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."

Comments

Wait, what?

[mrchaotica]

From the summary:

OS X is finally a full-fledged peer to iOS; all aspects of sibling rivalry have been banished."

Excuse me, but the only way for OS X to become a "peer" to iOS would be for iOS to become a whole lot better (e.g. to gain better multitasking and multiuser support, the ability to freely install software without a walled garden, a command line, etc.) or for OS X to become a whole lot worse!

Re:Wait, what?

[MachineShedFred]

You're wrong.

Apple did not strip the major sematics of the UI that their users have enjoyed for 14 years for something that makes absolutely no sense on the hardware you've loaded it on, in the name of "one common [shitty] experience."

Apple has not completely hidden settings and configuration options - they are all still where you expect them to be. In fact, they moved some that were completely in your face for no reason into System Preferences where they should have been 10 years ago (I'm looking at you, Dock Settings).

Apple still gives you a fully functional terminal with real shell options and built-in standard scripting languages. Perl, Ruby, Python, and Bash are all there ready to go. You can even paste into the terminal without touching the mouse!

This is nothing like Windows 8. This is actually better than what came before.

Re:Wait, what?

[ColdWetDog]

The usual user case for this scenario is a company making specialized applications for the iPhone. In which case, the roughly thousand dollars required to gain this functionality is just a sneeze, not even a sniffle. Just because it doesn't fit your particular fantasy (and it doesn't appear you'd be interested in iOS at any price) doesn't mean it's not priced correctly.

Re:Wait, what?

[Dutch Gun]

If you're typing the name of the program, of course there's little difference, except that Windows 8 covers your current workspace completely, yet doesn't even give you any visual indication that you can immediately start typing. This is endemic of the entire Windows 8 experience. There are no visual cues for *many* of the important things you have to do, and that's just a horrible design for a form factor with lots of real estate and a highly accurate pointing device.

I personally think the start menu is simply easier to use for a mouse user, especially when you don't remember exactly the name of what you're looking for (this can happen for rarely used programs or documentation, for example), because everything is logically grouped. You simply walk up the menu tree until you find what you're looking for and click it. Frequently used programs are pinned to the taskbar or perhaps populate the desktop.

However, it's a bit more than that as well. The start menu provides a logical anchor for nearly everything you can possibly do on a Windows machine. That's really, really important. There are shortcuts, but if you don't remember those shortcuts, you can simply click on the start menu and find it by browsing through the tree structure. It was an unbelievably stupid mistake, because MS completely discounted the psychological factor of removing a safe, always-visible fallback method for users to do whatever they needed to do on their computer.

From a design perspective, the Windows 8 start screen (well, the modern UI in general, actually) was also extremely intrusive for the user as well. This is fine for small form factors, because there's not enough screen real estate to do otherwise, but completely unacceptable for people with extremely large form-factor screens. You're unnecessarily blocking all other relevant information that the user is currently processing. After all, this isn't a phone, and so there's a high probability the user is working on or monitoring something else in another window (or many windows), and by removing those from view, you're creating a discontinuity in the workflow. The process is simply visually uncomfortable for large form factors.

Minimalism Overkill

[nucrash]

I really wish this sad trend of minimalism would go away.

In a way, I feel minimalism reflects the decline of our society because let's face it, we aren't putting all that much effort into our designs at this point.

Re:Minimalism Overkill

[slapout]

Thank you! Apple keeps trying to take things away, but they've gotten to the point where it hurts functionality.

Re:Minimalism Overkill

[Anonymous Coward]

Minimalisim requires *more* effort, not less. Which is more of a design challenge: 1) expose every setting for every aspect of a system, pick reasonable defaults, and trust the user to learn enough to figure out how to adjust every setting, or 2) greatly narrow the choices, pick a very few settings to expose, get it right at design time.

You may personally prefer one or the other, but minimalism puts a lot more work on the designer than the kitchen sink approach does.

Sibling Rivalry?

[slapout]

Siblings should not be the same. Are you and your siblings exactly alike? You're better and some things and they are better at others.

A desktop and a mobile OS should not be exactly alike. Sure, they can share similarities, just like you share traits with your siblings. But even twins are not exactly the same. Nor should they be.

A desktop OS should be designed for different jobs than a mobile one.

Re:First taste of Mac OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

Compared to Dolphin, I find Finder far too limited, especially the inability to show hidden files. I've got no idea why there is no such menu toggle built into it. What are Apple afraid of? This is especially annoying when I have to look for .m2 and .git files. Sure, I can use the command line, but it's not as intuitive.

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
killall finder

The mouse scrolling was odd; the whole concept of "accelerating" while operating the wheel doesn't feel as natural as moving 2-3 lines with each movement. I had to download an app to get it the way I wanted (or, the same as it works in Windows and KDE).

The scrolling behaviour is designed to work with touch pads, because they're the primary analog interaction device on OS X, I'd strongly suggest you grab one.

It took me ages to realise that Command-Tab cycles through open applications, but not the windows. I found several windows all hidden behind one another that had been there for days, because OS X's window manager didn't present them to me. Apparently, I have to use Expose or something like that to see all of them.

Correct, exposé is the right tool for this job. You can also use cmnd-` to cycle through windows within an application.

Oddly, most things on Mac are Command+. However, on the command line, Ctrl+C is still used to break a program.

That would be because there are well established unixisms at the terminal. This has the substantial advantage that even in a terminal window, you can still use cmnd-c to copy things without losing ctrl-c to kill applications. Note, a lot of common terminal shortcuts like ctrl-a and ctrl-e for start and end of the line work throughout the OS.

My Mac has been set up to be case insensitive. LS, GrEp, cAT, TAIl all behave as if they had been typed lowercase.

So? Why is this an issue?

Pressing home and end take me to the top and bottom of the document, rather than the line I'm edit, making me have to do some finger gymnastics when I want to highlight an entire line I'm working on. That's probably just personal preference, though.

As I said above ctrl-a and ctrl-e. Also cmmd-left arrow and cmnd-right arrow.

I'm not entirely sure why, when I click on the green plus, some windows will resize to fill the whole screen, while others will just get a little larger.

This was changed in Yosemite, the green plus now full screens all apps. The reason for the odd behaviour is because of a lot of windows devs failing to understand what that button was meant to do. The original behaviour in Mac OS was to make the window exactly big enough to hold the content in it, and no bigger. Lots of people implemented it as maximise though.

Maybe KDE has spoiled me, with its lashings of customisation options, but I can see if I were to switch to a Mac, I'd spend a lot of time downloading hacks and scripts to bring back the features I like to work with, and other scripts to do away with those that I don't. Can't see myself switching to a Mac any time soon, if I'm being totally fair.

So what you're saying is that on Linux you're willing to install the appropriate software to make the machine behave like you want it, but on Mac OS, having to install software is unreasonable?

Re:Interesting they keep doing lengthly reviews...

[ColdWetDog]

Now that it's free, the need for long technical examination seems to diminish...

I dunno about that. These reviews always show me features I've never known were in the OS and some of the thinking and history behind them. Do you need to read these? Of course not, my wife uses OSX and wouldn't understand every fifth word, nor would she care. I look forward to his disassemblies. Just takes me a while to get through them ....

I don't spend a whole lot of time dithering with the OS. I use a computer for it's applications. But the more you know, the more work you can get out of the machines. Still and all, I can't get too wound up about missing a few pixels here and there. Glad somebody does.

Re:Desktop is dying we need a good Workstation OS

[MachineShedFred]

The issue I have with Windows 8, and OS X.10 is the fact that they are trying to make the OS into the next tablet/mobile OS.

No, they aren't. At least, not Apple.

They are making your Mac work with your iDevice more seamlessly. There's a pretty big distinction there.

Anyone claiming this is akin to Windows 7 -> Windows 8 isn't paying attention. For one, Apple has never (and still doesn't) ship a touchscreen Mac, so it would be quite ridiculous to put a touch-centric UI on OS X. OS X is still clearly ruled by the mouse / trackpad and keyboard, and will be for the foreseeable future for one very good reason - OS X is where the content for iOS is made, and iOS is where the content made on OS X is consumed.

That is the business model for Apple, and very close to what Google is doing too if you haven't noticed. They haven't exactly been whipping people to get Android onto laptops - that's what ChromeOS is for.

Re:Planned obsolescence

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

I'm with you on the eye rolls. I'm not sure how a free upgrade with new features, to an already purchased product constitutes planned obsolescence. I realize language shifts, but planned obsolescence to me is when a product you purchased has a given shelf life where it loses the capability to do what you bought it for. This is a product that still does what you paid for it and actually increased utility, just some features that you didn't pay for anyway you can't use.

Did anyone buy the MacBook in 2011 and say "you know, when they stop charging for OS upgrades, and give out free updates and dozens of new features to the mac and iPhone, i won't be able to use this one new free feature they both get 3 years from now, curse you Apple!"

Re:Windows 8

[BasilBrush]

Personal likes can be subjective. But the failure of Windows Phone & Tablets in the market and the need of Microsoft to backpedal on the desktop is objective, The same Windows UI everywhere failed. A failure is not a foundation. It could be a learning exercise from which they'll recover. But in no way was it not a failure.