Apple giveth and Apple taketh away. In macOS 13 developer beta 3, I was elated to see that Apple had named Stage Manager’s dingus on the left a “strip”. Imagine my surprise and disappointment to find that name erased and replaced with “Recent Apps”. I have a few quibbles with this change. First of all, it’s not really a name for the dingus, it’s a description of what the dingus holds. Second, that description isn’t even accurate. The dingus doesn’t hold apps, it holds sets and stacks of windows and while stacks are organized by app, sets aren’t because they can involve multiple apps. Apple in theory could call it “Recent Sets” and say all windows, even standalone ones, belong to a set in Stage Manager, but they can’t. You know why? Because Apple doesn’t have a name for those UX mechanisms either! “Sets” and “stacks” are terms I invented just so that I can coherently write about Stage Manager.

Even without formal names for the UX components in Stage Manager, I think “Recent Windows” would be way more accurate than “Recent Apps”, but even then I would argue that merely describing the contents of the dingus is no substitute for actually naming it. Imagine if the dock didn’t have a name and instead was referred to as “Favorite Apps”. It wouldn’t make sense because the dock also contains open apps, stacks, and the trash. Furthermore, the type of stuff that goes into the dock is free to change because the dock isn’t defined by its contents. The dock didn’t need to be renamed when stacks came with Mac OS 10.5.

Seeing the lefthand dingus be given a name in one beta only to have that name taken away in the next one is particularly worrisome to me. It suggests a fundamental lack of consensus within Apple’s software division. I’ve complained about conceptual incompleteness in iPadOS’s multitasking before. Stage Manager, as useful as it seems, has me worried that this conceptual incompleteness is starting to bleed into macOS.