27" Thunderbolt User here: non retina yosemite looks really crappy compared to the 5k imac.
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Yosemite looks terrible!
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27" Thunderbolt User here: non retina yosemite looks really crappy compared to the 5k imac.
Non-retina anything looks really crappy compared to the 5k iMac
Happy new Year everyone!
I believe I posted afterwards that I discovered that it is the combination of Dark Menus and Increase Contrast that produces black-on-black in the Spotlight search term field, but if I neglected to post word of that addendum here, I apologize.
You will find other reports of this black-on-black problem in Spotlight's search field by other users of Yosemite who are using Dark Menus and Increase Contrast.
That still makes it a bug, since I need both Dark Menus and Increase Contrast to read fonts in Yosemite without constant eyestrain. I didn't expect Apple to be that dumb either, but apparently they are. Many, many of us never had any of these eyestrain problems in Mavericks and did not have to elect these options.
Respectfully,
Etan
I experienced the same eyestrain as you did with Yosemite--and the increased contrast only helped a little. The other objectionable thing about the Increase Contrast option is it makes the interface look terrible, aesthetically. I actually don't mind the overall look of Yosemite, but if the only way to reduce eyestrain is to outline all of the buttons in a distracting and ugly way, that is a problem. Anyway, I couldn't figure out any way to really avoid eyestrain (on a 13" Retina MBP!) and downgraded to Mavericks.
You are trivialising the issue. Different interfaces make use of different graphical elements and different visual paradigms. For instance, the graphical language of Yosemite is a superset of that of any other OS X. With Yosemite, app designers can make visual choices that they did not have before. And some of these choices would make no sense if you change the interface. This way, you are putting massive burden on the developer, who has to detect what kind of interface type is active on your system and adjust the application accordingly. The result is buggy and ugly, dysfunctional software. Not to mention that even such trivial things like system fonts will significantly affect the size of the UI elements, something that can screw up your app design completely.
If you want to have customisable looks, you can basically have two choices. First, you can standardise the logical capabilities of the user interface and provide different skins. FYI, Yosemite has something like this built in (look up the new vibrancy APIs). Or, you can leave everything up to the developers. This is the way UI works on Linux. The result is that you have dozens of different UI toolkits, applications that look and behave differently and do not synergise well at all.
The entire philosophy of OS X has always revolved around the common standards: standard UI, standard data model, standard interaction model. OS X has the best standard UI library in the world, and its looks are highly integrated into the OS itself. This holistic approach to the OS design is what made OS X successful in the first place. What you desire is simply not possible in OS X, beyond of course simple theming like dark theme/light theme and tweaks of the standard color theme.
There have been many Yosemite fans popping up in this thread claiming that the level of complaints is "normal" and this "happens with every release."
I just visited the Mavericks, Mountain Lion, and Lion forums on here and clicked on the option to sort by view count to see if there were rampant complaint threads that criticized that particular OS with respect to appearance. They simply don't exist...at least not to the extent they do with Yosemite.
Yosemite is a butt-ugly, bug ridden, piece of rubbish. Just last night I thought I would log into it and use it and I noticed that the network configuration managed to lose some setup data during installation. How? Who knows. I click on System Preferences -> Network to gain access only to be greeted by a spinning beach ball. After a minute I clicked on the finder->Force Quit option and sure enough, there it was, highlighted with the "not responding" label. Two or three tries later and the network configuration eventually starts....eventually. I have never had any problems with this on any other release of OS X, NEVER!!!
This is the worst operating system Apple has ever released. It's bug ridden. The translucency looks like it was designed to appeal to the 3-5 year old power user demographic. Labels in some buttons aren't even centered. The icons (I call them kiddycons) look like they were done by someone's third grade class.
FYI: I'm buying a used iPhone that has iOS 6 on it and I'll sell my iPhone with iOS 7, and one annoyance will be gone for good. If you have an older iPhone that has iOS 6 or earlier on it, emphasize the fact it's not using iOS 7 and you may find people are willing to pay a premium for it.
I just visited the Mavericks, Mountain Lion, and Lion forums on here and clicked on the option to sort by view count to see if there were rampant complaint threads that criticized that particular OS with respect to appearance. They simply don't exist...at least not to the extent they do with Yosemite.
Yosemite is a butt-ugly, bug ridden, piece of rubbish. Just last night I thought I would log into it and use it and I noticed that the network configuration managed to lose some setup data during installation. How? Who knows. I click on System Preferences -> Network to gain access only to be greeted by a spinning beach ball. After a minute I clicked on the finder->Force Quit option and sure enough, there it was, highlighted with the "not responding" label. Two or three tries later and the network configuration eventually starts....eventually. I have never had any problems with this on any other release of OS X, NEVER!!!
This is the worst operating system Apple has ever released. It's bug ridden. The translucency looks like it was designed to appeal to the 3-5 year old power user demographic. Labels in some buttons aren't even centered. The icons (I call them kiddycons) look like they were done by someone's third grade class.
FYI: I'm buying a used iPhone that has iOS 6 on it and I'll sell my iPhone with iOS 7, and one annoyance will be gone for good. If you have an older iPhone that has iOS 6 or earlier on it, emphasize the fact it's not using iOS 7 and you may find people are willing to pay a premium for it.
Gobbledegook. I remember Kaleidoscope.
Apple's Appearance Manager:
It's not a complex matter of different graphical elements and different visual paradigms forcing unspeakable complexity onto the poor developers, it's a matter of doing it the way Steve Jobs wanted it, or taking to the highway.
With Job's now dead, there may be an opening to turn away from the error that aesthetic straitjacket represents. Clearly Apple itself isn't capable of enforcing GUI standards uniformly across its entire software line anymore, so it's time for them to loosen up and allow real customization again.
I am certainly not saying that this is impossible. I am simply saying that it would require a different OS. And different approach to designing software. Basically, you are asking Apple to throw everything that makes OS X what it is away. Maybe it is possible to design a themeable interface in a sensible way, who knows (I have certainly not seen a design like that). And maybe Apple will be the one's that will do it. But then the resulting product should not be called OS X.
Pronounced "Oh! - sexy!"
If it were to include a theme manager, then it would be far from sexy. More like back to the stone ages of design. But what do I know
Rationale is great, but not necessarily greater than gut feelings
A preamble, for the first day of the year: I do realise that there are some beautiful touches to Yosemite.
Also I do value approaches to criticism that are rational, for example:
Well-written texts such as that have great potential to 'sell' the Apple operating systems to customers (and developers) as effectively as Gigaom did a few months ago. I can't fault the logic. Please don't let what follows lessen those compliments.
Rationalising is sometimes more troublesome than trivialising.
Rationale is great, but no less valuable than guts! Gut feelings, including first impressions that should be neither ignored nor forgotten. Sometimes you just can't put your finger on what's wrong, but you know that something's wrong.
The first seeded builds of OS X 10.10 I hesitate before discussing that period (it drives a wedge between me and some people) but I must say, I was horrified and the horror was not for the reasons most often given by me in public (title bars and so on).
Non OS X Alternatives to OS X Yosemite Convergence with and without Apple products amongst the referenced articles there's the impressive October 2014 Gigaom article, which presents Yosemite in a compelling way.
Whilst writing about convergence, yesterday, I viewed things rationally:
I read the string of articles, continued to view things rationally, but didn't lose the gut feeling that something had gone wrong with Apple's approaches before and during development of Yosemite. High profile people within the company portray Apple as being opposed to combining/merging/converging things. But is that really true?
I imagine engineering people, ready and more than willing to develop the technologies to support continuity with a single shared vision that can embrace the thoughts of most of those people. (There'll be stray thoughts, but those strays are not destructive to the vision.)
The looks? Much more difficult for me to imagine what was going on with the people who were making and/or breaking decisions. Readers here can argue with me rationally as much as they like but those arguments can't shake the gut feelings that I had from June 2014 onwards. What I saw was just wrong. At the time it was pretty much "What on earth possessed Apple to throw this together for seed testing?". I wasn't thinking about 'continuity-versus-convergence' or anything like that, but if that had been suggested to me I would have responded "It's like someone who lacks both (a) organisational memory and (b) Mac expertise has thrown a bunch of stuff together with iOS in mind".
I think that's unnecessarily pessimistic.
True. Also true: some people are gobsmacked by Apple's choice of font. There's screwing up, and there's screwing up.
Yosemite looks different from Mavericks. And I can't describe the looks of Yosemite as more synergistic than the looks of Mavericks
It's not possible with Yosemite. Apple should have taken steps towards making it possible. The company took steps to make other things possible.
I love the way that continuity and ubiquitous computing were presented by Gigaom. But all of that and more could have been achieved without spoiling the looks, as Apple has done for however many people.
As David Morgenstern wrote, in his 2013 plea to Apple to stop the merger:
A preamble, for the first day of the year: I do realise that there are some beautiful touches to Yosemite.
Also I do value approaches to criticism that are rational, for example:
Well-written texts such as that have great potential to 'sell' the Apple operating systems to customers (and developers) as effectively as Gigaom did a few months ago. I can't fault the logic. Please don't let what follows lessen those compliments.
Rationalising is sometimes more troublesome than trivialising.
Rationale is great, but no less valuable than guts! Gut feelings, including first impressions that should be neither ignored nor forgotten. Sometimes you just can't put your finger on what's wrong, but you know that something's wrong.
The first seeded builds of OS X 10.10 I hesitate before discussing that period (it drives a wedge between me and some people) but I must say, I was horrified and the horror was not for the reasons most often given by me in public (title bars and so on).
Non OS X Alternatives to OS X Yosemite Convergence with and without Apple products amongst the referenced articles there's the impressive October 2014 Gigaom article, which presents Yosemite in a compelling way.
Whilst writing about convergence, yesterday, I viewed things rationally:
- some desktop environments have convergence amongst their openly expressed goals
- with Apple, there's a stance against convergence; instead we have continuity.
I read the string of articles, continued to view things rationally, but didn't lose the gut feeling that something had gone wrong with Apple's approaches before and during development of Yosemite. High profile people within the company portray Apple as being opposed to combining/merging/converging things. But is that really true?
I imagine engineering people, ready and more than willing to develop the technologies to support continuity with a single shared vision that can embrace the thoughts of most of those people. (There'll be stray thoughts, but those strays are not destructive to the vision.)
The looks? Much more difficult for me to imagine what was going on with the people who were making and/or breaking decisions. Readers here can argue with me rationally as much as they like but those arguments can't shake the gut feelings that I had from June 2014 onwards. What I saw was just wrong. At the time it was pretty much "What on earth possessed Apple to throw this together for seed testing?". I wasn't thinking about 'continuity-versus-convergence' or anything like that, but if that had been suggested to me I would have responded "It's like someone who lacks both (a) organisational memory and (b) Mac expertise has thrown a bunch of stuff together with iOS in mind".
I think that's unnecessarily pessimistic.
True. Also true: some people are gobsmacked by Apple's choice of font. There's screwing up, and there's screwing up.
Yosemite looks different from Mavericks. And I can't describe the looks of Yosemite as more synergistic than the looks of Mavericks
It's not possible with Yosemite. Apple should have taken steps towards making it possible. The company took steps to make other things possible.
I love the way that continuity and ubiquitous computing were presented by Gigaom. But all of that and more could have been achieved without spoiling the looks, as Apple has done for however many people.
As David Morgenstern wrote, in his 2013 plea to Apple to stop the merger:
"
Apple can make its programs serve multiple constituencies longtime Mac users, newbies, former Windows users, iOS users. There can be multiple ways to do a task within an applications or between applications. The user interface can behave and look differently for different users and the sky won't fall in.
In fact, that was the Mac way, way back when."
In fact, that was the Mac way, way back when."
"The visual changes are also why Yosemite may feel like a more significant upgrade than Mavericks. For people who value being on the cutting edge of both fashion and technology, this will make Yosemite more attractive. For others, it will inspire some additional upgrade caution. Among the biggest curmudgeons, Mavericks may even become the new Snow Leopard: the last good release before Apple ruined everything."
OS X 10.10 Yosemite: The Ars Technica Review page 25
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/10/os-x-10-10/25/
I guess that makes a lot of curmudgeons?
Regards, Etan
OS X 10.10 Yosemite: The Ars Technica Review page 25
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/10/os-x-10-10/25/
I guess that makes a lot of curmudgeons?
Regards, Etan
This is again a different issue which has to do with taste. We already know that you do not approve the new visual language of OS X. And you don't have to, because tastes differ. Still, your subjective/aesteting feeling about particular appearance is completely orthogonal to the logic of the design.
In order to have a beautiful looking, coherent interface, all elements have to be matched together. So either you take a restrictive approach and constraint the basic appearance, which does not leave you much freedom beyond maybe manipulating the colors. Or, you take the permissive approach, but at this point the coherence of the interface is pretty much gone.
Again, this is taste vs. internal logic. You may not like the font. However, if the developer designs the app based on a particular standard font and you then change that font in your system, there is a good chance that the entire design will crash down: misaligned/missized buttons, loss of symmetry, loss of visual coherency. Its the same as with a well designed website. You can't change the fonts on a website and still expect it to look good.
Yosemite is in no way more synergistic than Mavericks. We are not even talking about it. What we are talking about is the ability to switch the interfaces at will. If I were to design an app of a moderate complexity, I will approach the design differently on Mavericks or on Yosemite. With Yosemite, I have more tools to work with I can opt for a unified toolbar, I can use the new vibrancy and depth effects to compose my UI in a way that was not possible on Mavericks. What would happen to my app if I leverage the translucency and vibrancy as my UI building tools and you then switch to a Snow-Leopard based theme? Exactly, my app will look out of place. In contrast, an application that looked good on Mavericks will still look good on Yosemite, because later's visual language is a superset, as I have mentioned before.
So what happens if a developer needs to make an app that behaves well in respect to interface switching? Worst case scenario, I'd need to provide a separate design for every possible interface (or interface family). Or I can just be lazy and design for the common denominator (pre 10.10). None of these variants make me happy.
What you seem to ignore so far is that the new visual elements (translucenly and vibrancy) are not just 'themes'. They are tools under full control of the app's developer one needs to make careful choices when and where to use them. That is not something that can be easily controlled with an interface manager.
Most one could do is theme these tools in different ways that would still appear coherent. But you will certainly not get a Mavericks look back, these would be all different faces of Yosemite.
Yosemite's API are designed with theming (of the sort mentioned above) in mind. Also, Yosemite includes an extensive set of APIs that allow the application to automatically adapt their appearance based on the theme of the surrounding elements. One example are the template images that automatically maximise their contrast. The dark/ligh interface modes are built on top of this functionality.
Sure, its very rudimentary right now and the applications would need to be updated to take proper use of this functionality, but its the first step. The API is definitively designed with extensibility in mind. Check out the NSAppearance class.
I posted this back in March and only remembered it a day or so ago. It was in response to a users pre-visualisation of the upcoming OS X release. My overall feelings and points have remianed remained true before and after the release of Yosemite.
It's a long post so to summarise my original post.
Minimalism has been applied to the OS by APPLE as a style and thus is counter functional betraying total ignorance of flow or Zen.
A common mistake made by designers who are one dimensional i.e. facile.
All the money in the world doesn't solve this problem. It can be learned but if it's innate then it's powerful beyond words. I think now after a few months of re-looking I'm now far clearer on what it means not to have Jobs around by the lac of his influence and how that was expressed.
It has been interesting.
It's a long post so to summarise my original post.
Minimalism has been applied to the OS by APPLE as a style and thus is counter functional betraying total ignorance of flow or Zen.
A common mistake made by designers who are one dimensional i.e. facile.
All the money in the world doesn't solve this problem. It can be learned but if it's innate then it's powerful beyond words. I think now after a few months of re-looking I'm now far clearer on what it means not to have Jobs around by the lac of his influence and how that was expressed.
It has been interesting.
Yosemite appears to have, at least temporarily, stabilized in the 35% to 40% user range:
https://www.gosquared.com/global/mac/yosemite/#beta
Now it would really be something if that user base started declining.
I don't buy the argument that it's too difficult to allow options to users. Anyone familiar with X-Windows knows that you can use different window managers like Motif, Open Look, etc. etc. and yet the applications will still work under different window managers. For example, why couldn't a user select a Yosemite theme or a "classic" theme that could be based on Mavericks, Snow Leopard, or whatever. The libraries would load at start up. So what? Is that really that difficult.
Yosemite doesn't bug me, but I don't look at it and say, "Wow, what an improvement." More like, "Big deal."
Sayeth ZVH:
That's true, and it's entirely stupid of Apple to be trying to force this change on people if too many people don't like it.
Based on the views and responses in this thread, I'd say logic should dictate to someone, somewhere at Apple that this change isn't particularly welcome.
https://www.gosquared.com/global/mac/yosemite/#beta
Now it would really be something if that user base started declining.
I don't buy the argument that it's too difficult to allow options to users. Anyone familiar with X-Windows knows that you can use different window managers like Motif, Open Look, etc. etc. and yet the applications will still work under different window managers. For example, why couldn't a user select a Yosemite theme or a "classic" theme that could be based on Mavericks, Snow Leopard, or whatever. The libraries would load at start up. So what? Is that really that difficult.
Yosemite doesn't bug me, but I don't look at it and say, "Wow, what an improvement." More like, "Big deal."
Sayeth ZVH:
That's true, and it's entirely stupid of Apple to be trying to force this change on people if too many people don't like it.
Based on the views and responses in this thread, I'd say logic should dictate to someone, somewhere at Apple that this change isn't particularly welcome.
It's the same corporate thinking (or not!) that put the U2 album on everyones itunes, they had to release a patch to remove it due to massive user backlash.... I see YOSX released under the canopy of the same flawed corporate logic and for the majority there is no going back so easily if they choose to upgrade based on a legacy of "trust capital" built up over a decade or more that Cook & Co are burning into fast. Once that's gone it's gone, for long enough to see a few CEO's come and go.
Bono once sang "Ambition bites the nails of success"
Bono once sang "Ambition bites the nails of success"
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Beta
Yes and no.
As a complement to the content published by Apple, you might find this useful: ASCIIwwdc - Searchable full-text transcripts of WWDC sessions
On YouTube: Apple WWDC 2014: Everything is Awesome Super-Cut if you mentally filter out the humour, you're left with a blipvert of WWDC 2014.
The introduction of Aqua was:
Is OS X upgrading too quickly? (seventy-five percent of voters in this Yosemite poll feel that the frequency is too great) Aqua and more during the periods 1997-2002 and 20142015:
Suitability
Understood thanks.
Let's not forget that Yosemite itself looks somewhat out of place on a Mac
It's not ignored by me, but thanks all of that is good for other readers.
And Yosemite is not a good example of careful design choices by Apple (in my opinion, it's less than OK).
And it's known that some developers of other operating system and third party apps will follow Apple precedents unquestioningly (so I see other products that are less than OK) and so on.
Whilst I can't fault the beta test feedback routines, I do believe that Yosemite was released way too soon. Problems with Wi-Fi etc. are off-topic but they're part of a big picture in which a much better-looking operating system could have resulted from beta testing.
I'm inclined to view the entire Yosemite phase, including all 10.10.x releases to come, as one long beta with hopes of 10.11 being a more reasonable beta (May/June 2015?) and a more reasonable release (I'd happily wait until 2016).
Yes and no.
As a complement to the content published by Apple, you might find this useful: ASCIIwwdc - Searchable full-text transcripts of WWDC sessions
On YouTube: Apple WWDC 2014: Everything is Awesome Super-Cut if you mentally filter out the humour, you're left with a blipvert of WWDC 2014.
The introduction of Aqua was:
- probably less controversial than the prerelease of Yosemite
- less rushed.
Is OS X upgrading too quickly? (seventy-five percent of voters in this Yosemite poll feel that the frequency is too great) Aqua and more during the periods 1997-2002 and 20142015:
Suitability
Understood thanks.
Let's not forget that Yosemite itself looks somewhat out of place on a Mac
It's not ignored by me, but thanks all of that is good for other readers.
And Yosemite is not a good example of careful design choices by Apple (in my opinion, it's less than OK).
And it's known that some developers of other operating system and third party apps will follow Apple precedents unquestioningly (so I see other products that are less than OK) and so on.
Whilst I can't fault the beta test feedback routines, I do believe that Yosemite was released way too soon. Problems with Wi-Fi etc. are off-topic but they're part of a big picture in which a much better-looking operating system could have resulted from beta testing.
I'm inclined to view the entire Yosemite phase, including all 10.10.x releases to come, as one long beta with hopes of 10.11 being a more reasonable beta (May/June 2015?) and a more reasonable release (I'd happily wait until 2016).
Yea so leading on from that... what they decided to was make Aqua flat. Aqua was never intended to look flat. It's a "wouldn't it be cool if..." moment that should of stayed at the water cooler or smoke filled basement.
If you want to do a flat UI, you need to start again because you do not want to limit the potential to "think different" and act different" so you can "start something new".
This is very limiting approach if you are the right kind of ambitious... you're going for broke but what you're going for is a prize no one else can see and if you win it, it represents more than monetary reward.
So APPLE are trying to conform to Aqua expectations but deliver something that looks new and performs new but is really equivlent to letting some fo the air out of your performance car tyres and claiming a better experience, ok I can't feel the bumps in the road so much so it must be better right?
Better because....
A) The car can't go as fast anymore but it's still a nice lookin car!
B) The tyres are softer to absorb the shock better so you feel smugly snug.
YOSX is not the Hover board we all hoped for in 2015.
(if you missed the metaphorical destination.....The prize was the Hover board)
If you want to do a flat UI, you need to start again because you do not want to limit the potential to "think different" and act different" so you can "start something new".
This is very limiting approach if you are the right kind of ambitious... you're going for broke but what you're going for is a prize no one else can see and if you win it, it represents more than monetary reward.
So APPLE are trying to conform to Aqua expectations but deliver something that looks new and performs new but is really equivlent to letting some fo the air out of your performance car tyres and claiming a better experience, ok I can't feel the bumps in the road so much so it must be better right?
Better because....
A) The car can't go as fast anymore but it's still a nice lookin car!
B) The tyres are softer to absorb the shock better so you feel smugly snug.
YOSX is not the Hover board we all hoped for in 2015.
(if you missed the metaphorical destination.....The prize was the Hover board)
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