OS X Yosemite
A brief first glance into a trancelucent world
OS X Yosemite
Finding myself in mid air, having jumped of a cliff into the great shaky void that is installing the first public OS beta on your primary machine. It’s been a few hours, I’ve peeked inside, felt around, and snuggled in. These are some quick thoughts about some of the new user-interface-parts of the latest operating system from our favourite fruit company.
Hello my petite Yosemite!
The first thing that catches your eyes when entering the ground below Yosemite is this charming little fellow.
You probably find yourself smiling right back at the one of the most charming and hopeful of smiles ever formed. And you know deep deep down that the upcoming inferno of bugs are already forgiven.
Happy and bright,
just like OS X Yosemite.
Everything is shinier and a little cuddlier than before. To put a finger on it, I think the word I’m looking for is ‘petite’. Yes, OS X Yosemite is petite.
Content is the new UI
Moving the transparent experience (and algorithms) from iOS 7, we now find ourselves in a see-through community of little windows and popups.
Transparency in a desktop operating system could have been done in a very tacky way (sorry windows vista), but Yosemite manages to keep a well contained balance of just being just transparent enough in all the right places. This creates a more emerging experience and brings the user closer to the content on the screen. That said, if you are the kind of user that likes to put all the applications in the same desktop space, this might become a cluttered experience. Personally I’ve found a sweet-spot of keeping one app in each space and then multitask like a doer of mothers.
The titlebars
Featuring slightly bolder fonts and a little more flat apperance. The titlebars are now a lot more likable. This is an area which few developers put time and thinking into. If only more apps would handle titlebars as seamlessly as ibooks.
Goodbye Alfred. Hello Spotlight
it’s been a while
It happened to Growl and it’s happening to Alfred. Apple is squeezing the sponge of another app.
Though as far as I can see, spotlight has yet to include system controlling actions, like log out, sleep, empty trash and everything in the Power Pack, which may render our loyal butler still an opportunity to survive.
Safari
Shoo shoo now Chrome!
While this refreshment qualifies to a review of its own I’ll try to make a brief overview.
We are faced with a whole new UI for safari, and a pleasing one at that! Everything runs smoothly and the new trancelucent toolbar makes for a more immersive experience, making it almost invisible when viewing an image.
This, with the improved JavaScript engine and addition of webGL, it is really hard to find an argument for keeping Chrome around.
I have to warn you about the tab overview-view though, the first time I acciedentally triggered it, it almost gave me a heart attack. If you open this with a lot of tabs open you are in for a hell of an animation!
The only thing that troubles me so far is not being able to see the full page url. Just like in iOS Safari, it just shows the domain. Wherever you are at. I guess this is a step towards web-apps and while urls are slowly fading away for the non-developer, it really bothers me as a developer to not be able to quickly glance at where I am at. Now, there might be a toggle for this somewhere, but I couldn’t find it with a brief glance att the preferences panel.
Notification center
Notification center has got a lot more clean, and there’s now place for third party widgets, a view of todays activities (as on iOS), and perhaps most intriguing:
It no longer makes the rest of your operating system fly out six inches to the left.
And this is important.
In Conclusion, TL;DR
While many outside of California will find themselves having a hard time spelling and pronouncing Yosemite right. I find it a solid step forward for the OS X series, and more importantly a better experience for the end user. It’s bright, light, and a delight to use.
There are some sluggishness in some animations, and it frooze once on me, but I’d nail theese down to beta features, for now. Otherwise I have to say OS X Yosemite is one of the most promising beta releases I’ve ever encountered and I’m looking forward for whats to come!
There are lots more to be covered, and I have barely had time to scratch the surface yet. But I would if you have the opportunity to do so, I would really recommend you to give the beta a try.
A short note on ‘dark mode’
I’ve searched through every setting panel a few times now, but I can’t seem to find switch for enabling of the dark mode. It guess it is disabled for now. If you’ve managed to unlock it somehow though, please let me know and I will add a paragraph shortly thereafter!
With ❤
@gopatrik
Anything you want me to give a spin? Just tweet me!
