Yosemite looks terrible!

[AFEPPL]

The problem is the UX hasn't really changed since inception. Apple have taken an evolutionary approach rather than a revolutionary one as its been revised over the years. People will argue over colours and positions forever. What the UX really needs is an whole re-think, not a makeover.

 

[leman]

Why do you not use full screen more often? I'm curious …

I usually work with multiple applications at the same time. I probably should be using spaces and fullscreen mode more, but old habits are difficult to break I guess.

 

[snorkelman]

Etan, to be fair, many users have complained about the Zoom functionality on OS X and there were many voices to make it "just like Windows or Linux", that is, a proper maximise button. Essentially, that is what Apple did.

Eh? The maximise button on Windows fills the screen retaining title bar and direct on screen access to the menus, it doesnt send an app fullscreen with menus that drop down only when you bring cursor to top of the screen (that Full Screen mode is usually done via F11). Same goes for Ubuntu

So if "many voices wanted them to make it just like windows or Linux" then I can't see how that's what they delivered.

I doubt theres many zoom users who would have had a beef with them setting Zoom to always maximise (ie the Active window filling the screen with menu bar left visible) That at least is a more consistent variation of what OSX zoom used to do and more akin to the behaviour on Windows and Linux those voices were seemingly asking for (or at least Ubuntu at any rate, been while since I've used any other Linux via a GUI).

 

[leman]

So if "many voices wanted them to make it just like windows or Linux" then I can't see how that's what they delivered.

I agree. How I understand the situation is that Apple have been opposed to the maximise function because it often wastes real screen estate (that is why they had Zoom, which was supposed to be a 'smart maximise'). With the fullscreen mode, they give the apps the opportunity to adjust their interface to make use of the additional space they have, so I guess that it goes more to the direction of the "maximise Apple would agree with". The absurd of the situation, of course, is that only very few applications would actually make use of that, and fullscreen just results in the same space-wasting maximise which also locks out the rest of the UI. Again, I am not saying that I agree with Apple on this one. I merely attempt to rediscover their reasoning behind this change.

At any rate, it should be obvious that Apple's vision for maximised windows entails app's exclusive control over the screen estate. I think there is some potential there, but apps need to start making use of this feature.

 

[joedec]

I agree. How I understand the situation is that Apple have been opposed to the maximise function because it often wastes real screen estate (that is why they had Zoom, which was supposed to be a 'smart maximise'). With the fullscreen mode, they give the apps the opportunity to adjust their interface to make use of the additional space they have, so I guess that it goes more to the direction of the "maximise Apple would agree with". The absurd of the situation, of course, is that only very few applications would actually make use of that, and fullscreen just results in the same space-wasting maximise which also locks out the rest of the UI. Again, I am not saying that I agree with Apple on this one. I merely attempt to rediscover their reasoning behind this change.

At any rate, it should be obvious that Apple's vision for maximised windows entails app's exclusive control over the screen estate. I think there is some potential there, but apps need to start making use of this feature.

Actually I am one who prefers Apples choice, referring to the "smart" maximize, full screen is whole different can of worms. Currently the application can perform different ways, its programmers choice. For example Contacts and Calendar maximize to the whole screen. Applications like Finder and Safari show just enough. I think its much better than all the screen all the time as in Windows/Linux. Like you said its a waste of space for most applications.

 

[Badagri]

UK app store.

***** 125
**** 28
*** 50
** 83
* 311

 

[MagnusVonMagnum]

Nope. You right click while holding down the option key and the context menu comes up and offers get info, and when you select that the OLD STYLE (iTunes 11) info window appears. If you leave out the option key press, you get the new style (iTunes 12) info window. Pretty tricksy of those UI guys, huh? Holding down option key while choosing from the menu bar does not get you the old style info window. Oh, I take that later back, with iTunes 12.0.1 now that does give you the old style window, so there's evidence of at least some evidence of movement towards rational interface design.

What you're describing is iTunes 12+. I'm still using iTunes 11.4 and I don't ever have to touch the option key to get to the "Get Info" screen for a given song(s). I believe the question was how to get to in PRE-iTunes 12.... OK, I re-read your question. I thought you mean versions prior to iTunes 12, not the pre-12 versions of the Get Info menu (I keep forgetting they're even different since I've only ever tried it on a notebook and my main iTunes server is on my Mac Mini running Mavericks and iTunes 11.4. I hate the new iTunes layout. I won't upgrade until I have to.

 

[thejadedmonkey]

Some days I think Apple doesn't want more than 10% of the marketshare (artificial scarcity, etc), and they made Yosemite ugly so that people would stop buying their computers.

It's the only explanation.

 

[ZVH]

In spite of the bad reviews in the app store, Yosemite continues to grow:

https://www.gosquared.com/global/mac/yosemite/

I noticed that Snow Leopard and previous OS X releases were missing so I went to netshare and got the current usage stats for OS X compared to all other operating systems. Although not shown, Windows has far and away the biggest percentage of uses with Mac OS X in second place.

I believe the following data is for last month for OS X of total market share:

Leopard: 0.12%
Snow Leopard: 0.68%
Lion: 0.49%
Mountain Lion: 0.50%
Mavericks: 2.79%
Yosemite: 2.66%

TOTAL: 7.24%

Macs comprise just over 7% of the market. If you scale those to 100% to see how versions of OS X compare to one another, here's what you get:

Leopard: 1.66%
Snow Leopard: 9.39%
Lion: 6.77%
Mountain Lion: 6.91%
Mavericks: 38.54%
Yosemite: 36.74%

You'll notice that I've included Snow Leopard, which using the chart above is in 3rd place above Lion, Mountain Lion, and Leopard. The GoSquared graph excludes Snow Leopard, which is probably a mistake. I excluded Tiger and earlier because they totaled less than 1%.

Conclusions:

1. People don't pay much attention to App Store reviews
2. OS X usage is still tiny compared to Windows
3. Can Apple really afford to be alienating it's base? I don't think so.

 

[Partron22]

Leopard: 1.66%
Snow Leopard: 9.39%

These numbers are likely low becase the counting method relies on internet connections. I've got Macs running 10.5 and 10.6 which never see the internet. They're good as music servers and for legacy Apps, but surfing with an OS that doesn't get security updates anymore and legacy browsers is asking for trouble.

 

[Badagri]

These numbers are likely low becase the counting method relies on internet connections. I've got Macs running 10.5 and 10.6 which never see the internet. They're good as music servers and for legacy Apps, but surfing with an OS that doesn't get security updates anymore and legacy browsers is asking for trouble.

Lies, damned lies, and then there is statistics.

You can do anything you want with statistics.

 

[joedec]

Lies, damned lies, and then there is statistics.

You can do anything you want with statistics.

Also the nag factor has increased. For example the iWork applications pop up everyday for about 5 days, each, to let you know if you upgrade to Yosemite you can get new versions.

Of course every week you also get an App Store reminder. Neither of which offered a "Don't ask me again" switch.

Apple is getting a little spammy these days.

 

[Choctaw]

You can turn off update reminders !

Also the nag factor has increased. For example the iWork applications pop up everyday for about 5 days, each, to let you know if you upgrade to Yosemite you can get new versions.

Of course every week you also get an App Store reminder. Neither of which offered a "Don't ask me again" switch

I have read on the forum there is a way to turn off that Yosemite update reminder/notice just can't relocate it now.

 

[joedec]

I have read on the forum there is a way to turn off that Yosemite update reminder/notice just can't relocate it now.

Did that, its no longer at the top of my Update page, I was a little surprised I still got the pop up. I should have grabbed a screen shot. Gone now.

This is probably what you're looking for.

http://osxdaily.com/2014/11/23/hide-os-x-yosemite-update-mac-app-store/

 

[blufrog]

I don't think it looks terrible, but I definitely preferred the look of Snow Leopard. Some of the UI changes are nice though - it seems a bit more organized than before.

Apple need to add a "Themes" function to the UI and enable customization. Maybe a trivial feature, but the UI is what we look at and interact with all day.

 

[ZVH]

I just spent the last 2 hours fooling with Yosemite. My conclusion: WHAT A PIECE OF CRAP!!!!

I did some updates and they were abysmally slow. The translucency actually irritated me. The childish looking icons annoyed the living hell out of me. The response is sloooooooooooooooow!!!!!!

I do beta testing for SCSC who develops Scannerz, and with that product they include a product named Performance Probe. Unlike the current implementation of Activity Monitor, it STILL shows actual memory consumption in real time.

If you think that Yosemite is a "tight and efficient" operating system, you have your head up your ass. With nothing more than Mail and Safari running the things using up almost 3GB of memory. Performance is abysmal. Performance Probe is showing tons of swap and page changes that simply just didn't exist in previous OS releases. Finally, when using it with other OS X versions, it's overhead was on the order of 2-5%, depending on what you're doing, but with Yosemite it's more like 10-18%? Where's that delta coming from????

Well, I suspect I know the answer: Translucency. I got fed up with the butt-ugly effects of translucency in the menu bar, so I came up with a trick to eliminate it. How? Scale the background image to the size of the display, measure the area of the menu bar's height and length in pixels, and then cut the area of the menu bar and fill it with white or gray, and then save and install that image as the background. The trick works, but what I noticed is that for Apple to enable the "brilliant" (sarcasm alert) effects of translucency, apparently the "trick" is to mathematically scatter the colors over an area. I thought I could make the menu bar have a 3D effect by putting a black line down the center of the image, but all I got was a general gray.

My conclusion: Every single pixel in the display needs to be mathematically "morphed" to accommodate translucency. God, this is stupid. Apple claims it's trying to make their systems more power efficient, but they throw some absolutely stupid work load at the CPU/GPU just to come up with a gimmicky look. And IMHO, it's stupid, annoying, and irritating.

I must say, this is the first operating system released by anyone, anywhere, that's actually managed to put me in a bad mood after using it for a few hours.

WELL DONE, JONATHAN IVE!!!! WELL DONE!!!

Now that you've managed to make yourself the head of all OS operations, what can we expect next? Perhaps some type of move where a user needs to use their elbows on a trackpad to access their home folder? How about this idea: Get rid of that confusing Unix kernel and replace it with a single tasking kernel like Apple had back in the early '80s. Multi-tasking can be soooooooo confusing to idiots. Golly Gosh!!! I changed windows and the process kept running….that's sooooooooo confusing. If only the OS would act like an iPhone and stop processing when someone isn't looking at it!!!!

Where does the stupidity stop?????

 

[grahamperrin]

Saturday lunchtime

Consumer loyalty driven by aesthetics over functionality -- ScienceDaily (2014-12-17)

– referred from https://twitter.com/DesignUXUI/status/545632869822267392 … it's easy to find 2014 NPS® figures for Apple laptop computers, iPhone and iPad (72, 67 and 66 respectively for those hardware devices) but still: properly measured loyalty-related figures for OS X can't be found in public. (For software and apps the average NPS is 26 and with a score of 58, the star in this sector is Intuit TurboTax®, developed in the mid-1980s.) There was the summary chart based on votes within MacRumors forums but those polls are too easily criticised.

In spite of the bad reviews in the app store, Yosemite continues to grow:

https://www.gosquared.com/global/mac/yosemite/ …

And as the number of users grows, so the number of negative comments grows. https://twitter.com/search?f=realtime&q=Yosemite ugly usually shows a spurt during and after weekends.

I pretty much stopped adding to the list at http://tinyurl.com/1010uglystick after the list grew so large that the service provider could no longer present it in its entirety (at the time of writing you can probably view a maximum of 100 per page). For the past few hours that list has been converting to a new format.

It's not just the size of that list; there are so many complaints about the looks of Yosemite, it became tiresome to regularly select items for addition to that list.

Conclusions:

1. People don't pay much attention to App Store reviews
2. OS X usage is still tiny compared to Windows
3. Can Apple really afford to be alienating it's base? I don't think so.

The App Store interface to reviews is unnecessarily, suspiciously unfriendly to users. For me, that's the greatest cause of not paying attention to what's written by reviewers.



I expected 5, no less, from Apple.

… WELL DONE, JONATHAN IVE!!!! WELL DONE!!!

Now that you've managed to make yourself the head of all OS operations …

Where does the stupidity stop?????

My own explosion of anger occurred when I first saw an iOS/Yosemite-like app on Mavericks. Whilst Sir Jonathan is not entirely without blame, after a few days I regretted making the anger so personal against him. Yesterday's https://twitter.com/grahamperrin/status/546056556190908416 identifies the offending application, a beta.

 

[Masada31]

Also the nag factor has increased. For example the iWork applications pop up everyday for about 5 days, each, to let you know if you upgrade to Yosemite you can get new versions.

Of course every week you also get an App Store reminder. Neither of which offered a "Don't ask me again" switch.

Apple is getting a little spammy these days.

Has you computer been set to check for updates if you go into preference and App store and un click check for updates it might help.

 

[Partron22]

Has you computer been set to check for updates if you go into preference and App store and un click check for updates it might help.

Of course, App store Preferences should be settable from the Preferences menu of the App Store App. For whatever reason, Apple put the App's prefs in a nonstandard place, and didn't bother putting a Prefs item within the App itself.

 

[joedec]

Of course, App store Preferences should be settable from the Preferences menu of the App Store App. For whatever reason, Apple put the App's prefs in a nonstandard place, and didn't bother putting a Prefs item within the App itself.

The most irritating thing, the iWork Apps, there is no preference what-so-ever for updates but you get 15 nag messages, total. They are spaced out 24 hours, I guess that's Apples compromise.

BTW, I set Yosemite hidden in the App Store, but you still get the nag message if System Preferences / App Store checks for updates. Not very consistent or well integrated.

Most people will buckle to these messages and Apple knows that. Hence the adoption rate goes up.

 

[OldGuyTom]

I do beta testing for SCSC who develops Scannerz, and with that product they include a product named Performance Probe. Unlike the current implementation of Activity Monitor, it STILL shows actual memory consumption in real time.

I've often thought that the changes in Activity Monitor to memory reporting and usage that came about in Mavericks were done to hide how inefficient the operating system has become, or, if we want to be really, really, cynical, part of a scheme dreamed up by Apple's marketing team to trick people into thinking they need new systems or more memory all of which are quite expensive if purchased at Apple.

If I understand it right, something called speculative memory, which is memory not in use but that might be used is now in the "used" memory classification. That now gets added to active, inactive, and wired and it always reports that nearly 100% of the memory is used. The only way you can get a handle on which program is using how much memory if you're not using something like Performance Probe is to open up Activity Monitor and look at the process list, sort by memory, etc. It's quite annoying,.

The way Activity Monitor reports memory graphically simply makes no sense, unless the objective is to misrepresent or hide something from the user. That's not a Yosemite only problem though...that one started with Mavericks.

Now for another example of the "we're too stupid to be alive" design team at Apple take a look at this "improvement":

1. Open up the side bar in Safari in an OS earlier than Yosemite. Notice the icons and how they correlate to the site being linked.
2. Now open up Yosemite and do the same. It's all the exact same icon for every entry. You can't easily find anything.

First, what's a good name for the open book icon? How about "stick figure icons" because they're drawn like infantile stick figures and they're now throughout iOS and OS X now as well.

But what is the logic? I can do this on Mavericks and I can quickly see an icon for the weather channel, icons for TV stations, icons for this, icons for that, and I can quickly find what I'm looking for and select it. With Yosemite I have a long list of the exact same open book stick figure icons for every single item, and unless the list is very, very short, like 5 to 10 entries, it's nearly impossible to navigate.

What's the logic???? How is this possibly an improvement? The Safari side bar has basically been rendered utterly useless. There's literally no point in having it or using it.

This company literally has no clue any longer.

 

[pickaxe]

Yosemite looks better if you change the font, dump some of the more offensive stock icons and use a different wallpaper.

 

[F1Mac]

The Safari side bar has basically been rendered utterly useless. There's literally no point in having it or using it.

I use it constantly. I found the icons superfluous. While they did add some color to the sidebar landscape, text, to me, was more important than these tiny icons. So I don't mind about the new, uniform open-book design.

 

[KALLT]

I use it constantly. I found the icons superfluous. While they did add some color to the sidebar landscape, text, to me, was more important than these tiny icons. So I don't mind about the new, uniform open-book design.

The lack of icons is definitely unfortunate though. It can help you distinguishing the links more easily. I don't know why Apple is so opposed to favicons, they serve as the very metaphor they embrace for apps on iOS.

 

[FrtzPeter]

I do beta testing for SCSC who develops Scannerz, and with that product they include a product named Performance Probe. Unlike the current implementation of Activity Monitor, it STILL shows actual memory consumption in real time.

You really shouldn't make posts like that. As a beta tester I doubt that you're an employee of the company but it sort of sounds like you're trying to tie your relation to that company to a disliking of Yosemite. Sort of like your trying to convince everyone that even companies don't like Yosemite, and I doubt that's true. That company has pictures of their products running on Yosemite all over the place on their web site.

Ladies and Gentlemen, whether you like it or not, Yosemite has surpassed Mavericks in usage. If it levels off in the low 40% range an issue may be able to be made that it's not really accepted, since more than half of Apple's users would be on older OSes, but the curves imply, at least to me, that it will likely completely displace Mavericks.