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OS X 10.10 Yosemite Review
An anonymous reader writes: With the release of OS X 10.10 Yosemite, Ars Technica has posted one of their extremely thorough reviews of the OS's new features and design changes. John Siracusa writes that Yosemite is particularly notable because it's the biggest step yet in Apple's efforts to bring OS X and iOS together — new technologies are now being added to Apple's two operating systems simultaneously. "The political and technical battles inherent in the former two-track development strategy for OS X and iOS left both products with uncomfortable feature disparities. Apple now correctly views this as damage and has set forth to repair it." Yosemite's look and feel has undergone significant changes as well, generally moving toward the flat and compact design present in iOS 7 & 8. Spotlight and the Notifications Center have gotten some needed improvements, as did many tab and toolbar interfaces.
Siracusa also takes a look a Swift, Apple's new programming language: "Swift is an attempt to create a low-level language with high-level syntax and semantics. It tackles the myth of the Sufficiently Smart Compiler by signing up to create that compiler as part of the language design process." He concludes: "Viewed in isolation, Yosemite provides a graphical refresh accompanied by a few interesting features and several new technologies whose benefits are mostly speculative, depending heavily on how eagerly they're adopted by third-party developers. But Apple no longer views the Mac in isolation, and neither should you. OS X is finally a full-fledged peer to iOS; all aspects of sibling rivalry have been banished."
Siracusa also takes a look a Swift, Apple's new programming language: "Swift is an attempt to create a low-level language with high-level syntax and semantics. It tackles the myth of the Sufficiently Smart Compiler by signing up to create that compiler as part of the language design process." He concludes: "Viewed in isolation, Yosemite provides a graphical refresh accompanied by a few interesting features and several new technologies whose benefits are mostly speculative, depending heavily on how eagerly they're adopted by third-party developers. But Apple no longer views the Mac in isolation, and neither should you. OS X is finally a full-fledged peer to iOS; all aspects of sibling rivalry have been banished."
Nope, no Windows 8 tiles, thank Jeebus. I've been using it since an early DP release and have been fairly impressed with the look/feel compared to past versions. A little buggy at first but that was to be expected being an unreleased OS and all. Even that first copy I installed was better than any iteration of Windows 8, and I'm primarily a Windows user.
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Not sure that's correct. I think the apps you distribute via OS X Server to mobile devices have to be signed with a enterprise dev certificate, which will cost you $299/year
Everyone's taking that snippet waaaay out of context.
OS X and iOS work better together now, they don't work the same.
As in, for example, you start typing a document on your desktop, like you normally would, and you can continue it on your phone seamlessly and automatically if you have to go out. Both with different, and appropriate, interfaces.
This isn't about making your desktop work LIKE a phone. It's about making your desktop work WITH your phone.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
including things like their version of Androids Intents (that they call "extensions")....notifications pane from iOS (stolen from Android, natch)...
Right, so you're upset that Apple is using plugins, extensions, and notifications because all of those things were invented by Android developers. Sure.
They're making it possible to make and receive phone calls on the desktop.
So they've added functionality. I don't' think anyone is complaining about Windows 8 for added functionality.
They're changing a bunch of apps to more closely mimic the cellphone UI. According to the review itself, this is resulting in UIs with excessive whitespace...
You might need to point that out in the review. I don't doubt what you're saying, I just need context, and skimming the review for a second, I didn't see anything specific about that.
Having used Yosemite for a while, I don't see there being a lot of extra unused space due to "mimicking the cellphone UI". It actually seems like, in a lot of cases (e.g. Safari), they've cut down on "wasted space" in a way that may have been inspired by the cellphone UI, but not in a way that sacrifices functionality. I definitely haven't had the experience of noticing that things are spaced out strangely as though it were optimizing OSX for touch interaction.
Mostly it seems like they just re-skinned it. The textures and colors are different, with almost the same spacing.
once you install a Start Menu replacement (e.g. ClassicShell)
In other words it's only different if you change the new UI for the old one.
It looks like Apple is doing the same thing
Not even slightly. There's no new UI that is like iOS, nor any "classic" UI to go back to.
Apple is flattening the graphical elements of the OS
Yes they are doing that. But that isn't enough to make OSX look anything like iOS.
Cycle through windows: Command + `
Move cursor to beginning/end of line: Command + Left/Right
Case insensitivity: You can enable this, but there might be repercussions
Green plus: Only maximizes windows in Yosemite. Schizophrenic behavior is gone. The original idea was that it would resize the window to be exactly as large as it needed to be in order to show all its content, but it was often confusing.
If you can't convince them, convict them.