I do remote tech support for my elderly aunt. She finds it difficult to figure out how to accept screen sharing requests, so I have Team Viewer installed as a host on her iMac.
But sometimes Team Viewer doesn’t work. In that case the fallback is macOS screen sharing, requested through Messages.
This happened recently, but I couldn’t get sharing started. I spent a lot of time trying to explain to her that when I initiated the macOS screen sharing request, she needed to click the accept button on the notification.
But she kept saying there was nothing for her to click on. It was very frustrating. Why couldn’t she see the button and click on it?
Come to find out that with Ventura, the notification that someone is requesting to view your screen has no visible button to accept or deny the request. That is, a dialog that is asking a question has no buttons! It is an invisble button, that only appears when you mouse over the notification, which you wouldn’t know to do because there’s nothing on the notification to make you think you should.
This is like an adventure game where you have to move your cursor all over the screen to find the hidden hot spots, except not as fun.
The recent macOS tendency to hide actions until a mouse-over is something that I hope will be replaced very soon. It seems to be a design decision to try to make screen interfaces more minimal, with options only appearing when needed - but I’m sure I’m not the only one who thinks that it’s actually made things more complex.
No, you’re not. I’d wager that three-fourths or more of users never ever use controls that are visible only on mouse-over, because they forget they exist or they don’t even know they’re there. It makes a lot of things unnecessarily more complicated. At least show the user that there’s a control there with a disclosure arrow or a pop-up menu indicator or something.
Thanks, that’s useful but unfortunately Notifications doesn’t seem to use it (at least on Monterey). On notifications neither control is outlined and you still have to hover over them to get anything to show up.