OS X 10.10 Yosemite: All The Little Things

[Takuro]

Here's the official thread for the MacRumors Front Page News for the DP4 release:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1756452/

The initial reception to iTunes 12 seems mixed, but mainly negative so far. I really hope it's just an experimental design exercise and not the final product. Maybe something to get "out the door" until the fall unveiling when iPhone 6 launches?

Changes in iTunes 12

• New "now playing" area, which spans the entire height of the titlebar. Album artwork is scaled to span this entire height as well.
• New button on the toolbar to access your iTunes account.
• The sidebar has been removed (WHY APPLE???) and can no longer be enabled from the "view" menu. However, the sidebar suddenly returns in "playlist" and "device" tabs as well as in a few other places, making for a weird UI inconsistency. (Personally, I don't get this. It's sort of like a half-assed way of admitting the sidebar was useful — so why disable it in the first place?)
• New buttons near the upper left area of the window replace the previous selector-style downtown for accessing "Music," "Movies," etc. The "…" button shows a list of content that you've hidden (e.g.: "iTunes U".)
• The iTunes Store no longer gets its own standalone section. Instead, you access the store from each respective content view ("Music," "Movies," etc.)
• The "view" button that toggles between album view, song view, etc has been replaced with a text drop-down menu. However, in playlist view, it's still shown as a "view" button. Again, another weird inconsistency.

I know this is an iTunes beta, but it's definitely not headed in the right direction. All they've essentially done is re-theme the existing iTunes 11 UI and tweak things ever-so-slightly to make it much harder to navigate through your content. They aren't even incorporating any of Yosemite's transparency effects — neither for the sidebar, nor for the titlebar when scrolling.So much missed opportunity.

 

[cclloyd]

Either my computer was acting slow or it has a slower/smoother screen fade-in from sleep in DP4.

 

[Killa Aaron]

New get info window for iTunes 12.

 

[ErikGrim]

[*]The sidebar has been removed (WHY APPLE???) and can no longer be enabled from the "view" menu. However, the sidebar suddenly returns in "playlist" and "device" tabs as well as in a few other places, making for a weird UI inconsistency.

WTH Apple?

 

[WhackyNinja]

WTH Apple?

Sidebar removed, Apple....why??????

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New get info window for iTunes 12.
Image

Sky Full Of Stars, nice choice of music

 

[Hezzaa]

This is the update list

Well that's Yosemite on your screen shots at least.

 

[576316]

Sidebar removed, Apple....why??????

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Sky Full Of Stars, nice choice of music

Nice choice of avatar.

 

[ErikGrim]

Not sure why everyone is panicking. My main iTunes view seems wholly untouched. Phew.

 

[ErikGrim]

On further inspection it seems that Get Info dialog is worse than the previous one. Genre is now a drop down box instead of a text field. Can't type + autocomplete like before. Much worse.

Tracks no longer seem to stop while editing its ID tags (a problem with massive libraries), but I did get it to beach ball for a bit when changing the name.

Window resizing seems much smoother. The bug where you could only click within the previous window size boundaries in full screen has been fixed.

No speed increase in using AppleScript, but happy to report my most used scripts still work. (Some broke in 11.0).

 

[shanson27]

Redesigned weather in the control center with weather moisture

 

[xmichaelp]

New get info window for iTunes 12.
Image

Thanks I didn't see this. This is gorgeous.

I don't get the hate, itunes 12 looks amazing. It's just the lack of transparency that bugs me.

Can someone explain to me what they mean by sidebar?

 

[rbfshr]

Is anybody having problems dragging items to an Open dialog? For example, if I am adding an attachment, I usually find it quicker if the folder or Desktop is open to just drag it from the location to the dialog and it would just take me to that file but now it seems to move the file to the folder in the dialog.

 

[Killa Aaron]

On further inspection it seems that Get Info dialog is worse than the previous one. Genre is now a drop down box instead of a text field. Can't type + autocomplete like before. Much worse.

Tracks no longer seem to stop while editing its ID tags (a problem with massive libraries), but I did get it to beach ball for a bit when changing the name.

Window resizing seems much smoother. The bug where you could only click within the previous window size boundaries in full screen has been fixed.

No speed increase in using AppleScript, but happy to report my most used scripts still work. (Some broke in 11.0).

Not true, clicking on the text allows for text editing just as before.

 

[Takuro]

Not sure why everyone is panicking. My main iTunes view seems wholly untouched. Phew.

You're in the "playlist" view. The bottom line is that the sidebar should not randomly reappear only in certain content views. Now it takes 2 or more clicks to do what 1 click used to do when the sidebar could be persistently enabled. For example, if I want to play music from a particular playlist, I now have to click the playlist view, then select the playlist. Before, everything was integrated into one sidebar.

I really don't get why Apple has a penchant to make this sort of change, which first cropped up in iTunes 11 but was override-able. Finder has a sidebar and so do many other apps — why can iTunes not?

 

[PsykX]

On further inspection it seems that Get Info dialog is worse than the previous one. Genre is now a drop down box instead of a text field. Can't type + autocomplete like before. Much worse.

Did you know you could type after you pulled down a Dropdown menu in OS X ? It will bring you to the first result that starts with what you typed.

I love this new Get Info window, it's a little surprise for me because I thought we would be stuck with it until 2020.

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What I hate the most is those new icons on the top left of the application. Apple has started this new trend in iOS 7, ported it to Yosemite, to Xcode 6, now to iTunes 12, ughhh these are UGLY ! But while we're at it, the dropdown menu at the top right should at least be represented as a series of icons instead of a dropdown menu... if you're going for bad choices at least go with the consistency.

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Trafic light buttons are not vertically aligned and integrated in the toolbar in Yosemite. Another UI inconsistency. I just filed them a bug report about it, maybe they'll understand.

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My name appearing between the search bar and the name of the song in the toolbar is a little awkward...

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Other than that, my setup remains pretty much unchanged too, and I haven't modded iTunes or anything... What I'm wondering is why this sidebar isn't translucent in Yosemite like all the others... yet another UI inconsistency.

 

[ps3zocker]

My guess is that they can't take advantage of the new APIs because it's still a carbon app. That's why they can't use translucency and blurring or native scrollbars (they have a different behavior when you compare them to the system scrollbars)

 

[Simplicated]

Other than that, my setup remains pretty much unchanged too, and I haven't modded iTunes or anything... What I'm wondering is why this sidebar isn't translucent in Yosemite like all the others... yet another UI inconsistency.

Because it is still written in Carbon. You'd think they'd actually spend some time creating a Cocoa iTunes to match a major OS redesign... But they didn't.

 

[Shawzborne]

does anyone else have issues while trying to search the app store on itunes 12? it wont search for me

 

[PsykX]

Because it is still written in Carbon. You'd think they'd actually spend some time creating a Cocoa iTunes to match a major OS redesign... But they didn't.

No. It's in Cocoa since 10.4, but yes it did have Carbon underpinnings at that time. I have no clue about version 11, let alone version 12.

It could have been a groundbreaking news if iTunes 12 was to be coded entirely in Swift though...

 

[lunarworks]

No. It's in Cocoa since 10.4, but yes it did have Carbon underpinnings at that time. I have no clue about version 11, let alone version 12.

It could have been a groundbreaking news if iTunes 12 was to be coded entirely in Swift though...

It's unlikely to get a complete rewrite for one specific reason: Windows.

They have to match, feature for feature, so the Windows version is basically the Mac version with a compatibility wrapper around it. (Or something.)

 

[mindlessmissy]

Window Position ...

Looks like iTunes 12 beta does NOT like staying put when it comes to window positioning ... (may just be me )

I like mine kissing the Menu bar but it keeps shifting after every reopen ...

ps. Looks like it's still theme-able ...

 

[Intelligent]

New get info window for iTunes 12.
Image

Looks better than i imagined

 

[LiterallySimon]

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[MartinAppleGuy]

Looks like iTunes 12 beta does NOT like staying put when it comes to window positioning ... (may just be me )

I like mine kissing the Menu bar but it keeps shifting after every reopen ...

ps. Looks like it's still theme-able ...

And Windows users say OS X is not theme-able. I'd say that Windows is more locked down than OS X if you know what you are doing. Just one of many (many) things Windows users say but have absolutely no idea what they are on about.

 

[Takuro]

I have two iTunes accounts (my main account and the very old one I used to buy songs with before I subscribed to .Mac and switched to that ID). Now I use family sharing with those two accounts which works fine except for a few songs that I bought when DRM was still implemented. These are listed in the Purchased section but have never been upgraded to non-DRM files by Apple. (Probably because they were pulled from the store before DRM was dropped.) So I can re-download these songs with my newer main account via family sharing but they won't play. My Mac is authorised to play content from both accounts but it's no use. Anyone else with that problem?