I have to admit, I could use an upgrade to my Mac, but since I’m a bit of a stingy, I put it off. After all, the performance offered by my old Mac is adequate for everything I do every day.
Recently there have been a lot of great offers to get a Macbook Pro, but I didn’t make the investment. Do you know what would make me finally spend my money? As is the case with the iPhone 14 Pro, a Mac with Dynamic Island.
dynamic island is a new UI element that arrived with the introduction of the iPhone 14 Pro. With this phone, Apple redesigned the pill-shaped front notch to make it a key form of interface for notifications.
Apple’s Dynamic Island Demos at the iPhone 14 event they were dazzling. Small icons appear and touching them brings up relevant and useful commands. Apple has done some magic in turning something from a hindrance into a useful interface anchor.
I recently got my hands on an iPhone 14 Pro Max and Dynamic Island is something special that’s here to stay. Many apps already use and leverage the display area, including third-party apps that use Apple APIs, such as the Now Playing API that handles media playback.
It’ll be fun to see third-party developers coming up with creative ways to implement it in their work. But what is clear is that the power and emotion must be transferred to the user experience on Mac.
The bone 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro Apple already has notches, and the screen could easily be configured to mimic the movements of Dynamic Island in pill form.
On the iPhone, Dynamic Island brings a fun and whimsical touch to the user interface. For example, I’d like to see the icon for the podcast I’m listening to minimized on a Mac dynamic island, like on an iPhone, with playback controls.
Now, it can be said that the Mac does not need Dynamic Island, because it already has the menu bar. It’s true that the menu bar performs many of the same functions, but the right side of the Mac user interface is quite cluttered.
Menu bar icons are aligned to the right, and everything that appears on the desktop (storage devices, network servers, saved files) appears on the right side of the screen.
Notifications also appear on the right, and if you click on the time in the menu bar, a column of notifications and widgets appear above the desktop icons. A Mac with Dynamic Island would take some of that load off the right side.
Apple already implements features that were introduced with iOS into macOS, and often these features are designed for Mac use, so they don’t always work the same on all platforms.
The same could apply to Dynamic Island: if it doesn’t make sense for a Dynamic Island feature on the iPhone to act the same way on the Mac, then there’s no need.
For example, using the podcast As I mentioned earlier, the controls that appear don’t have to expand from the notch. Since Dynamic Island on the MacBook Pro would be surrounded by the menu bar, expanding it may not work.
Instead, these controls can appear in a popup just below the dynamic island.
Dynamic Island with multitasking
There are also Mac-specific features that might work on Dynamic Island. Multitasking on Mac is much more advanced than on iPhone, so Dynamic Island may work differently.
Perhaps Activity Monitor could show statistics about CPU or memory usage, or Zoom could show commands to disable or manage the camera. Bringing a similar UI to the Mac would be a great way to liven up macOS.
There are nuances in a Mac with Dynamic Island that Apple should iron out. Could this be a feature exclusive to the Pro models? Can the user have the option to disable Dynamic Island? How is it possible to ensure that it will not appear on a Mac without notches?
In any case, we think it’s something that would be worth it. It’s an element of the user interface that we already appreciate positively on the iPhone (despite its recent arrival) and that we would surely like to have on the Mac.
Original article published on igamesnews.com
