Rating:
Pros:
A complete UI redesign of Apple’s longest-running OS. Gone are the gloss and shine and in are the flatness and minimalism. Yosemite is also tightly integrated into the iOS ecosystem now--a huge plus for iPhone owners. Great improvements to Mail, Safari, and Spotlight.
Cons:
If you aren’t an iPhone or iPad user, you may find this a relatively minor feature upgrade. Also, OS X 10.10 Yosemite was clearly designed for Retina displays, so if you have an older Mac some of its beauty might be lost on you.
Verdict:
It’s fast, free, and sexy as hell. OS X 10.10 Yosemite is the best desktop OS Apple has ever put out.
Apple launched OS X Yosemite in late-2013 after an extensive public-beta testing period, whereby the general public –– you and me –– could sign up for early access to the software in order to help Apple ensure everything was smooth as silk prior to its official release. It proved popular and word on the street suggests Apple will do the exact same thing with its upcoming iOS 9 update.
Apple Releases OS X Yosemite 10.10.3
The OS X Yosemite v10.10.3 update includes the new Photos app and improves the stability, compatibility, and security of your Mac, said Apple in a statement to the press. Below is a full breakdown of all the features and updates you will find inside the new software.
With Photos you can:
- Browse your photos by time and location in Moments, Collections, and Years views
- Navigate your library using convenient Photos, Shared, Albums, and Projects tabs
- Store all of your photos and videos in iCloud Photo Library in their original format and in full resolution
- Access your photos and videos stored in iCloud Photo Library from your Mac, iPhone, iPad, or iCloud.com with your web browser
- Perfect your photos with powerful and easy-to-use editing tools that optimize with a single click or slider, or allow precise adjustments with detailed controls
- Create professional-quality photo books with simplified bookmaking tools, new Apple-designed themes, and new square book formats
- Purchase prints in new square and panoramic sizes
This update also includes the following improvements:
- Adds over 300 new Emoji characters
- Adds Spotlight suggestions to Look Up
- Prevents Safari from saving website favicon URLs used in Private Browsing
- Improves stability and security in Safari
- Improves Wi-Fi performance and connectivity in various usage scenarios
- Improves compatibility with captive Wi-Fi network environments
- Fixes an issue that might cause Bluetooth devices to disconnect
- Improves screen sharing reliability
At its core, though, Yosemite is about bringing iOS and OS X closer to together, making Apple’s wider ecosystem more robust. Features like Extensions, Hand off and Continuity aimed to make OS X and iOS more useful when used in conjunction with one another. Having the ability to pick up an email you started on your iMac on an iPhone or iPad is pretty damn handy. I get what Apple was striving for and I like the direction it is taking OS X –– it’s mobile mobile, more agile and more useful than ever.
Apple will unveil OS X 10.11 at this year’s WWC 2015 expo, which runs from June 8 to June 12, 2015, in San Francisco. Unlike Yosemite, which was a big, design-centric update, OS X 10.11 is expected to instead focus on security features, bug fixes and overall stability. Control Center will apparently get a facelift too, and will boast similar features to its iOS-based counterpart, meaning the addition of music controls and access to things like Do Not Disturb, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth.
“Apple is rumoured to be working on a new kernel-level security system called Rootless,” according to Mac Rumors, “which will help curb malware by preventing access to protected system files. Apple may also convert many IMAP-based applications like Notes, Reminders, and Calendars to its iCloud Drive system to improve communication between the apps and increase security.”
You can read about all of Yosemite's best features in our Ultimate Guide To Apple's OS X Yosemite. It's an ongoing article that will have new content, tips and tricks added on a weekly basis -- just like our Ultimate Guide To The iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. There's a ton of new features inside Yosemite, so be sure to bookmark the page so you can always discover new and innovative features, tips and tricks.
Read on to find out all about its new features, how they work and what they’re like to use in practice.
OS X Yosemite Review: Look and Feel
The most recognizable new change in OS X 10.10 Yosemite is, of course, it’s entire look. Apple has gotten rid of the glossy buttons and large drop shadows in favor of a minimalist, flat design--and it works exceedingly well. This new design style is pervasive throughout the OS, from the menu bar to Finder windows to the Dock. Apple was so obsessed with going minimalist it even created an entirely new system-wide font.
The thin lines of text, buttons shapes, and window borders make this the most eye-pleasing desktop OS I’ve ever used. And the new flatness of its shapes--like the red, yellow, and green stoplight buttons--give the OS a vibrancy I’ve not seen before.
There’s no doubt about it: OS X Yosemite is the most beautiful operating system Apple has ever designed. It’s even more beautiful than iOS 7. Every aspect of the OS has been redesigned to give it a flatter, more modern look. Gone are the gloss and the large drop shadows and in their place are translucent frosted glass elements and clean, thin lines.
Though a redesigned interface is everywhere, it's no more apparent than in the Dock, which is now a flat, two-dimensional strip of frosted glass across the bottom of the screen. All the icons on the Dock are flat now too and slightly cartoonish for some (Finder, for example). But overall, the new Dock works exceedingly well from a visual perspective.
The menu bar that runs along the top of the screen now also sits flat with the background, giving it one unified appearance. Open up a Finder window and you’ll see even more changes, almost too many to talk about in one review. Nevertheless, some of my immediate favourites are the translucent sidebars that show through frosted glass what is behind the window you are in and the new, flat red, yellow, and green stoplight buttons that allow you to control window size and shape.
It’s clear Yosemite’s inspiration came directly from iOS 7, but with it Apple made this redesign the desktop’s own. It is absolutely gorgeous.
Translucency (aka “frosted glass”) is also a big part of OS X 10.10 Yosemite’s theme. The Dock is now flat and translucent, allowing the desktop wallpaper to blur through from behind it. The same is true of all sidebars in Finder and apps, and even in the title bars of apps like Safari. Scroll through a Finder window or a web page in Safari and you’ll notice the content blur as it creeps behind title bars. This translucency effect is not only beautiful, but it helps give context to where your items are as you navigate around windows and apps.
The only thing that it did take me some time to get used to about the look of OS X 10.10 Yosemite was how bright it is. That’s because of all the thin lines--there’s more white space than ever before. I actually needed to turn down the brightness on my MacBook by 25% so I wasn’t blinded. But once I made that adjustment things were just fine (although they could still reduce the brightness of the Finder’s folders, IMHO).
OS X Yosemite Review: Continuity and iOS Integration
If the new flat UI is the icing on OS X 10.10 Yosemite’s cake, its main new feature--Continuity--is the deliciously doughy center. While it’s clear a main objective of OS X 10.10 Yosemite was to give OS X the same look and feel of iOS, the other primary objective was to being Apple’s two OS’s closer together than ever before.
Apple has achieved this through a feature called Continuity. Specifically Continuity consists of three major features--all of which require iOS 8 to work.
The first major Continuity feature relates to phone calls. Now when your Mac and your iPhone are on the same Wi-Fi network you can make and receive phone calls right on your Mac. When your iPhone rings you’ll get a notification on your Mac and can answer it right there. These aren’t VOIP calls either--it’s a real phone call (how it works is the software simply streams the call from your iPhone to your Mac). Because of this your mom, for example, could call from her landline to your iPhone and you can answer it on your Mac. Pretty cool.
Related to this is a new SMS feature. Previously iOS and OS X users could get iMessages (the blue chat bubbles) on their iPhone and Mac no problem, but regular text messages (the green chat bubbles) were relegated to only your iPhone since they require a cellular connection. But now thanks to Continuity OS X 10.10 Yosemite sports SMS Relay, which automatically pushes all you regular green text messages from your iPhone to your Mac (as long as the two are on the same Wi-Fi network). This allows you to send and receive text messages on your Mac to and from people that might not have an iOS device (aham, Android users).
The third big feature of Continuity is Handoff. Handoff allows you to automatically pass whatever you are doing on one device (your Mac or your iPhone or iPad) to the next. For example, if you’re composing an email on your iPhone or creating an iWork document on it, you can simply switch to your Mac and pick up composing the email or editing the iWork document right where you left off. This is done seamlessly and automatically. The first time I used this feature it felt like magic. I had opened a Pages document to edit on my iPhone, but then wanted to continue working on it on my Mac. When I went to my desktop the Handoff notification for the Pages document was waiting for me to the left hand side of the Finder icon in my Dock. I simply clicked on it and it opened in Pages on my Mac--the cursor was even in the same spot.
OS X Yosemite Review: Spotlight and Notification Center
OS X 10.10 Yosemite also sports some other system-wide new features. The first of these is a new and improved Spotlight. Spotlight is OS X’s system-wide search. Previously its interface and results were always locked to the top right side of your screen. But in OS X 10.10 Yosemite Spotlight takes front and center--literally. Now when you click the Spotlight icon the Spotlight search field displays right in the center of your screen. Simply begin searching and your results are populated right there too.
And now not only will Spotlight search for files on your computer, it will now search Wikipedia, new stories, movie showtimes, and even restaurants in your area. In this way Spotlight moves from a local Mac search tool to a global information querying interface. It also does plenty of other cool things like calculates math formulas right in the search bar, and, as always, not only searches for documents based on filenames, but searches text inside of documents and emails to return relevant contextual search results.
Before now I’d never been that big of a user of Spotlight. Now however, it’s become a tool I use almost hourly.
Apple has also totally revamped Notification Center in OS X. As with iOS, it’s now divided into a Today and Notifications tab. The Notifications tab contains all your usual push notifications that Notification Center in OS X 10.9 contained. But the new Today tab gives you a complete overview of your day ahead and also sports some incredibly handy widgets like a calculator, stocks, weather, world clock, and more. It also allows third-party OS X apps to install their own widgets. Notification Center is a really nice tool thanks to the Today view. But it also foreshadows the fall of another long-standing OS X feature--Dashboard widgets. Dashboard was the only thing in OS X 10.10 Yosemite to not get a visual makeover. This combined with the fact that Notification Center seems to be Apple’s choice for widget location means that Dashboard fans better prepare themselves for OS X 10.10 Yosemite being the last OS X to feature Dashboard widgets.
OS X Yosemite Review: Mail and Safari
Both Mail and Safari--like other built-in apps--got major visual makeovers in OS X 10.10 Yosemite. But these two apps also got a handful of new features. My favorite new feature in Mail is Markup. This allows users to markup attachments they include in an email. How does this work? Well, I frequently send images or PDFs to people that I open up in other apps first so I can make notes on them or call out part of images with lines or other markups. But now in Mail in Yosemite I can simply drag an image or PDF into my email and markup the attached document right within Mail. The markup tools are also exceptionally brilliant, turning my squiggly circles into perfect spheres. Simply drag an image into your email, click the Markup button and get drawing lines or adding text. Click Done and your image or PDF is saved with your markings. The recipient doesn’t need a Mac to view them either--the markings are saved right into the attachments.
Besides Mail my most-frequently used app is Safari, which gains a complete visual overhaul in OS X 10.10 Yosemite and some new features as well. The best new feature is the improved tab view. Click the tabs button and see all your open tabs as a contact sheet. Simply click on one to bring it forward. This new tab view also allows you to see open web pages on your other iOS devices. Tap on them to open that page on your Mac.
The address bar has also gained some nifty new features as well, such as now your favorite sites can be quickly accessed from where you enter the URL. Click on the site’s icon to launch the page. Also, now when performing a search from the address bar Safari will autosuggest news results, local business locations (with maps!), articles from Wikipedia, and more.
OS X Yosemite Review: Performance, Cost and Verdict
The above features are just some of the new benefits OS X 10.10 Yosemite brings. As with any OS upgrade, there are literally dozens of smaller improvements throughout the OS. Stumbling upon them is half the fun. Performance-wise it also has given my MacBook a speed bump and longer battery life. Chances are it will do the same for your Mac.
But the big question is: should you upgrade?
The answer? Hell yes.
OS X 10.10 Yosemite is completely free. If your Mac can run OS X 10.9, it can run OS X 10.10 Yosemite. There is no reason not to download it. And for being a “X.X.0” release, it’s remarkably stable and bug free. That’s probably thanks to the fact that Apple decided to do a rare public beta over the summer, so it caught and fixed a lot more bugs than it normally does for a first release.
For me OS X 10.10 Yosemite is the freshest and most exciting software release Apple has done in years. The massive visual changes makes it feel like I’ve gotten a new Mac and the feature enhancements and tighter integration with iOS makes anything Microsoft is doing with Windows seem like it’s stuck in the past. OS X 10.10 Yosemite isn’t only the best Mac OS ever, it’s the best desktop OS on the market, full stop.
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