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Comment by agloe_dreams | Hacker News Reader

The best example of this is the macOS document proxies. They were a sensical representation of an icon you can drag and drop, now they are hidden under a hover of the title that stupidly animates it out.

Anybody would would make a critical productivity feature a hidden hover should be canned from a UX team. This choice was defended by Alan Dye.

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Sorry, what are document proxies?

EDIT: Oh, is this it? [0]. I can't say I ever noticed that before (when it still existed)

0: https://osxdaily.com/2014/08/20/open-files-new-app-proxy-ico...

Maybe I am misunderstanding, but I just tried that flow with a Pages document and it still works in Sonoma. Drag the icon from the header, drop into an email. Now I'm curious what the old feature was.

What's changed is that newer versions of the OS hide the file proxy icon by default. You have to hover the cursor over the title for a second to see it, or to interact with it. Before, it was always visible, and ready to be clicked + dragged.

I think there’s an option somewhere to enable it, but yeah annoying it’s not default.

Ah maybe I changed this setting at some point and don't remember. It is always there for me, not only on hover.

Likewise, I think I enabled an option to always show it.

Its under System Settings → Accessibility → Display → Show window title icons

This is a feature i miss from macOS - perhaps the feature i miss most from macOS. Beyond drag-and-dropping you could also right click (or something similar, don't remember, i used macOS years ago) the icon and you'd get a popup menu with the directory hierarchy under which the file was stored - clicking on any of the menu options would open that directory in Finder.

This is the sort of integrated functionality you get when the OS, the application framework and the core applications that come with the OS are all written with each other in mind.

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