People who have great things to say about the new OS, please chime in and let me know what you like; I have to live with this so I’d like to like it.
But so far, like so many recent Apple OS updates, I hate the look. Who the fuck is making everything in the world look cartoonish lately? It sucks.
Also, so far I have not been able to figure out how to put my favorite bookmarks at the top of the new Safari. That also sucks. **Okay, I found this in “View”; thank Og.
After about 10 minutes with Yosemite, so far I have nothing good to say about it.
I like the dark menu bar, although it’s hardly an earth-shattering feature.
But Handoff/Continuity alone is worth the upgrade to me: e-mail, in particular, that starts “getting to long” while on my phone can be picked up immediately on the desktop and finished with a real keyboard. Sending SMS from the computer will also be nice, once it gets turned on here on Monday.
I can finally answer the phone on my Mac – sounds weird, but I’ve been able to do it at work via Lync for a couple years, and it’s something I’ve missed in the Mac world.
As for the cosmetic changes? any change to the appearance of things will cause wailing and gnashing of teeth. Give it a week or two and you won’t even notice any more.
And if the upgrade doesn’t offer you anything you want, nobody’s making you do it. It’ll be about two years before software starts requiring it.
All new OS are moving away from the 3D contrast look to the flat cartooish look.It is fad with new OS and new web sites.Give it 5 years or so and this fad will be gone and new fad.
Both windows and OS X are doing it like iOS all this flat cartooish look.
It’s fresh and appealing. I was afraid it would look garish and cartoonish, like iOS7 did, but it seems more put-together and well planned.
My only major UI gripe was that Safari no longer had the bookmarks bar, so I couldn’t command-click one of the dropdowns and open all of the bookmarks within. That was fixed by View / Show Favorites Bar.
They monkeyed with the way DNS/bonjour works, and that meant that all of my home URLs that ended in “.local” stopped working (think “mac.minor7flat5.local”).
I could see them via nslookup, but not via ping or anything else.
As is usual for this kind of thing, Google found several other people suffering with the same problem and several non-working solutions with people saying “Has anyone figured this out?”
No prob. I have always figured I was asking for trouble using “.local” since Bonjour uses it—I went to my router and changed the home network to end in “.lan” instead of “.local”. Problem solved.
Apple has pretty much lost me as a customer going forward. They’ve stopped making any sort of MacBook I actually want to buy, they’ve discontinued the iPod Classic, and I’m getting really tired of the interface changes without any way to set them to something else. Seriously, is a different icon package that much to ask for? I shouldn’t have to download multiple programs just to get my preferred UI back.
I’ve already gone with a Nexus 5 for a phone and my next tablet will either be a new Kindle Fire or something running stock Android. At this point I’m hoping that Microsoft doesn’t screw up too badly when it’s time for me to buy a new computer so that I don’t have two lousy operating systems to deal with.
I know we live in 2014 and Windows and Apple still thinks it is the 90’s. I’m not saying it has to be like Linux but what is so hard to have OS themes with out download multiple programs and playing with terminal.
Why can’t I change windows 8 flat UI and put Aero on with out out download multiple programs and mods hacks.
In the 90’s Apple let you change your theme- they even supplied a few.
One reason they don’t encourage it is: they have to support it. It’s easier for Linux to be customizable when there’s no tech support offered. Apple needs a consistent UI so they can field phone calls without fighting a lot of customization issues.
For those interested in an insanely thorough and well-reasoned review of the interface, check out this arstechnica review. The best I’ve read — it’s managed to get me off my initial revulsion of the appearance — though I’m still going to wait a little.
Well, so far I’ve found that disabling transparency, turning on contrast and leaving it at minimum setting, and using TinkerTool to change the standard font back to Lucinda Grande at 13 pt all seem to help. The real disaster remaining is the piece of crap that is iTunes 12. Anyone got any good suggestions for a replacement, preferably something that looks just like, say, iTunes 10.7 with a sidebar and a column browser?
I thought I would hate it, but I bit the bullet and upgraded seven machines today (two of them are VM’s). I guess I’m already used to it. The only thing that bothers me is the Finder icon. Not because it’s too happy, but it seems to tall, or rather, not wide enough. Even the bright blue folders I thought I would hate seem to be okay.
I’m now in a full-screen space in Chrome, and it’s exactly like being in Mavericks, unless I look at the top-left window control buttons.
That reminds me – I preferred the old, separate full-screen window control. The dual use of the zoom button bothers me.
Windows phone was first with the “flattened” Metro interface. iOS and Android followed, once Jony Ive and Matias Duarte (respectively) took control of UI design.
If you look even at web design, “flat” is “in.” For once Microsoft was ahead of the curve
as has been said, it’s largely because of support. if your theme or mod breaks something and you call them for help, it’ll make it a ton harder to diagnose the issue.
Plus, having been around in the Windowblinds and Kaleidoscope days, most of the themes people cooked up were hideous.
While image files can break, it’s not that big a deal, and shouldn’t affect the rest of the OS. The problem is that these new themes seem to need hacks to use your own images. The hacks break, not the theme itself.
And while a lot of Windowblinds stuff was hideous, it mainly suffered from an inability to quickly find the best themes. There was some good stuff–a lot of it copying from other themes.
Fortunately, Microsoft finally dealt with the main issue and added color selection back to their themes, which was enough customization for most people. The fact that Apple wouldn’t even add that bugged me back when I messed around with Macs.
Heh. I was very active in the Kaleidoscope community. I designed a few clunkers, but I had a couple schemes of which I was quite proud. The Kaleidoscope site is still there; unfortunately, there seems to be no way to link directly to my page there. So you’ll have to go here:
Click on “O” in the alphabet, then scroll down to my name, “Rik Osborne”. The first two listed schemes, “SimpL” and “SchemeThing” were my best work. “SimpL” was an original design, inspired by various UNIX/Linux GUIs; “SchemeThing” was based on the look of early versions of the shareware app launcher utility, “DragThing” (with permission from DragThing’s author).
The schemes with city names were part of a big project I undertook to create a scheme for every Major League Baseball team (though I’m not sure why “Seattle” isn’t there - it was the first one I created). Unfortunately, Mac OS X came out before I finished, and Kaleidoscope’s author elected to not migrate the software to OS X. So I never got any further with the baseball schemes. Which was actually kind of a relief. Given the number of teams whose colors are red, white, and blue, it was turning into quite a headache trying to come up with unique combinations of those colors. For each team, I sampled the team colors directly from the team logos as they appeared on the official web sites. I only used the city names in order to avoid trademark issues.
I accidentally clicked on the name of one of the themes, and downloaded the file. Then I saw the “.sit” extension and was like “holy crap, a Stuffit archive! In 2014 even!”
That’s what annoys me. It’s been, what, 13 years and the first thing I still do with a new install of WinXP is set my preferences to Windows Classic. I’m not asking for much from Apple on this, just a few different design options included in the OS. It’s not just Apple, either. I’m sick and tired of these UI designers deciding that they know best and changing everything with no ability to get the technical upgrades while sticking with the older UI. Firefox, I’m looking at you right now.
You mean other than Light/Dark, Translucent/Not, selection color, button color, high contrast, icon size, scroll bar type, placement, and behavior, number of recent items, font smoothing, contrast, grayscale mode, color inversion, zoom behavior, captioning, about thirty different input choices, notification location, desktop color/picture, screen saver color/picture, dock location, multiple desktop layout and embedding widgets in the fully customizable notifications bank, finder display type, format, preview type and size? 'Cause those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head, and without using third party mods.
One of Job’s pet peeves was sitting down at a computer running the same OS as yours, and not being able to figure out how to use it because everything was different. But this idea that Mac OS isn’t customizable is a little silly. Yes, it’s not Android, but that’s a feature, and frankly one that you’re paying a fair amount for. If you want a device that works exactly like Android, well, they sell a lot of them.
