PSA: Big Sur, GS 1.25.101 and proxy icons

Armelline

One of the changes that came with the recent 101 update and better Big Sur support was GS now uses a more "Big Sur compliant" title bar. This has taken a little getting used to for me, but is a small tradeoff for a better functioning GameSalad.

Something I really struggle with, though, is the lack of a proxy icon. You may be wondering "What's a proxy icon?" Well, it's that little icon that you'd often see in the middle of the title bar on Mac apps. Clicking on it would show the path to the file, and the icon could be dragged from the titlebar to move/copy the file etc. They're super handy little things that get largely overlooked.

The biggest benefit to proxy icons, in my opinion, is that they show quickly if a file has unsaved changes or not. Threre's a clear visual distinction between the unsaved and saved state. GameSalad isn't very crash-happy these days, at least not for me, but knowing at a glance if you've saved is super helpful.

The GameSalad team are not responsible for the disappearance of these proxy icons when working in GS, though. This is a Big Sur change. Apple decided the proxy icons are too ugly or something and hid them away.

So here's the PSA:

Hovering your cursor over the file name in the title bar for a second will make the proxy icon appear. Holding down shift as you mouse over the file name in the title bar will make it appear immediately.

Command-clicking on the file name in the title bar will bring up the path.

That's all. One of the many (imho) stupid changes in Big Sur.