Things you like vs things you don't like in Yosemite

[pickaxe]

Rather than post in one of the bandwagon "it's hideous!/it's incredible!" threads, I thought we could have some nice discussion about things you personally like or dislike in 10.10.

After using it for several weeks now... I mostly like it.

Things I like in Yosemite:
- The toolbar icon style is wonderful. I love it! The "square lens" effect in toolbars (such as the Safari address bar or iTunes 12's currently-playing song is similarly beautiful and functional.
- Title bars getting shrunk down. I've been wanting a unified no titlebar look since forever.
- Graphite now looks extremely nice.
- Overall lack of gloss makes much of the interface look nice and minimal.

Things I honestly don't like after using this for several weeks:
- Helvetica Neue. I don't like it even on high resolution displays. It's just no good at small font sizes.
- The paper texture in Notes and Reminders. Absolutely terible.
- About a third of the new Dock icons, and many of the worst offenders are some of my most used apps (Reminders, Calendar, Safari).
- Inconsistency in app titlebar usage. Want to get rid of title bars? Do it! But do it consistently.
- Some grey-on-white (like in Stacks) that is difficult to read.
- A lot of the transparency is pretty tasteless and distracting. Menu Bar transparency especially, good thing there's a setting to turn that specific part off.
- Various lag/UI popup issues regarding transparency performance, like when opening the Safari sidebar (popup) or activating Mission Control (lag).
- Some of the gradients look like crap. For example, checkboxes and comboboxes look ten times better with "Increase Contrast" enabled because they have that tacky gradient on.
- Green menu bar charging battery icon, language flags are still colored. Why?

 

[lupedelupe]

Like
The overall feel. I like flat, and simplicity. It may feel a little strange now, but like iOS 7 made anything before that look ancient I feel this will too.
I like the new system font ... but prefer the old one (in this context).
Spotlight (lags a little though).
Compatibility (so far, so good).
That I-feel-at-home-everything-is-familiar snugness of a Mac.
The Trash icon.
Calendar looks great.

Don't like
The translucency is not all that translucent.
My name on the Menu Bar is not as sharp as other items are (odd?).
Not nuts about the Favourites drop-down in Safari, or the small and indistinct tabs.
Not mad about the Dock. It needs something.
My mouse is too slow.

 

[mbinaustin]

icon dock is NOT transparent

Any workaround for this?

 

[chown33]

... language flags are still colored. Why?

Because without color, some flags for very different languages would appear nearly identical.

Some flag designs that fall under this are ones with three vertical "bars" (e.g. French, Irish , Italian) or three horizontal "bars" (e.g. Dutch, Hungarian, Russian). There may be others; I didn't go through every flag.

It's easy to see the effect removing color would have. Just turn on "Use grayscale" in System Preferences, with those languages present in the language selector menu.

Note the problem comes in glancing at the menubar to determine what the current language is. When the menu is pulled down, each item has a text label to eliminate ambiguity. It's the "What is it now?" question that's hard to answer without color, or by clicking on the menu to see where the checkmark is.


The above assumes I've understood your question correctly. If I misinterpreted what you were asking, then feel free to ignore me.

 

[mrplt]

What I Liked:
The New Interface (dock, window frames etc.)
New Spotlight
The green button on the bar actually makes the app full-screen
The New Notification bar
I don't know if it was there before, but I loved the "show desktop" option in the touchpad gestures.

What I didn't like:

Dashboard is still old, i'm using it for the world clocks, weather forecast and the sticky notes. (I don't need it anymore as the new notification center has the weather and world clock widgets)
Command+W or Q does not close Spotlight
Wish Spotlight answered the questions I typed - like Siri.
Can't change the icon of the "user" folder. Was able to change it on Mavericks
The graphics of the interface itself are glitchy.

 

[grahamperrin]

… Inconsistency in app titlebar usage. Want to get rid of title bars? Do it! But do it consistently. …

I drew attention to some of the inconsistencies within broader problem reports about abandonment of title bars.

I'd like Apple to remove title bars from all apps, for just one seed and for just one purpose: for a significant proportion of beta testers to realise the disorientation that can occur when titles are hidden.

Consider this. If you were designing an app, for any platform, from the ground up: would you intentionally hide – from all users – information that some users treat as critical?

Forcing this reduced functionality upon all users of an OS would be illogical.

If it proves to a transient experiment, to be something that's not forced within a release, then I'm fairly amazed that the experiment has lasted so long. It's not logical for all users.

 

[pickaxe]

Because without color, some flags for very different languages would appear nearly identical. [...]

Okay, I completely agree. Oops.

I guess I would prefer text instead of a flag though, like in Windows. The flags just look kind of crappy and gaudy.

I'd like Apple to remove title bars from all apps, for just one seed and for just one purpose: for a significant proportion of beta testers to realise the disorientation that can occur when titles are hidden.

Good luck with that, most beta testers are consumers, and not power user consumers either.

Consider this. If you were designing an app, for any platform, from the ground up: would you intentionally hide – from all users – information that some users treat as critical?

If you are referring to the actual titlebar, aka "the name of this current window", then I definitely think these should stay for some apps. For example, I'm a huge fan of this thing and really don't want to see it go. But for some apps such as Preview, it can be possible to have it side by side with the other window controls instead of having two rows. For some apps (like the TextEdit example that I've just linked to) doing that would look too crowded, so it would definitely take some time with the drawing board to implement it everywhere.

Anyway, yeah I agree that just removing titlebars in places where it would harm usability is a horrible idea.

 

[grahamperrin]

Cross reference

Thanks. Spun off from this topic and others:

The value of addresses/locations/paths/URLs in Safari, and of title bars in general

 

[Simplicated]

Things I like:
- Dark mode
- A completely refreshed interface is a breath of fresh air
- Today view in Notification Center
- Safari 8 is absolutely amazing (I've been a longtime Safari user and I occasionally used Chrome, but there's no way I'm installing Chrome now)
- New Spotlight makes launching apps a breeze, and is as good as Alfred

Things I don't like:
- The folder icon is way too bright and steals attention from other files
- They went overboard with title bar elimination: In document-based apps like Xcode, the titlebar should always be present to indicate exactly what file is being worked on, and show a file proxy icon.
- They went overboard with the flatness craze and they have removed what made OS X fun and amazing: puff of smoke effect when dragging an item off the Dock, and the star effect in Time Machine, which wowed every person I demoed to.

 

[mkeeley]

Like: The general look, not sure it's really better but overall not worse.

Don't like: the trash icon, doesn't work with light backgrounds, pretty obvious and don't know how they didn't notice considering how long they apparently spent on it.

Folder icons colour needs toning down.

Safari icon is hideous, generally dislike flat icons compared to the old ones.

Dark mode is a bit pointless at the moment, hope they actually finish it.

Don't really see the point of the transparency, certainly not as "cool" as they seem to think it is.

Green battery icon in the menu bar sticks out like a sore thumb.

 

[isaiahmontoya]

Notes App Texture

Is there a way to remove the paper texture in Notes for Yosemite?

I've been on a witch hunt for it, but I've had no luck.

 

[davidlv]

icon dock is NOT transparent. Any workaround for this?

cDock on SourceForge http://sourceforge.net/projects/cdock/

 

[DisplacedMic]

I love the new spotlight
pressing cmd-space and typing the info i need rules even more than it did before!

i hate the Mail program now

 

[afsnyder]

Things I like:
-The new icons/interface generally
-Airdrop compatibility
-Text message forwarding
-Dark mode

Things I don't like:
-UI lag (my laptop runs windows 8 super smooth... I'm sure the next release will focus on performance)
-Notification center loads after you open rather than before meaning scrolling in it before its loaded kinda is weird and uncomfortable...
-Animations are the same as before, was expecting more easing like with iOS 7 redesign

 

[thejadedmonkey]

Okay. I'll play.

I like the bright icons and new old dock of Yosemite. I also like the dark mode.

I don't like Finder, the finder icon, or the transparency everywhere. Safari is hideous and I can't stand looking at it. I also dislike how terribly buggy it is, and how the buttons aren't buttons but hyperlinks without borders.

And the icon in the top left of the login screen just irks me.

 

[Traverse]

Okay. I'll play.

I like the bright icons and new old dock of Yosemite. I also like the dark mode.

I don't like Finder, the finder icon, or the transparency everywhere. Safari is hideous and I can't stand looking at it. I also dislike how terribly buggy it is, and how the buttons aren't buttons but hyperlinks without borders.

And the icon in the top left of the login screen just irks me.

You summed up exactly what I would say. Thank you!

- I don't mind the icons
- Safari is atrociously designed for a web browser
- Translucency everywhere is unnecessary and hinders usability.

If I wanted to see my desktop, I'd look at my desktop. I don't need the colors bleeding through all my apps.

 

[leman]

What I don't like:

- some icons feel misplaced (e.g., I'd much prefer iOS-style icons for the iWork suite), this needs some rework
- the rare but regular hangups
- some attention to detail seems to be missing

What I like:

actually everything else

 

[KALLT]

Notification center loads after you open rather than before meaning scrolling in it before its loaded kinda is weird and uncomfortable...

I notice this in some other places too, like the deferred loading of panels in System Preferences, especially the Desktop & Screen Saver panel (where even the wallpapers need to be loaded again), the Messages application which needs to refresh when you’ve used iMessage on your phone for a while, the Mail application that reloads the messages list when you reopen the window (the application was running), even though it’s just a split second and in my places icons need to be reloaded as well, especially in the Finder and Dock stacks. It almost gives you a distinct iOS feel where nothing really runs in the background and needs to be loaded into memory first.