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?

[Kenshin]

I've been using Yosemite for a couple of months.

It's not turning into iOS. It's just working alongside iOS better. On the surface, de-glossification aside, it's more or less the same as Mavericks.

But of course, let's whip ourselves into a frenzy without even trying it out. This is Slashdot, of course.

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: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?