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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."
From what I can tell, Apple is going whole-hog in the "whole lot worse" category.
You know how people (rightly) shit on Microsoft for going the whole "let's bring Windows Phone to the desktop!" thing they did with Windows 8?
From what I can see of Yosemite, Apple is doing the same thing with Mac OS X. So congrats, Apple users, you can now experience the same joy that is the phone-ification of the desktop that Windows users got with Windows 8.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
They're making it possible to make and receive phone calls on the desktop.
According to the article, they've ported iOS-specific APIs back to the desktop, including things like their version of Androids Intents (that they call "extensions"). However, since they come from iOS, they only work with apps that are sold through the App Store.
They added the notifications pane from iOS (stolen from Android, natch) to the desktop. It's now literally identical, other than swiping in from the side rather than the top.
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 due to the lack of space on iOS devices compared to a desktop. (The examples the review uses are the maps app and Safari.)
So, yes, they're slowly iOS-ifying Mac OS X. I guess they learned they need to "boil the frog" from Microsoft: if they add the changes in slowly enough, people won't even notice their desktop OS is now slowly becoming a mobile OS.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.