GoKawiilTailscale should feel nearly invisible when it's connecting you and all your devices together. But on some MacBooks, for a while there, it could be a little too invisible. We have two fixes for it: one small and slightly quirky, and another really useful one, available now on macOS.
The small, quirky fix might become a thing of the past for the vast majority of Mac users. I wanted to document it here: to help other developers, to mark this moment in time, and quietly crow about our windowed macOS interface now being generally available.
But for a while there, we had this issue with Tailscale's icon slipping into darkness.
At its debut on macOS, Tailscale was a command-line tool and a menu bar utility. Some MacBooks, starting with 2021 MacBook Pro models, have a notch in the top-middle of their display. And depending on how many other apps with menu bar icons are running, the Tailscale app’s icon can be hidden inside that notch.
Apple, a company that traditionally favors simple functionality over dense settings, does not offer users, or developers, a path out of the darkness. If there are more menu bar icons then there is space to the right side of the notch, the menu bar items simply disappear into the notch-y ether. If you don’t see it, you can’t click it. There is no notification to the user, no overflow section, no options to rearrange the menu bar items.
Author's rendition of the Tailscale menu bar applet, dangerously close to the inky depths.
As of this writing, Apple has some indirect work-arounds, like pushing more of its own system icons into a revamped Control Center, and offering a somewhat inelgant “Scale to fit below camera” option. Third-party menu-bar-managing apps like ICE and Bartender can help, but they add complications and overhead.
“We don’t have any control over where things get rendered in the menu bar,” said one Tailscale engineer, who asked to go nameless so as to share their honest opinion. “You just say, ‘I want to be a menu bar app.’ They shove it up there, and that’s it, you end up where you end up.”
Given this there-or-not-there behavior, Tailscale developers received a number of bug reports from users when, after the notched MacBooks' debut, their Tailscale icons fell into the middle-screen distance. "They were like, 'Actually, I can't find my Tailscale. It's gone. It didn't start," the engineer said. "We're like, 'No, it's there, it's just hiding behind the notch.' But we kind of got sick of that."
Mac menu bar icons may not know they are trapped inside the no-pixel phantom zone, but they can report that something is blocking them. Using data from occlusionState, the Tailscale app can see that its icon is in mid-bar limbo.
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