REVIEW: My First 5 Minutes with OS X Yosemite

Holy Caw! This beast is… SLEEK.

I didn’t think I would like the non-skeumorphic icons. I’m not crazy about them on iOS. Yosemite will probably carry me over that hump.

Right off the bat I was concerned about app compatibility. We’ve all been stung by that with these updates. Yet, here it is 30 minutes in. I’ve launched all my go-to apps and I only have 8 requiring update via Software Update. Yet, they launch fine, docs open, save, reopen. Try THAT Windows!

I’ll run Yosemite for a while on this production machine before I take anything else past Maverick. But, there’s plenty of reason to appreciate the polish Apple has applied to this latest version of OS X.

First impression of the UI is the login screen after installation. That’s a really nice “Hello”. Very subtle. Very beautiful. Very elegant. Very… Jonny Ive (honestly).

Next, and particularly impressive, is Safari. I’ve nearly exclusively moved over to Chrome (and Firefox for one very specific site cpanel). Safari hasn’t factored for a long time in my daily use except on iOS. Th new OS X Safari *may* lure me back across the aisle. Realistically, I doubt that… I have too much configuration invested in Chrome at this point to really seriously a permanent move. Kudos to Apple for getting their browser tight and right though. (fwiw, I still miss RSS)

There are so many fresh new nooks and crannies to explore. I’m genuinely looking forward to this one. Those who know me well, know I just plunge into these updates with a reckless pursuit to see what’s waiting on the other side and know the price for that will (usually) be picking up the broken pieces of busted apps and such. And, usually, that’s apparent within the first thirty minutes. Judging by the stability, ease of migration and lack of core apps misbehaving I have to say right now, barely 10 minutes in this is going to be one of the easiest updates I’ve been through of all the OS X releases. It does make me wonder what Yosemite Server must be like. That hasn’t happened in a long time. Which also makes me wonder about ZFS implementation (or lack of) in Yosemite. More on that later if there’s anything to pass along. A boy can hope 🙂

New Safari Seed Posted

Safari for Mac OS X Leopard Seed 9B4009a (only compatible with the 10.5.2 seed) was posted to the ADC recently (link here). This simply means there’s an update coming to the stage sometime soon. Keep your eyes peeled and your software update pinging for updates. As for details of what’s new… It’s downloading in the background now so there’s not much for me to tell about it. There is a ReadMe file. Pretty sure it’s not OK for me to divulge the details due to developer NDA.

The latest public release version of Safari is 3.0.4. This updater (which contains PPC and a Universal versions) takes it to 3.1.0.

I’m generally lukewarm on Safari. Yes, it’s fast. Yes, it’s nicely integrated into the OS (syncing to .mac and all). IMHO it has some serious limitations in the ‘extensions’ department though (comparatively few exist). I’ve extended FireFox to the point I’m no longer sure what’s stock and what’s not. Anyway, it’s not a slight toward Safari. Truth be told, I’m hopeful the Safari browser will find a way to surge past FireFox as I’ve built quite a bunch of bookmarks on the iPhone which makes for a pain to keep sync’d with FireFox. I’d prefer to consolidate all that stuff (or have an app in the middle arbitrating and unifying the various bits from here and there).

Google Gears For Mac

DO NOT try and install Google Gears with anything OTHER than Firefox (you may even have to specifically ALLOW Firefox to install from Gears.Google.com).

Gears apparently is NOT friendly with Safari, the nightly builds of WebKit, with the new Camino or with Opera.

Figures. Isn’t Dr. Schmidt on Apple’s Board of Directors? Didn’t I hear that somewhere?

Firefox Commercials!?

I just slurped down a Firefoxflix.com video and was kinda shocked to find it was a pretty good animated commercial for Firefox. Cool!