Yosemite Observations
Trying not to repeat the work of the reviewers, here is a running list of my personal observations after using pre-release versions all summer but only updating my main Mac this morning:
- The first place to go is the Accessibility preferences pane to turn on Reduce transparency. Without it, windows look hideous and are hard to read. The blur and transparency don’t even make sense (the way, say iOS 7’s layering does); why should only the front window be see-through?
- The default contrast is rather low, so I was tempted to try the “Increase contrast” option, but I think it goes a bit too far.
- I’m not convinced that Helvetica Neue is better than Lucida Grande on a Retina display. On a non-Retina display it is unquestionably worse. I would gladly buy a large Retina display except that the only one Apple sells or supports is built into an iMac, and that doesn’t seem likely to change soon.
- At a glance, indeterminate progress bars are too indistinct when in the background or using the Graphite appearance. It looks like the progress bar is stuck at 100%.
- By default, Safari only shows the domain name of the URL in its location bar. You can fix this with the Show full website address checkbox in the Advanced preferences.
- Unfortunately, this only helps a little because, unlike in previous versions of Safari, the location bar doesn’t stretch. No matter how wide you make the browser window or how many toolbar items you remove, Safari only shows about the first 60 characters of the URL (fewer for secure sites with extended validation).
- It also now takes an extra click to edit the URL or to select part of it. The first click just shows your bookmarks and selects the entire URL.
- My muscle memory doesn’t like that the items in Safari’s bookmarks bar are now centered.
- Safari does seem to be faster than in Mavericks, however.
- In the Finder, clicking on iCloud Drive in the sidebar doesn’t show anything. However, it works if I open it in a new tab.
- The first time I opened the Mac App Store, there were lots of updates available. They got stuck in the middle of downloading, though, as the store’s helper process crashed.
- CrashPlan is not yet updated for Yosemite, but the main problem seems to be the real-time backup scanning, which I don’t use.
- VMware failed to boot from the Yosemite installer disk that I’d created. However, it does work if you tell it to Install from disc or image and then give it the Install OS X Yosemite.app package (even though that’s neither a disc nor an image).
- So far, it looks like Apple has finally fixed the bug from Mavericks where it can take tens of seconds to move messages via AppleScript.
- Mail’s smart folders are still incredibly slow to update. My hypothesis is that in 10.8 and earlier Mail queried its own SQLite database (when not searching the full content) but that since 10.9 it has used Spotlight.
- Mail’s Page Up and Page Down keys bug still persists from Mavericks.
- I use keyboard shortcuts to quickly change sending accounts in Mail’s From pop-up menu. The format of the menu items has changed in Yosemite, so any shortcuts need to be renamed in the Keyboard pane of System Preferences from Name <address> to Name – address. Note that this is an en-dash, typed by holding down the Option key and typing a hyphen.
- Clicking the green zoom button now makes a window go full-screen, which I almost never want. Instead of Option-clicking it, I’ve found myself invoking Moom via keyboard shortcut.
Update (2014-10-18):
- It’s great to be able to AirDrop files to my iPad.
- Markup always shrinks my freehand drawings and rotates them 90 degrees.
Update (2014-10-19):
- Mail sometimes changes from showing flag icons in the message list to just showing their color names, e.g. “Red”.
Update (2014-10-20):
- Mail seems to be using more memory than under Mavericks.
- I miss the submenus in Safari’s Window menu to see the list of all my tab names.
- After using the Graphite appearance since Mac OS X was first released, I’ve now switched to Aqua. This is both because Aqua is less extreme than before and because Graphite looks worse than before.
- Even without glasses, the red x buttons do not look centered to me.
- Most of my apps have been working great in Yosemite, but MarsEdit uses lots of CPU when editing a post, and typing is very slow.
Update (2014-10-21):
- Lots of users are reporting problems with Mail using 10 GB or more of memory.
- Lots of people have reported Wi-Fi problems, but I haven’t seen any yet.
Update (2014-10-22):
- I have been getting lots of crashes from mdworker and Safari Networking.
- Various applications are beachballing until I force quit them. They seem to be waiting on the pkd process, which is pegging the CPU for minutes at a time.
- My DYMO label printer’s driver started crashing every time I tried to print. Updating to version 8.5.2 stopped the crashes, but now printing is unreliable. It often halts mid-label with an error saying “Unable to send data to printer.”
Update (2014-10-23):
- The bezel indicators have opaque corners.
Update (2014-10-31):
- After several times setting the preferences, Notification Center just doesn’t seem to remember which applications I’ve hidden in it.
8 Comments RSS · Twitter
You can assign a keyboard shortcut to the Zoom command in the Window menu, which I've done for several years (I use Control-Command-Z). The only weird thing I ever noticed was the Zoom button in Safari getting 'stuck' (highlighted) when you trigger it, which I just heard from Apple is supposedly fixed in Yosemite - gotta try it.
Of course, I use Moom as well - it's wonderful.
CrashPlan is now updated, BTW.
@Nicholas I use Control-Command-Z for Moom and haven’t felt the need for a second shortcut. Nothing wrong with assigning Zoom a keyboard shortcut, though.
Thanks for the reminder on the Mail accounts shortcuts. I've been meaning to look at what I needed to do to bring them back.
Double-clicking most windows' title bar also works like pre-Yosemite zoom button. That somehow compensated full-screen-by-default behaviour for me.
On the other hand now many window title bars are relatively busy with controls, so I need to hunt for unused space sometimes.
"At a glance, indeterminate progress bars are too indistinct when in the background or using the Graphite appearance. It looks like the progress bar is stuck at 100%."
And they are buggy as far as I can tell.
My Mail flag icons disappeared in the same way. Repairing permissions restored the icons for me, so I hope that's all it takes.
[…] own experience is that most of the bugs from Mavericks have been fixed, though there are a few new ones. Apple Mail was stable […]
