Yosemite looks terrible!

[TheBSDGuy]

I made the first post in this thread over six months ago. Who would have thought this would be one of the most visited posts on the site. I think it's safe to assume I'm not the only one that dislikes Apple's recent design trends.

I looked at GoSquared and it looks like Yosemite's rise has pretty much leveled off at 40%, which is still pretty high. The curve shows what might be a reverse migration back to Mavericks occurring, but it's so small and over such a short period of time it might just be an oddity.

If you scroll down to the bottom of the GoSquared page, there's link to see Mavericks adoption rate. If you look at it, Mavericks went flat between May and July at approximately 50-55%, then it resumed its rise to top out in the 65-69% range.

Sales typically go flat during the summer, and go up during the fall, and especially around Christmas. Assuming new Apple systems all have Yosemite installed, it's possible their adoption might be somewhat inflated due to a holiday season blitz. Also you can't tell how many are not using Yosemite because of appearance or bugs with the OS.

Time will tell. If the Yosemite adoption rate starts going down with all the rest going up, probably Mavericks being the most likely to recover, then it would be a clear indication with dissatisfaction of the OS.

 

[grahamperrin]

Revisiting Jean-Louis Gassée's 2012 'Grand Unified User Experience' (GUUX) article

Apple's grand user experience unification | Technology | The Guardian (2012-02-20)

"For a company that prides itself on simplicity and elegance, it only makes sense that Apple would offer a consistent user experience across all its devices …

… a GUUX, a Grand Unified User Experience. Apple customers should be able to move easily and naturally from one device to another, selecting the best tool for the task at hand. Add another unification, iCloud storage services, and Apple can offer more reasons to buy more of its products.

It's a lovely, soothing theory.

In reality, the Grand Unification isn't there yet. We still face antiquated limitations, bad bugs, ageing applications and capricious flourishes. …"​

Twitter is somewhat broken. Its view of his 2012 tweet fails to show my 2015 response – Yosemite is a disappointingly tasteless wine.

Capricious

– given to sudden and unaccountable changes of mood or behaviour.​

When I view the looks of the OS strictly as a Mac user (not a user of a broader Apple ecosystem), I do feel that Yosemite was the most capricious development in the history of Apple operating systems. That was the gut feeling when I began testing.

Then, the arguments from users of iPhone and the like; attempts to justify the changes of appearance in devices that are nothing like an iPhone. My gut feeling remained the same.

Example: making the foreground window darker than the background window. Was that change for the sake of change? I think so.

Can we describe 'change for the sake of change' as 'accountable'? Maybe; it's what some users crave, with little or no regard to the consequences.

Generally

I find it difficult to fault Gassée's 2012 article; there was no foreknowledge of Yosemite. For now, just two thoughts.

Gassée: "… the menu bar is bad ergonomics …" – I can not agree. If the argument involves the space between the bar and the top of a window, then the argument must also include the space between that window and the Dock, which is at the bottom by default. I always considered the Dock to be evolved from the classic Application Switcher (screenshot below); and that switcher was compared to the Deskbar at top right of BeOS 5.0 Personal Edition.

​

Gassée: "… today's 21.5in or 27in displays …" – a good point in 2012. 2014: the reduced GUI of Yosemite appears to give greatest consideration to the smallest Mac (currently 11").​

Side note: someone might like to edit taskbar in Wikipedia to include the Deskbar of BeOS.

Moving on from Gassée …

----

Adoption rates

Looks like Yosemite adoption may be plateauing around 40%. …

More on adoption rates …

 

[pickaxe]

"We made something beautiful and you copied us, so now we are going to make it deliberately ugly (because our loyal customers will buy it anyway and drool over it as the latest thing) and the whole world will see that you will copy us again, won't you!?"

One thing that I believe was not addressed enough is that iOS 7 is, in fact, not a bunch of radical new ideas. It's shockingly derivative.

The translucency is Microsoft's Aero (conveniently just as Microsoft were phasing it out).
The text-for-buttons is Microsoft's Metro.
The interface colors are Google's Holo Light.
The lockscreen and notification center redesigns are Android Jellybean.
The multitasking interface is WebOS.
The parallax effect was popularized by the Jailbreak community.

It's an amalgam of ideas that were already done (better) on other platforms, for no reason other than to try and be "fresh". In other words, the exact "copy because you can't understand it" approach that Apple used to criticize first Microsoft and then Samsung for.

The only somewhat "new" thing Apple did is the icon design and the neon colors, and these are both unmitigated disasters that Apple has been attempting to backtrack from (unfortunately, they can no longer backtrack from those icons).

 

[Loops]

Yosemite is ugly.

The Finder icon is horribly smarmy.

The oversaturated colors everywhere are bad.

The loss of Lucida Grande is unfortunate.

The trash icon looks cheap.

I have kept my phone on iOS 6. I will never "upgrade" to one of the butt-ugly newer versions with all their terrible nausea-inducing swooping animations.

It's sad that Apple thinks looking like a half-baked Linux desktop is somehow impressive. No taste design trends.

 

[ZVH]

Yosemite is ugly.

The Finder icon is horribly smarmy.

The oversaturated colors everywhere are bad.

The loss of Lucida Grande is unfortunate.

The trash icon looks cheap.

I have kept my phone on iOS 6. I will never "upgrade" to one of the butt-ugly newer versions with all their terrible nausea-inducing swooping animations.

It's sad that Apple thinks looking like a half-baked Linux desktop is somehow impressive. No taste design trends.

Are you looking for an argument, fella???? You're not going to find one here. I made the sorry, sorry, sorry mistake of upgrading to iOS 7 on my iPhone on the very last day that they allowed downgrades. After using it for about an hour, I decided to reverse migrate and guess what happened? The window closed. I couldn't stand using the iPhone, so recently I bought a used one with iOS 6 on it because I still had use for it. iOS 7 has some good features that are clear improvements, but looking at the glaring white everywhere and the use of basically what amount to hyperlinks as controls is just tooooo stupid. I used to use the Notes app for scheduling, doing notes, etc. a lot. Not with iOS 7. Look how stupid the "controls" are. Yellow outline icons on a glaring white background with a general presentation that looks like it's motivation was unorganized text printed on a laser jet printer viewed under a glaring white light. That's just toooooooo stupid looking and poorly thought out.

If Palm had survived as a major handheld player and they adopted the newer screen resolution and colors, I suspect iOS 7 would be very comparable to what they would be producing. This will likely be the last Apple phone I ever own.

They've done the same thing with Yosemite. They've made the OS look like it was downgraded, but with the "magic" of translucency - an idea they had to optionally remove from the menu bar in Leopard years ago because so many people disliked it. What's the logic? The main feature of the older OS X versions was the "coolness" that skeuomorphic design gave it. Now their systems are nothing more that highly priced systems using an OS interface that's not "cool" it's just mediocre. Why should anyone convert to a Mac, especially since other OSes have the same (or in Windows case, more) applications available?

There is no logic, just, I suspect, the ego of the designer.

 

[GerritV]

<snip> There is no logic, just, I suspect, the ego of the designer.

Yep, a huuuuge one (think Holywood).

 

[Ulenspiegel]

...There is no logic, just, I suspect, the ego of the designer.

True. Though many here question that the looks of iOS and OSX is one person's concept.
I believe that it is one person's "mental roller coaster". Nobody can say no to him now. Who could are out.

 

[TheBSDGuy]

True. Though many here question that the looks of iOS and OSX is one person's concept.
I believe that it is one person's "mental roller coaster". Nobody can say no to him now. Who could are out.

Which, unfortunately, is why we're stuck with his designs. Basically it seems to me that the people Jobs had designing the OS have all been "outed" one way or another.

Maybe I should start every day by logging into Apple's Feedback and writing a complaint about 10.10.

 

[Etan1000]

Yosemite is ugly.

The Finder icon is horribly smarmy.

The oversaturated colors everywhere are bad.

The loss of Lucida Grande is unfortunate.

The trash icon looks cheap.

I have kept my phone on iOS 6. I will never "upgrade" to one of the butt-ugly newer versions with all their terrible nausea-inducing swooping animations.

It's sad that Apple thinks looking like a half-baked Linux desktop is somehow impressive. No taste design trends.

I agree with everything you have just said above, except for the sentence which I have just re-set to red for emphasis.

"Unfortunate" is IMHO a grossly inadequate word to describe the horrors many of us have been subjected to by the abandonment of Lucida Grande as the system font.

Respectfully,

Etan

 

[Badagri]

One thing that I believe was not addressed enough is that iOS 7 is, in fact, not a bunch of radical new ideas. It's shockingly derivative.

The translucency is Microsoft's Aero (conveniently just as Microsoft were phasing it out).
The text-for-buttons is Microsoft's Metro.
The interface colors are Google's Holo Light.
The lockscreen and notification center redesigns are Android Jellybean.
The multitasking interface is WebOS.
The parallax effect was popularized by the Jailbreak community.

It's an amalgam of ideas that were already done (better) on other platforms, for no reason other than to try and be "fresh". In other words, the exact "copy because you can't understand it" approach that Apple used to criticize first Microsoft and then Samsung for.

The only somewhat "new" thing Apple did is the icon design and the neon colors, and these are both unmitigated disasters that Apple has been attempting to backtrack from (unfortunately, they can no longer backtrack from those icons).

Funny isn't it.

 

[This Dude]

Would it really be too much to ask that we be able to modify the look of our dock and icons????
Apple is a multi billion dollar business, am I suppose to think something like this is asking too much?
Oh and I paid a crapload for this equipment I would like a little recognition from the company I support.....I want new stuff and I shouldn't have to pay more money for it. Put it in the app store as a thank you to the customers.
........Yep I said it!

 

[KALLT]

If anyone is considering switching to Windows because of Yosemite, I have some bad news. After some initial excitement of the consumer demo, I have to say that Windows 10 is in terms of UI still a lot worse than Yosemite (believe it or not).

 

[joedec]

If anyone is considering switching to Windows because of Yosemite, I have some bad news. After some initial excitement of the consumer demo, I have to say that Windows 10 is in terms of UI still a lot worse than Yosemite (believe it or not).

Ditto! And they are trashing ClearType for whatever reason. Windows 10 makes Yosemite look like a dream come true.

 

[Badagri]

If anyone is considering switching to Windows because of Yosemite, I have some bad news. After some initial excitement of the consumer demo, I have to say that Windows 10 is in terms of UI still a lot worse than Yosemite (believe it or not).

Nobody is copying each other for the better.

 

[b0fh666]

guess I've been hit with a *major* yosumite bug today.

was running 2 vms and really pressing for memory (went red then yellow then green again after closing some apps)... but at some point both VMs (fusion) crashed and the entire system started to act weird.

bad looks and crappy memory management it seems

 

[KALLT]

and the entire system started to act weird.

Happens to me as well. The system suddenly becomes unresponsive, force-close or system restart doesn’t work. I think this started in Mavericks, I never had to use the power button to restart the system before.

 

[b0fh666]

this time i could shut down 'the normal way' (but had my share of black screens that force you to power-button-off on both MBPs).

by acting weird i mean... switching to the (restarted) VM made itunes playback/pause. second monitor (where i show the VMs) impossible to swipe left/right.

probably something broke at the keyboard level

 

[joedec]

Happens to me as well. The system suddenly becomes unresponsive, force-close or system restart doesn’t work. I think this started in Mavericks, I never had to use the power button to restart the system before.

Kernel extensions are hard to control, so to speak, I would blame the VM before Mac OS in this case. I assume everyone is current with Fusion 7.1?

A VM tuning tip. Reduce the memory of the VM, let the VM OS swap, not Mac OS. I got this from MS of all places, and its proved good advice. I never exceed 2GB allocated to a VM, on an 8GB Mac. Just an FYI (off topic)

 

[Etan1000]

…
A VM tuning tip. Reduce the memory of the VM, let the VM OS swap, not Mac OS. I got this from MS of all places, and its proved good advice. I never exceed 2GB allocated to a VM, on an 8GB Mac. Just an FYI (off topic)

Now that is very interesting!

I guess I will try that with Parallels.

Thanks!

Etan

 

[technosix]

I'm enjoying Yosemite, the longer I use it and continue to optimize it to my liking, the faster and more efficient it becomes...

 

[b0fh666]

Kernel extensions are hard to control, so to speak, I would blame the VM before Mac OS in this case. I assume everyone is current with Fusion 7.1?

A VM tuning tip. Reduce the memory of the VM, let the VM OS swap, not Mac OS. I got this from MS of all places, and its proved good advice. I never exceed 2GB allocated to a VM, on an 8GB Mac. Just an FYI (off topic)

i prefer not to let the VMs swap, because i use them a lot for development. in this case both had XP, one 3GB and the other 2GB (host 8GB). Fusion 7.1.

Never had a problem doing this on mavericks and fusion 6, btw.

VMs also have some memory trickery, like no mem backing files, but I have been using this forever too.

I'm blaming this particular one in yosumite, since the OS itself kinda broke not only the VMs. host was not swapping much either, just compressing memory at that time, swap was like 200 megs.

cheers

 

[FrtzPeter]

One thing that might be useful for some people would be a reverse migration guide that would tell people how to re-install a previous OS version and get rid of Yosemite, or for that matter, any other OS version. To the best of my knowledge the only way to do this is to re-install from a Time Machine backup or clone back from a previous clone of the the pre-existing system.

Are there any other ways? Maybe this should be in a different thread, but since so many here dislike Yosemite, I assume there's experience present.

 

[Loops]

If anyone is considering switching to Windows because of Yosemite, I have some bad news. After some initial excitement of the consumer demo, I have to say that Windows 10 is in terms of UI still a lot worse than Yosemite (believe it or not).

It's Microsoft. They have always been UI impaired. Their best GUI was Windows 95 and it was still clunkier than Mac OS.

 

[grahamperrin]

Orientation

Off-topic

… Windows 10 is in terms of UI …

Discussions:

• Microsoft Gives Early Look at Windows 10 Featuring Windows 7 Elements, Broad Adaptability (2014-09-30)
• Windows 10 (2014-09-30)
• Windows 10 (2014-11-06)
• Microsoft Demos Free Windows 10 Update, Debuts New 'Project Spartan' Web Browser (2015-01-21)

… reverse migration … Maybe this should be in a different thread …

• Reverting back to previous OS. Has anyone tested?
• Reverting back to Mavericks.
• How to revert back to Maverick/Fix Yosemite
• REVERT to Mavericks
• Reverting Back to an Earlier Mac OS X Version – I'm subscribed.

You can also search titles of topics for words such as 'downgrade' (but please note that Apple doesn't offer a downgrade option; it's basically restore or revert).

 

[Etan1000]

I'm enjoying Yosemite, the longer I use it and continue to optimize it to my liking, the faster and more efficient it becomes...

Gee that's wonderful!
We are all so happy for you.