OS X Yosemite: Do you Like the Look?

[Grond]

I still haven't upgraded, I usually avoid being an early adopter, even though there don't seem to be particular issues this time. Also, there are no new features I'm particularly looking forward to, so I'll just wait a little more. Anyway, when I read Yosemite I can't help thinking to this guy:

[Daniel Beardsmore]

Without thinking too hard (or I might come up with something else), I think the Dock might just be the single worst thing about OS X.

Mac OS 9 was really consistent. Clunky, but consistent.

Mac OS X started disintegrating this consistency. Other old fogies will remember that Macintosh services (the faceless background applications — 'appe' files) would crash the GUI if they accidentally opened a regular window that could take focus.

Unless something has changed in the last couple of versions, Mac OS X considers it normal to have regular windows that are not owned by an application, for example Spotlight results. They don't show up in Exposé, and they can't be reached using cmd+tab, as that only selects applications. You have windows that, so far as the keyboard are concerned, don't exist.

Exposé always used to (and may still, I don't know) have a fault where a sheet window and its parent could be selected independently in all-windows view. Sheets within sheets are considered wrong, but perfectly possible (there's a program in Mac OS X that does it). There are situations in which sheets spawn pseudo dialog boxes that are owned by another process, and either these get set to always-on-top (thus blocking other programs you switch to), or they just vanish when you cmd-tab or use Exposé to return to the program you were in.

The whole UI lost its sense of immaculate consistency and I've never felt that Mac OS X's UI actually makes any sense. The indefeatable Dock got on my nerves too, as I wanted to replace it with the far, far superior A-Dock X.

So much of Mac OS X is just completely, utterly broken. There's an installer system (packages), but no corresponding uninstaller. There's no way to just run programs — I have Agar Sagoo's Namely on my old Mac as I can start programs so much faster with Namely than Spotlight.

Animations are mandatory, despite the fact that, if your brain is reasonably fast, all animations achieve is make you wait for the computer to catch up with a simple request. Animations are powerful for non-technical folk as they avoid the problem of humans not noticing instantaneous changes, and they help tie chages back to an action or source, but an "off" option is still important. The only exception is the file/program launch animation as it is non-blocking (in Mac OS 9 it was blocking).

And indeed, the Dock is rather odd.

I loved Mac OS 9, and X was never the replacement it should have been.

[Hypersphere]

Without thinking too hard (or I might come up with something else), I think the Dock might just be the single worst thing about OS X.

Mac OS 9 was really consistent. Clunky, but consistent.

<snip>

"It is best to be both right and consistent, but if you must choose, you must choose to be right."

-- Winston Churchill

[Muirium]

Quicksilver was an essential install on my old (but still OS X only) Macs. But Spotlight's just as lightning quick now, so I don't think I'll bother with a separate launcher.

With the dock always hidden (an old habit from my 1024x768 days) my lasting gripe with OS X is the ability for apps to steal the keyboard focus with certain dialogs. There's nothing quite as irritating as getting yanked right out of typing, often zipping across virtual desktops (I love me a bit of full screen mode in Spaces) and always firing the system sound effect as your input was suddenly redirected to a button, not a text field. It doesn't happen very often, but it's one of those jarring WTFs that you remember every time it does. Clunky! I don't need that. Bounce the app's icon in the dock or something. (I still see those, leaping up from nowhere, even with the dock hidden.) Just not stealing focus. Modal UIs are so 90s.

[Hypersphere]

After spending the weekend trying to tweak Yosemite into submission, today I returned to work where I have a Mac Pro running Mavericks. It was such a relief! My Mavericks installation looks so much better than my tweaked Yosemite, I think I will wait a while to upgrade. In the intervening time, perhaps Apple will change its mind. I wonder if Yosemite would look the same if Steve Jobs were still around.

[sth]

there was a time that Onyx allowed you to put the dock at the top of the screen. that, hidden mostly, would save an edge and if you throw it in the right corner, would almost never get in the way. dunno if onyx is even around anymore though.

[Daniel Beardsmore]

Quicksilver was an essential install on my old (but still OS X only) Macs. But Spotlight's just as lightning quick now, so I don't think I'll bother with a separate launcher.

Windows 8.1 slowed down the search considerably. I don't recall how bad modern Macs are — I've not used one for a while. It's more also that an application launcher knows exactly what you want — whether Spotlight is able to offer you predictive results, I don't know.

With the dock always hidden (an old habit from my 1024x768 days) my lasting gripe with OS X is the ability for apps to steal the keyboard focus with certain dialogs.

Seriously? I didn't think Mac programs were capable of that. I thought that was a Windows flaw arising from dialog boxes being opened with no parent window, forcing them to the top as there's no way to graphically signal or switch to an unparented dialog. (You can't flash a taskbar button when the window doesn't have one.)

If Apple have managed to get even that wrong, there is no hope in the universe.

[jacobolus]

If Apple have managed to get even that wrong [i.e. very occasionally keyboard focus gets stolen], there is no hope in the universe.

Rather fatalistic don’t you think?

I agree this is terribly annoying, but in my experience it happens almost never. I agree it should be impossible, but “no hope in the universe” seems a bit extreme.

[Daniel Beardsmore]

We're supposed to hold out hope that Apple can avoid making the same idiotic blunders as Microsoft ;-)

[jacobolus]

Khoi Vinh’s review, which I generally agree with (except for the Helvetica thing):

http://www.subtraction.com/2014/10/21/t ... -and-feel/

Yosemite’s ambitions are evident: it aims to be a much more elegant, more sophisticated, less elaborate visual presentation than what came before it. For me, it doesn’t achieve those goals, but the groundwork is clearly there, in raw—perhaps too raw—form. In many ways, it feels very much like starting over again in the way that Mac OS X’s Aqua interface was a new start, over thirteen years ago. In those nascent stages, Aqua was never particularly beautiful, but it did make a point—it was a radically new kind of interface aesthetic that heralded a new approach to software. And the same ideas that informed later, much more successful iterations of the operating system were clearly present even then.

This is true with Yosemite, too. Spend just a bit of time with it, and you can almost picture the iterations to come, when future releases will have fully worked out the visual language and the gestalt of the interface will have cohered to a more advanced state. OS X Balboa and OS X Palisades are going to look great.

In the meantime, though, I find Yosemite lacking in polish, full of awkward decisions and unresolved tensions.

[Muirium]

I agree with him most on the Helvetica thing! Yosemite is a retina native UI. Just like iOS 7 and above. I haven't even tried it on a low res display. But when it is mushed into crude pixels, I hear it's brutal:

http://www.robbert.org/2014/10/the-off- ... se-button/

Of course, the people buying non-retina Macs are exactly the kind who won't notice anyway. But Khoi needs to upgrade to enjoy his beloved Helvetica.

[jacobolus]

What I meant is: I agree that the Helvetica looks especially bad on non-retina screens. However, I also think it’s fairly illegible even on retina screens. Helvetica in general is not designed to make letters look distinct, and it’s quite bad for reading extended text, or reading anything at small point sizes. Helvetica works well for single words at large size (like corporate logos), or in places like posters where visual effect is more important than reading the text. In particular it’s great if you want a design to look corporate.

To be equally readable to something like Frutiger, Myriad, Lucida, &c., Helvetica needs to be set at a substantially larger point size. It’s IMO one of the worst choices for a UI font they could have possibly made. Basically, Windows, Ubuntu, Android, Windows Phone, &c. have made better UI typeface choices than Mac OS or iOS. What is the world coming to?!

[Hypersphere]

I've applied a third-party hack to OS X in order to switch the system font back to Lucida Grande, but it's is annoying to have to do this.

In contrast, I just upgraded my linux system from Linux Mint 13 Xfce to Linux Mint 17 Xfce. The upgrade was painless, and like many linux desktop environments, Xfce gives me complete control over fonts for every place in which they used on the desktop. The defaults look fine, but if I didn't happen to like them, I could change the settings quite easily.

[Muirium]

Sounds to me like you'd be happier over there. Prepare for your liberation!

I can see the attraction for some people in Linux. But I'm gasping like a fish out of water every time I have to touch a terminal or wrap my head around the kind of customisations Linux can do. If Apple had just switched from (perfect) Helvetica Neue to (janky) Lucida Grande and added a load of skeuomorphic cruft instead of destroying it, I'd be much less cosy than I am now, and shuddering at the prospect of finding my home somewhere else. Thankfully that day has not come!

[Hypersphere]

Mu, you have readily embraced writing configuration files for your XT and beam spring. Linux customizations are far easier.

Despite my disappointments over some aspects of Yosemite, I am adapting well, and I have no plans to abandon OS X, which is still my preferred primary system. I use linux for some compute-intensive tasks and as a diversion, and I use Windows when I must.

[jacobolus]

https://medium.com/@tschundeee/osx-yose ... f1b35ccb5e

I wonder why they didn’t choose Comic Sans as new system font. Comic Sans also offers bad readability but matches the candyworld ui colors a bit better then Helvetica Neue. I made a UI mockup using Comic Sans (beautiful, hah?):

[Muirium]

Mu, you have readily embraced writing configuration files for your XT and beam spring. Linux customizations are far easier.

I'm a GUI guy really. Xwhatsit's GUI, especially now it's hit version 0.9, is much more my style than editing config files for Soarer's converter. I just got my 3276 fixed up in time to run with it. Excellently clicky, symmetric, and easy to configure. Beamspring bliss!

You might have noticed that I've hardly touched Hasu's TMK project, despite its universal acclaim. Don't mistake that for disinterest! I've pored through the source, in what limited way I can, and it's definitely too much for me. The simple remaps I wanted to do with his M0110 keyboard converter felt like deep magic as my intuition kept leading me astray when working with it. Soarer's converter and controller are fortunately configured with good defaults for my needs. I've built my customisations slowly on top of them, one step at a time, until I more or less understand what I'm doing. Yet with Xwhatsit's GUI, I'm really at home.

I'm wary about Linux just as I'm wary of working on code myself. Keyboards are a nice constrained field where only so much can go wrong. I used to make a spectacular mess of my PCs before I switched to OS X over a decade ago. Those were hairy times. Occasionally amusing, but surely not productive! Some things take the right kind of mind.

[andrewjoy]

anyone have any experience binding a yosemite mac to an older 10.6 domain ? I know it should work binding to a 10.9 domain

( yes i am upgrading the server and switching to a fresh domain but i need to sort out the shares and the DNS first )

[Daniel Beardsmore]

o_O

[andrewjoy]

ha yeh comic sans is the worst font ever made IMO

[Muirium]

A common misconception. There is another ubiquitous font that is worse…

[BlueBär]

Welp, time to buy a mac.

[Hypersphere]

The new Yosemite calculator is IMO a disaster:

YosemiteCalc.png (35.15 KiB) Viewed 4950 times

It looks like something from Ubuntu that got run over by a cartoon steamroller.

[Daniel Beardsmore]

I find the Windows 8 calculator really irritating. Whatever I want to do, I'm never in the right mode and it always wipes my calculation when switching to the mode I need to be in. Why can't I just have a "gimmeh all the buttonses" mode that just does everything? (At least in the scientific mode I no longer have to keep reminding myself how to do square root using powers: there's a proper square root button at last.)

Does that Mac one do RPN? Those grey buttons at the top look interesting. (Maybe that's why the brackets buttons seem to be disabled.)

[Findecanor]

The new Yosemite calculator is IMO a disaster:

I think it looks like a web page where the stylesheet did not load.

[Daniel Beardsmore]

Here's the real question:

Why is the green pill still there?

[Hypersphere]

RPN is the only mode I will use. My first electronic calculator was an HP that was RPN-only. I wouldn't know what to do with an "equals" sign!

In fact, I still have an HP 11c, and I have the limited edition re-issue of the classic HP 15c. The 15c is available for various OSs in emulation.

[Muirium]

Funny how other people's screenshots seem to be acting up lately. Here's mine.

Screen Shot 2014-10-29 at 12.02.09 am.png (93.41 KiB) Viewed 4938 times

Much better than the old version. Re: RPN, looks like you're in luck Daniel.

Screen Shot 2014-10-29 at 12.04.50 am.png (254.07 KiB) Viewed 4938 times

And as for the green pill, it toggles this.

Screen Shot 2014-10-29 at 12.05.54 am.png (60.56 KiB) Viewed 4938 times

Oh right: Hyper's weird looking small numbers are because he's in RPN mode. Well, I'll grant they fucked that up! Looks like a programmer's hack.

[Hypersphere]

Mu, are you photoshopping your screenshots again?

[jacobolus]

The previous calculator is also pretty bad though, IMO:


Unrelatedly, it’s really stupid how crazy OS X goes with the shadows. They were just perfect in ~10.4/10.5.