OS-X Yosemite

Well, I succombed to my stupid side with Apple. After installing OS-X Mavericks, 10.9.0, shortly after its release and found it had persistent problems through 10.9.2 and even resident in 10.9.5, I installed OS-X Yosemite, 10.10.0, yesterday. And what prey tell did I learn?

Of course beside the obvious stupiditly installing the initial version of OS-X's IOS for Desktop computer, which I learned the licensed and public beta testers cheered, I have no doubt there are a lot of good thing under the hood of it which makes it better.

But it's clear Apple is making Yosemite for two things. The first is to expand the new iCloud Drive, formerly iCloud for all Maverick users, for everything Apple and hopefuly everything user, as long as the user uses it, which I don't very much (still have 99% of my free space available).

The second is the graphic user interface (GUI) for the Desktop, Apple applications and other stuff you use on the computer, a late 2010 Mac Pro in my case (sorry, no plans yet to move to a new Pro for another 2-3 years when Apple stops supporting them).

The interface is a major change from Mavericks, which I thought was worse that Lion, but then Yosemite is even worse as everything uses flat, 2D views which are very much almost cartoonish looking, like IOS where Apple asked the local elementary school art students to design it.

Yeah, I hate it, from the color of the dock, which mimics the backgroundy you can't change except to the dark mode or the transparency to gray, and the flatness of the icons with the little dots for indicators the app is open.

All the windows are like someone put a translucent screen over them so they're faded and you have to squnit to see what's there. And who thought of the default choices for the folder colors? They had to be on something. I liked the colors and now the mismatch with the folders I've created.

What's worse is that if you change the color or other options in the finder windows, you have to find how to do it globally (haven't found it yet) or by folder, like folks are going to do that. What's wrong with just good ole' plain colors?

Ok, enough there. On to other stuff. First, the installation didn't have any major problems, some small one, Google searches found answers for, but after getting it running I rebooted and it didn't, reboot taht is, where all I got was a black screen.

I had to power it down and back up and then after it booted and was running rebooted again for a clean restart and everything seemed ok, until the Time machine backup didn't start and I had to manually relink the HD. It's running again but uses a lot of GByte's for file cache when it runs.

Second, Safari is another step backward for Apple. Really, they changed somethings you can't control  which seems really dorky since it's supposed to be "user-friendly". I found the font size for the edit bookmarks so large it's hard to move links between folders as the list goes well below the bottom and you have to hold it to scroll where you want to put it.

Apple should give users some control of that font size. It was perfect for me under Safari 7, but apparently big fonts is now the order of the day for this, but all the other fonts are small(er). Go figure their thinking.

And why get rid of the title bar? I like it, it's part of what people code into their header html code so people know what Website they're visiting. Why not give users the option to view or hide it?  And what happened to the "new tab" button"? I like it because it was handy. I hope someone creates an extension for it.

What you will notice the biggest change is iTunes. First books are gone from the iTunes store, they're in iBooks now, which I assume is liked to iTunes for your devices (only have one iBook because the author only offered it there).

Apple continues their really dumb idea of not allowing users to load all the album artwork when you open iTunes and keep it in active memory until you close it. You have to scroll to get all the artwork loaded and then rescroll regularly to keep it in active memory because it's moved to inactive memory and lost for quick display until you scroll again.

They had this with iTunes 10, dropped it in iTunes 11 and now 12. It's very irritating to those who look for albums by their cover to wait for the artwork to load or reload. Apple argue memory isn't the problem except for laptops but then pull this trick to save memory. Make it a user option or menu choice.

I could spend a lot on how different iTunes is with Yosemite, and everyone has their own opinion, but at best to me, you have to spend time and get used to it as you can't change it, whether it sucks or not, it's there, get used  to it.

This is just the start of my walk through. I have some other issues to check, like the bluetooth which doesn't work with the iPhone and rarely works with the iPad, and there I'm getting a list of small things there was no reason to change but they did.

In short Apple has forgotten change for the sake of change isn't always good, and with Yosemite, it's worse, from the cartoonish IOS look for a desktop computer (really Apple?) to the faded look of the application windows, along with the stuff they removed people liked.