from Hacker News

Fixing QuickLook (2023)

by rogual on 6/25/24, 7:45 PM with 67 comments

• by AnonC on 6/26/24, 12:31 PM

  This was quite an interesting read, even though I didn't understand some of the details. QuickLook is basically tampering with the accuracy/completeness of the item by using a border and rounded corners. Whoever designed this may have believed that this looks nicer, but there's no good reason to remove information (even if a little bit) while displaying things.

• by __d on 6/26/24, 12:37 AM

  This is lovely.

  As someone who doesn't use ObjC in earnest, it's also a good reminder of how nice it is under the hood.

• by krackers on 6/25/24, 9:22 PM

  Note that if you're just experimenting you can also use LLDB's breakpoint commands + "thread ret"/reg write to control logic.

  But I've had some weird issues using "thread ret" (even when using it as the first instruction in a function when it shouldn't corrupt the stack), so patching memory is probably cleaner.

• by dlivingston on 6/25/24, 8:52 PM

  Cool investigation into the guts of macOS. I had no idea symbols were still present for production builds in macOS and that they are so easily 'hackable'.

  I hadn't noticed before, but it is very strange to round corners of images in QuickLook. Apple should revert this change.

• by projektfu on 6/25/24, 8:53 PM

  I recognized myself in this article, except I usually don't get to the solution at the end. Bravo.

  Anyone have a good way to not be distracted by every egregious annoying thing that appears in your daily routine?

• by behnamoh on 6/25/24, 11:24 PM

  90% of macOS is legacy code and programs that worked well in OS X and even NeXT OS. It's insane that every once in a while, Apple decides to poke around those areas and make some "improvements". When I put that next to what Microsoft is doing with Windows, I can only ask:

      Have we lost the art of OS design?
  

  I mean, surely there must be designers and programmers in those companies who still know what a good OS experience is like. But are marketing and sales people louder in those companies?

• by z500 on 6/26/24, 1:24 PM

  This was a great article. I've been playing around with Smalltalk for a few weeks, which I understand is like the spiritual ancestor of Objective-C, and this reminded me a lot of that. It's probably mostly down to the oddball calling convention, but I wonder if other GUIs are as easy to introspect and patch.

• by xhruso00 on 7/1/24, 3:40 PM

  This article is a golden goose for anyone learning lldb or improving on their lldb skills. Thanks!

• by harel on 6/26/24, 4:08 PM

  Didn't Gnome had this feature too at some point in the past? I have a clear memory of this working in Gnome and then not...

• by reboot81 on 6/26/24, 10:53 AM

  Nice writeup. Annoying behavior of Apple. But is it worth disabling SIP for? No.

• by pornel on 6/25/24, 11:39 PM

  Design of macOS since BigSur took such a nosedive.

  Buttons are flat text that doesn't look clickable, with the best case of having a very faint border, sometimes only on hover. There are multiple ad-hoc checkbox replacements. There's a jarring cacophony of old macOS and new iPadOS UI elements — old UI elements with small fonts, small padding, and teeensy disclosure indicators share the screen with big fat round blobs lazily transplanted from a touch screen OS. Some elements react to hover, some don't. Some can only be discovered by hovering mouse in a specific location. Menus have varying heights, and varying padding.

  Such unpolished inconsistent details used to be a tell-tale of non-native UI toolkits, or skins for other OSes faking a Mac OS X look. Now macOS looks like a hasty unfinished reskin of iPadOS ;(

• by fredsted on 6/25/24, 8:48 PM

  I'm puzzled someone in the macOS department made it a priority to fiddle with adding some border to QuickLook when there's so much stuff broken in macOS (and QuickLook itself)

• by a2tech on 6/25/24, 8:23 PM

  Well that was an interesting journey. I don’t think rounded corners would bother me enough to go digging that deep, but I appreciate that it bothered someone enough that they went to the trouble and wrote it up.

• by lloydatkinson on 6/25/24, 10:07 PM

  I know nothing about mac but damn what is Apple playing at? Have they succumbed to the dumb trend ux people are obsessing over of late - removing buttons or making buttons appear unclickable?

  Look at the left and right screenshot. On the left, I can clearly see the Preview button. On the right, it's barely a button. Also, the default window background colour now looks like a washed out water colour brown.

  What are they thinking?