Here I Am!

A recent blog post from Marcin Wichary briefly discussed a proposed application interaction Mario Guzmán had posted on Mastodon. The aim was to help locate a window on screen:

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As you can see in the demo above, clicking on the app’s Dock icon causes its main window to do a horizontal shake. While this is effective in drawing attention, as Wichary notes, this left-right shake already has a well-established meaning. Throughout MacOS, such a shake is used to indicate a password has not been accepted.

We actually tackled this exact problem several years back in SoundSource. The app’s main window can be pinned to remain open on screen. When it is, we wanted a click of the menu bar icon to draw attention to that already-open main window. We began with a left-right shake, much like what you see above.

Eventually, though, I realized it just didn’t feel right to me. The connection to both bad passwords and saying “No” was too strong. So I opened a case in our issue tracker titled “Consider modifying the ‘Here I Am’ shake”, and suggested that perhaps an up-down “yes” shake might work instead.

Nathan, our lead developer on SoundSource, experimented a bit. He eventually got us to the fantastic “pop” animation you can see here:

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We released this change back at the end of 20211, and it can still be seen in SoundSource today. I recently noticed that Apple’s apps do a similar animation when opening an already-open file.2 I remain delighted with this simple but effective pop animation. It feels like something other apps might adopt it as well.

Footnotes:

The release note for this read: “…now does a more logical ‘Here I am!’ pop to indicate its location.”↩︎

To see this, open an already-open file in almost any Apple app, including Pages, QuickTime Player, or TextEdit. The window for the file will quickly pop once. Though it’s not bad, I feel our double-pop is superior.↩︎