OS X Yosemite | Hacker News Reader

OS X Yosemite

apple.com

237 pointssc90103 comments

I remember just how buggy Yosemite was when DP 1 was released. But it's come a long way, the third GM candidate for Yosemite is really stable, maybe one of the most stable OS X .0 release. It even has less lag for animations like for Mission Control for retina displays so maybe they finally figured out how to handle a Retina display.

The one thing I'm not a fan of is the horrible, and absolutely terrible animation to take windows fullscreen. It takes a proper 2 seconds for a window to go full screen. I just can't see the reason behind this. At least provide an option to disable this animation or provide a terminal command to speed it up like the mission control animations.

Handoff is one feature I use more than I thought I would. It still feels like a novelty but I'm glad it's there. I use it most to continue my emails on my Mac from the iPhone.

Airdrop on both iOS and the Mac is simply amazing. Now I don't have to wait for Photostream to sync between the two devices.

And the little things like Javascript for automation, built in actions for batch renaming and encoding media files inside the right click contextual menu, the dark mode all add up.

I'm also looking forward to Siracusa's multi-page review about Yosemite. He hasn't been a fan of transparency, so it will be interesting to hear his thoughts on it. I'm not a fan of it either but I like the transparency used in Yosemite. It's not as distracting and the dark theme really helps with that.

Mountain Lion was crashing on my Retina MacBook Pro about every day, since I upgraded to Yosemite it hasn't crashed once. Only a single data point, but it appears to be a really stable release now.

I still have the impression that the GPU is struggling with the retina display though, I was just using a 4 year old MacBook Air and the display animations were smoother on it than on my rMBP. I do have it scaled up to the max resolution though, I think that makes the performance worse as the scaling is more complex.

I have it set to the max too. It still stutters here and there, but definitely not as much as Mavericks did.

That's why I feel like upgrading right now, the handling of graphics is terrible on Mavericks.

DP 1 was terrible. Preview would crash so often, folder icons werent visible on retina displays, many other random crashes. I really can't believe they fixed so much in so little time.

I go between hating transparency and loving transparency. The "Reduce Transparency" option in Universal Access is useful at times.

Just curious, why would you love transparency? IMO it’s distracting at best and crashy at worst.

I really dislike the fullscreen behavior in Yosemite, not only for the animation (as you mention), but also because I feel like the average user is going to want a "maximize" button more often than a "fullscreen" button.

Besides, most sites that have content that lends itself to fullscreen mode (e.g. YouTube) allow you to enter fullscreen mode through the site, so being able to enter through the browser window is not typically necessary.

At work, I use multiple displays, and it's really not seamless when you have one display in fullscreen mode and another not. Imagine having three monitors side-by-side, with the middle in fullscreen mode, and trying to drag a window from Display 1 to Display 3. Maybe this is fixed by now, but in beta, Yosemite sometimes let the fullscreen mode "overrule" the window dragging, so you couldn't see it on Display 2. I know, first world problems, but it's jarring nonetheless.

What's especially frustrating is that there doesn't seem to be a built-in "maximize" function anywhere! The closest I've come to in Chrome is Window > Zoom, but there's not even a keyboard shortcut for that.

Option-clicking will do maximize instead of full screen.

That seems to only work some of the time. It doesn't work for me in Chrome, at least in the beta.

I don't know why but for me it seemed like it works on second attempt but then consistently. E.g.: first option-click still goes into fullscreen, go back to windowed, try again and it maximizes. Don't ask me why.

Double click the tip of the window and it will maximise.

This is a great tip, and much easier to remember than option-clicking the green button!

Thanks!

You should be able to hold option and click the fullscreen traffic light to maximize, but I agree that it should be the other way around. It is rather ridiculous to take a user out of their interface if they forget to hold the option key.

The other major issue is that fullscreen actually renders my second monitor completely useless. It just fills up with grey. Why would anyone want that to happen? If I didn't want a second monitor I could turn it off.

I think you can change the behavior of your second issue. In System Preferences -> Mission Control if 'Displays have separate Spaces' is checked then only the one monitor should go fullscreen leaving the other to use normally.. I have it unchecked for a specific reason, but I remember before unchecking it that fullscreen was per monitor, and now it treats all monitors as one basically. I'm too lazy to log out and back in to make sure I'm right though :), give it a shot

Thanks, I'll give it a try when I switch over to my Yosemite partition.

FWIW- This was introduced in Mavericks. Easily the best feature in my book :)

The full-screen animation has been around since 10.7 or so and it is absolutely frustrating due to how jerky it looks. Compare this with say, Exposé or switching Spaces. Both are pleasant, smooth animations.

I've come to have a subconscious association of "full screen button" == "slow painful animation" and essentially avoid this feature just as I avoid touching fire.

This may be device specific. On my 5 year old iMac full screen is smooth enough I can't detect its individual frames. It takes about one second.

Edit: Shooting it at 240fps in video and counting frames confirms 60fps animation.

I think the slow full-screen animation is intentional. It's easy to trigger by accident, but getting out of full-screen mode isn't so easy or obvious. I think they want people to really see what's happening.

try shift+enter on a terminal.

Siracusa's review is up here: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/10/os-x-10-10/

You say it is stable; would you say it is...rock solid?

Heh. Their "Upgrade Now" button:

"The item you've requested is not currently available in the U.S. store."

Same with the UK store.

Same everywhere.

Same for Indian users!

Same for Pakistani users!

Same for French users.

Same for Planetary Defense Force 8 users!

Same in planet Xii of sector 8 of the 4th galaxial quadrant.

I'm on planet Xii of sector 8 of the 4th galaxial quadrant, and it's working fine.

Germany confirms.

Same in Israel.

Same in India as well.

Really? I'm in Belgium and with a Portuguese account, a combination that usually doesn't get me too far, and it's downloading right now.

I'm in the US - I am able to download now as well.

Same for Germany. Why wouldn't they just update the website now, three hours later? This is kind of ridiculous.

I'm from Mexico City. I thought that it was just that my Apple Id was only attached to the Mexican store, so I didn't had access. So, I was struggling for around an hour to change for my Apple Id to be one from the US and then I realize that the problem is the same regardless of the country. I lost my time and my previous purchases. FAIL.

Well, that was a) dumb and b) likely something Apple support can fix if you're unable to just switch back.

Same in Canada

It's probably a CDN thing… the files have to propagate, which I'm guessing is happening as quickly as possible.

For those of you who were a fan of customizing the colors of message bubbles in Messages.app and don't like that Apple removed this ability as part of the iOSification of Yosemite, there's an app for that: https://github.com/kethinov/BubblePainter

I made this during the developer previews because I don't like the default puke green for most of my IM conversations. Hope this helps some people. Source code also available.

If I upgrade, should I expect some of my dev tools to break? Homebrew stuff or eclipse etc... I bought this mac with mavericks so I don't know what to expect.

What about iTerm and my bash/zsh configs?

Short answer is yes. Pretty much every upgrade breaks everything that depends on XCode Command Line Utilities because xcode and the command line utils get uninstalled :\

Wait, so I need to reinstall XCode after an upgrade?

You don't need to reinstall the command line tools as long as Xcode is on the disk. It'll just redirect to them.

I can confirm that Homebrew and iTerm work fine. Your shell configs should be fine as well (unless you've made changes to /etc/bashrc, which gets overwritten).

As I was using the beta I just rsynced my 10.9 homebrew install. Never had any issues with that strategy.

From my experience everything with eclipse and iTerm work well. Don't have too much custom configs going on though.

Ultimately, you're going to have to search the announcements/issues for any projects that are really important. The good news is that because Yosemite has been available as an open beta many bits of software have been patched to work with it as technical and non-technical people have been reporting bugs.

    brew list | xargs brew home

Wasn't sure what that was going to do, now I have 40 tabs open. lol

Here is an up-to-date list of broken Homebrew formulas:

https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/issues/29988

Many more were previously broken but have been fixed given the time that the Developer and Beta-builds of Yosemite have been out.

Some minor hassles, most will work when updating packages. You'd probably have to reinstall macports though, if you're using that (don't know about brew).

I can recommend a clean install though. I just did that myself on the beta, and nothing is nicer than knowing that everything works so far (of tools installed).

If you're up for it, I can recommend http://lapwinglabs.com/blog/hacker-guide-to-setting-up-your-....

If you use fuse, you will have issues. Apple doesn't allow any unsigned kernel modules in Yosemite, and a developer certificate can't sign kernel modules. (You need need to apply to Apple for special permission.) There is a boot argument to turn this permissions checking off completely.

There were some issues in the beta with large amounts of stuff in /usr/local (I think Apple is building a new /usr tree and copying stuff over very slowly.) I don't know if it was resolved in GM3, but with Mavericks -> GM2, the last "about a minute remaining" took five hours.

For my laptop, I'm going to move /usr/local aside before I do the Mavericks -> Yosemite upgrade and move it back afterwards. (The installer doesn't seem to mess with /opt.)

It took out my java 1.6. Java 1.7 was intact, but I was surprised to find that the info.plist in (my copy of) IntelliJ says it requires Java 1.6.

I had to re-link some perl directories to get git-svn working again, I forget the details.

If you're dual booting, Mavericks will rewrite the spotlight index on your Yosemite volume, if it sees it.

I don't use zsh, iTerm works fine for me.

I can confirm that the "one minute remaining" problem still exists. It's moving things back into /usr/local. You would think moving files would be faster than this.

I've been using Homebrew throughout the Yosemite beta test period and it's been working fine. Yes, there are some formulas that need to be updated, but now that Yosemite has been released, I expect those will updated shortly.

Also, Apple has been updating Xcode and the command line tools all along, so just getting the latest versions should be all you need to do for developer happiness on Yosemite.

I've been running Yosemite for a few weeks and Eclipse has been running fine (I do limited dev with it), I haven't run into any Brew package issues, etc. I don't have a very exotic setup though.

You can check user-sourced app compatibility at http://roaringapps.com

well brew itself requires a patch (since ruby 1.8 is no longer included by default in the system apps), but using the default ruby has brought no ill effects yet...

If I had to choose again I would have waited at least until brew updated.

I've come to prefer the look of it compared to Mavericks on my non-retina desktop display, but only slightly; and when I switch back to Mavericks there are things that are nicer about it. But on my retina MacBook display, wow, there's just no comparison: Yosemite looks so good. Beautiful.

As far as features: I've been wishing for the Continuity and Handoff stuff for years. When my computer's running Mavericks it now feels isolated, like a mini version of how it feels to use a computer that's not connected to the Internet. If you're not also invested in iPhones and iPads, that won't be the case, of course.

I know there's literally no hope for it, but I really do wish they could look past their differences and enable air-drop between android and iOS.

Can you even use AirDrop between iOS and OS X yet?

Yes you can with both iOS 8 and Yosemite. It works quite well.

This would require AirDrop to be an open standard. I would be very happy if Apple started opening their standards. AirDrop, iMessage, Facetime, etc. would be much more useful as cross-platform standards.

I might be talking out my arse here but wasn't FaceTime initially touted as being released with a view to heading towards being an open standard?

Steve Jobs stated that in a Keynote, but it wasn't planned. He just sort of decided on the spur of the moment (or so I hear). As it turned out FaceTime infringed patents Apple did not control and it all turned into a mess.

I'd love to hear what happened at the first FaceTime meeting after the announcement.

Yes, which is one of the reasons it sucks that Apple isn't doing it.

When will it be available? It is saying Item is not available

Usually they do a rolling release over the course of the day. So it will probably be available by the afternoon and definitely be the evening (west-coast time).

If you have homebrew, node/npm, etc. installed that puts files in /usr/local make sure you reserve hours (yes hours) for the install to complete. It will sit at "Less than a minute remaining" for potentially hours if you have a lot of files in /usr/local since it has to copy it all back apparently.

Hitting cmd-L will show you the install log which shows you that it is actually still doing something while it sits there for a long time with no apparent change.

It looks like its going to take all night stuck at "3 minutes remaining" because my MacTeX install of TeXlive has over 135,000 files and is somewhere close to 4GB. It would have been much faster to blow away all of my homebrew installs, emacs, qt, and especially TeX and reinstall after the upgrade.

I does eventually finish. I'm typing this on my desktop running Yosemite, which took a long long time because of /usr/local, but my laptop is still working on the install. I believe it's been eight hours! (And both have SSD's)

Or do something like this:

   $ mkdir ~/local
   $ sudo mv /usr/local/* ~/local
   (install Yosemite)
   $ sudo mv ~/local/* /usr/local

Yosemite has nothing in /usr/local, so you don't have to worry that you'll stomp on anything it installs when you move your /usr/local stuff back.

That worked fine for me. Only a few minutes at "Less than a minute" (unlike 2 hours on the previous attempt, before I knew about this problem and so gave up and restored from Time Machine).

They still have serious issues to fix. For example try this sample app from Apple https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/samplecode/LayerBack.... 10.10 uses 4 times the CPU compared to 10.9.

Continuity/Handoff requires Bluetooth LE, so a bunch of older devices would not support it.

Chart here: http://www.macrumors.com/2014/06/17/yosemite-handoff-bluetoo...

This is a little off topic, but I am still unhappy that Apple does not have a simple Android app that would allow me to play the iTunes music I have purchased on all of my devices. I manually keep iTunes music in sync with Amazon cloud which is a nuisance. If Apple does not provide a solution soon, I am canceling my $25/year iTunes Match service and just use Amazon music cloud since they have players for all platforms.

On topic: I have been using Yosemite since the first beta, and it is a nice upgrade. I use a 3 year old MacBook Air, and on a non-retina display everything still looks good. Unlike other commenters, I like the Spotlight changes. I also like the better intro with iOS 8 devices.

I have Yosemite GM-3 installed... when I go to the app store, it says "You already have Yosemite installed" - Should I care or try to reinstall from the "final" installer?

Also, my biggest frustration has been the workflow change of the "maximize" button to it's new role as full-screen button. I wish there was at least a config option to switch it back. I'm fine with adding it as an option, but completely breaking the workflow seems unnecessary IMHO. I guess that's why I use "Spectacles" app for window placement keyboard shortcuts.

Holding the Option button reveals the old functionality instead of fullscreen when hovering over window controls.

Wicked psyched about the in-window search for terminal. Finally. I like having terminal full screen but it screws up the popup box search.

In case you haven't got the upgrade yet, here's the direct link: https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftw...

I installed the developer betas - I'm updated to the most recent. Is the release today different and more stable, and is there a way I can switch to today's release?

Any more info released about the Yosemite hypervisor?

https://communities.vmware.com/thread/486412

As I have no experience with OS X upgrades, does anyone have advice about upgrading versus doing a clean install? Its a rMBP 13 from late 2013

I experienced no problems with earlier major OS X updates on my MBP, so personally I'd go down the update route. Nevertheless, it's a good idea to have Time Machine backups at hand.

Upgrading works surprisingly good. I never ran into any issues if I recall correctly. For me however, this one is going to be a clean install. I do them every 2-3 releases.

Upgrade. I've only ever done a fresh install of OS X once whereas on Windows upgrade was for crazy people. I actually upgraded last year from the first beta to the official release and there were zero issues. As always, backup first.

Depends on which category you fit into.

You use dev tools and stuff like homebrew/macports a lot: fresh install is a lot nicer.

You don't use the above that much: Upgrade is fine.

As for the packages, I had a lot of different packages that were built for Mavericks, and needed updating, and would constantly bump into something new that needed something reinstalled etc. Various reasons for this, like Apple moving around system utilities and upgrading various things.

EDIT: Just to be clear, all is solvable with the upgrade. It's just a bit cleaner with a, well, clean install ;)

I personally always go for a fresh install. I just rysnc my home dir away and copy it back. The rest is mostly setup in ansible land now so I don't really lose much by installing fresh.

Strange, I guess I'm an outlier but I always do clean installs for a new OS.

I always do a fresh install. I save backup of my $HOME, but don't restore it (I copy what I need when I need). It's perfect time for getting rid of old unused applications, projects, etc. But it takes time and patience.

I am old school. Across major versions, I back up my files, create the install media, and clean install from that.

By the way, Yosemite runs really well on my MBA. The only thing that bugs me is the hideously ugly folder icons.

I have Yosemite GM-3 installed, and when I go to the app store, it says "You already have Yosemite installed".

Has anyone run through an upgrade from Mavericks with FileVault enabled? What was your experience? Any trouble?

Horrible fonts and colors just as iphone has... :(

Link is working now. Download away.

Oh si

I joined the beta at "2" and it's been incredibly stable on both of my Macbook Air's. Excited for the final refined release.

It's very stable for me too, but it still has some really weird bugs. For example - here's how the "iMac with Retina" page displays for me in Safari: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3ajXezmKDo#t=12

Same here, MBA 13" (Mid 2011)

That's the exact same model I have...

I'm disappointed how much emphasis we hear about the interface. I don't think design is a substitute for engineering.

Even the new features seemed to be focused on iOS.

It makes me sad that with all these wonderful changes, Apple still can manage something as basic as differentiating scroll behavior on a mouse from behavior on a touchpad...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com