I had no idea it survived.

There are, of course, ways to indicate "more controls this way" with an arrow or other affordance when there's a toolbar or menu overflow, though.

Anyway, the point is that by the time OS X came along, other platforms had solved the problems but Apple rejected those widely-accepted solutions.

"I much prefer that to a self-aggrandising comment essentially stating 'I'm better than them because I wouldn't post something like that'"

I don't see anyone saying that. What I said was, why waste our time with empty blather masquerading as a how-to?

Whatever, man. I guess we have different standards for what constitutes "informative."

"We’ve also added a few contractors to the team. And these guys are legends. They come straight from the ProjectionLab user community"

So... the product was obviously built, because it had a "user community;" so now they've added contractors? Whoop dee doo.

Is there some advice or playbook we're supposed to take away from this? Or is it self-congratulatory spam?

Never heard of "harding" though.

I have Logic, so I will probably never devote the time to trying to fix this. But maybe if I understood the "tracker" interface it would be more appealing.

Another side effect is the uselessness of the Help menu. What help am I looking at? The application owns the menu, so where's the OS help?

Oh right, it's just all mixed together. When I'm searching for information in some developer tool I'm using, I really enjoy all the arbitrary hits from the OS help about setting up printers, sending E-mail, whatever.

And we're talking about a GUI here, so when I minimize an application's GUI then yes, I expect that I've minimized the application. And again, I think you'll find that the vast majority of users work under this M.O.

But your observation raises another usability issue caused by the single menu: Instead of an "infinite" desktop, the Mac reduces the entire screen to a single application's client area... so, historically, Mac applications treated it that way...littering it with an armada of floating windows that you had to herd around.

The problem is that turning the whole screen into one application's client area fails because you can see all the other crap on your desktop and all other open applications' GUIs THROUGH the UI of the app you're trying to use. It's stupid.

So, to users' relief, the floating-window nonsense has been almost entirely abandoned over the last couple of decades and single-window applications have become the norm on Mac as they have been on Windows forever. Oh wait, hold on... here comes Apple regressing back to "transparent" UI with "liquid glass;" a failed idea from 20+ years ago.

Full circle, sadly.

But yeah... now I'm relieved when I go home from work and get back on my Mac. I waste so much time hunting for stuff on Windows now... it's just incredible.

Pompous pedants used to trot out "Fitt's Law" in defense of the Mac's dumb menu all the time, when in fact it contra-indicates it:

"Fitts’ law states that the amount of time required for a person to move a pointer (e.g., mouse cursor) to a target area is a function of the distance to the target divided by the size of the target. Thus, the longer the distance and the smaller the target’s size, the longer it takes."

Right, so where should an application's menu go? ON ITS WINDOW. Not way up at the top of the screen. It's as if the people citing this "law" don't even read it.

Second, I want to give focus to the entire application at once. ALL of its windows need to be brought to the foreground at once.