations!
- Window multitasking!
- Overlapping windows!
- Window snapping: This is annoying. Whenever I want to move a window, it more often just snaps back to its original position. You have to find the right area for it to snap to. You can’t flick it either, hoping it will snap in position like slideover, PiP, or an iPad cursor getting absorbed into a button when you flick it near a button. Also, have you ever flicked a PiP to another corner but it just snaps back to the original corner? It feels exactly like this, except your actively moving it to a specific location and it’s still not staying still.
- Not enough areas to place a window: Due to window snapping, there is not enough places to place a window. It seems there’s 4x3 points you can hook a window to, which decreases when the window gets bigger.
- Unable to move windows out of the way: Due to window snapping, you can’t move a portion of the window out of the screen or below the dock. Which defeats the idea of overlapping windows, where the user decides what unnecessary part of an app can be hidden away to make space for another app. Not the entire app needs to be seen or utilized.
- Window auto adjusting it’s position: This is annoying. I’m trying to set up my workspace, I have a specific section on the app that cannot be covered because it is showing the information I only need to see, but Stage Manager opts to completely ignore my window positions and covers my content unnecessarily. Have you ever added icons and widgets to an already full Home Screen and your layout suddenly turns into a random mess order? Yeah, it’s the same experience. This makes you less productive if your content keeps getting covered up without your intention.
- More window sizes: There is a limited amount of shapes and sizes you can resize to. The smaller you go, the more it is akin to an iPhone app. Which is terrible if you use a third-party video player with horizontal content. I noticed that 16:9 content will have black borders in any window size IIRC.
- Window auto-resizing: When bringing another window into a space, your entire workspace changes, because the windows will resize without your intention. Just because you bring a smaller app, doesn’t mean the big window I’ll be mostly using needs to be shrunk down.
- Window doesn’t remember size: You will always need to readjust, instead of going off by memory.
- Stage Manager is weird, because on iPad it is a background blur just like the app switcher. But on an external display it is a desktop wallpaper, just like macOS’s desktop and Stage Manager. Switching to iPad’s app expose or app switcher from Stage Manager is confusing too.
- Limited number of apps: It’s the M1 with 16GB of RAM, let me be the one to decide what apps I want on my screen. Sometimes apps get automatically removed, and it’s hard to get it back. When I do bring it back, everything gets shifted, auto positioned, and auto sized. My workflow is always getting interrupted. I have no control! If my video app gets replaced then it gets paused!
- App switcher is a mess: It’s cluttered with regular full screen apps, splitview apps, slideover apps, windowed apps, and grouped windowed apps.
- Full screen apps in Stage Manager is still included with the other windows, instead of it being it’s own space.
- No easy way to close a window: I’m done with my private browsing on Safari, but I see no way to actually close the window on screen or with keyboard shortcuts.
- Simultaneous playback from other audio sources: I can’t listen to a commentary that is synced to another video in windowed mode?
- Video still stops: If any app is playing a video, and it gets replaced automatically due to the arbitrary four app limit, then the video playing the app will still pause.
- Unable to access apps behind windows: Since Mission Control doesn’t exist, windows can be buried. It’s hard to access covered windows when compared to macOS.
- Add Mission Control to quickly see all the windows behind other windows.
- A toggle to allow free form window positioning so we can have more places to position a window behind other windows, out of the screen, or under the dock; which will allow us to make better use of creating space for other apps and being able to cover up the exact amount of unnecessary space from the window below the other. It will also help with the annoying issue where apps will snap back to its original position, despite being near one of the snapping hooks.
- A toggle to disable auto resizing.
- Allow more than four windows.
- Allow more than one audio source to play.
- Stop pausing video apps when they get minimized.
