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New Mac OS X Yosemite (re Ashton)
I have three Macs in routine use: near-twin production iMacs, each rather long in the tooth (about seven years at this point) for home and work, and a notebook, a "MacBook Pro" a year junior to these, on which I seldom do serious work, although I have the Adobe CS4 software installed thereupon. I have upgraded this secondary platform to "Yosemite" (the other two are "Mavericks" machines), and perhaps because I do not consult it daily, the Yosemite GUI does not trouble me as much as it apparently does Ashton.

It does feel like a transitional product, and it also feels increasingly as though Mac OS X development is an afterthought on Apple's part. I would hope that someday soon Cupertino will spare some of its varsity coders from iOS to work on the Mac. The "flattening" of the UI is slightly incomplete, and also co-exists a bit uncomfortably with the translucency that so irritates A. Brown. I miss the "gumdrop" versions of the red/yellow/green buttons at the upper left of every Finder window, but these are almost the only related elements I miss from the original "lickable" OS X that Steve Jobs introduced with such fanfare early in the present century. Look up some of those old screenshots: they're pretty garish.

As to interface design generally, I think that Microsoft has, astonishingly, stolen a march on Apple since its introduction of the "Metro" design, the first time in living memory that Redmond has unveiled a UI that doesn't resemble a cheap imitation of the Mac visual interface. Good for them. With all due respect to "if it ain't broke, don't fix it," I'd like to see more in the way of paradigm-breaking design from Apple: but of course, if it's too radical I'm apt to join the old mens' chorus decrying it. I sympathize with the Mac software design team, trying to balance the irreconcilable demands of multiple constituencies.

Anyway, Ashton, I recommend that you work for a while with Yosemite. Try to ignore the elements that irritate you; get acquainted if you can with some unfamiliar functionalities. In half a year you may discover that you have gained as much as you have lost.

cordially,
New Yosemite has some defaults that annoy J.
She's been working on an Excel spreadsheet for an upcoming trip to "fire country" with her sister. :-/

Yosemite on her 13" MBP seems to default to making scroll bars disappear and enabled a bunch of multi-touch gestures on the Trackpad. She was pulling her hair out with it for weeks until she told me about it. I did some Googling and told her about how to turn off the "new and improved" defaults.

My impression is that they're trying to iOS-ify OSX for some reason. Maybe they figure they have to prepare for a touch-screen MBP and iMac future. Or something.

I'll have the "fun" of moving from Win7 to Win10 at work soon, so I'll too get to join the "change for no good reason" griping... :-)

Cheers,
Scott.
New Apple design has some ... holes.
Principal is the fact that there is a lot you can't make OS X do, not necessarily because Apple have decided it's a bad idea, but because they can't easily conceive of why anyone would want to do that.

This is a very extreme example, but I found a blog post a few years ago about some enterprising soul trying to create focus-follows-mouse in OS X. The TL;DR is: there is a basic assumption to the design of keyboard shortcuts that require the menu to be correct and it is this that prevents focus-follows-mouse from being implementable. And behind that is that Apple OS devs cannot understand what focus-follow-mouse is.

Wade.
New I would have thought that NextStep (or NEXTSTEP or whatever) had it.
Presumably that stuff could have been put in there, but the menu at the top thingy would have made it tricky. What would you want to happen if there was an unfocused window between the active window and the top-of-the-screen menu that you wanted to access?

There apparently was freeware/shareware that tried to create work-arounds to various degrees of success - http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/5/how-can-i-make-focus-follow-the-mouse-cursor

Cheers,
Scott.
New It's a complicated problem.
The Menu at the top of the screen is one piece. Handling AutoRaise properly is another.

Also, that blog post I mentioned was for several major versions of OS X ago - like 5 or 6. It is possible that something has been tweaked by Apple that makes it a lot more possible in more recent versions.

But my point was that Apple has strong blind spots sometimes.

Wade.
New Indeed.
Yes, Steve had strong opinions about too many things, and OS X had and has some weird limitations as a result.

An old friend at work was the group Mac expert. He ordered and set up one of the 1U Servers that Apple was selling for a while. He would tell occasional stories about how upgrading to the latest version of OS X would break all kinds of server-y things - unfortunately I've forgotten the details. The clear implication was that they didn't bother to test the changes because they figured nobody would do that...

Over the weekend J was trying to remember how to (effectively) duplicate a music CD. I got her a copy of "Toast" to do that a few years ago, but I vaguely recalled that iTunes has a way to do it. Naturally, there have been so many changes to iTunes over the years that the cheat sheets one can find don't seem to apply any more. And it's not at all obvious how one does it through the menus now. I ended up clicking and poking to explore a little and did my usual, "Command-Click", "Option-Click", "Shift-Click" exploration and an extensive menu popped up for one of them. "How did you do that??" - she said. She's been using Macs since her grad-school days and still has to relearn stuff because Apple continuously hides functionality away in their attempt to make things "easy"... She eventually got it done, but I always dread when she wants to make a CD because it always involves an hour or two of wasted time and increasing frustration, and it's always a little different from the time before.

Oh well. If they weren't continuing to change it, nobody would buy machines to run new versions I guess...

Cheers,
Scott.
New Oh I know the upgrade problem.
I use a Bluetooth mouse on my work MBP. This worked perfectly on 10.8 (Mountain Lion). However, Apple, in their infinite wisdom, did something to the BT stack for Mavericks. Now it has trouble re-connecting to the mouse upon wakeup unless the mouse is already on, as well as other re-connection bugs. I found evidence that Apple are *actively ignoring* the problem. They just don't fucking care. And no-one can even figure out why.

Wade.
New Yup. :-/
New Windows 10 is the *tits*
Seriously. It's what operating systems should be like.

My PC boots from cold to lock screen in 12 seconds. Right-click on the start button for the best menu in the world ever (or press Win-X). Pin everything to the taskbar like you did in 7, and have a start menu that doesn't live in a ridiculous tiny little box like Windows 7, but which also lets you pin all your stuff to it.

Gripes: not enough differentiation between the active window and the rest. Focus is weird and inconsistent; even UAC windows can popup UNDER everything else, which is obviously less than ideal. Edge isn't finished, although it already spanks everything else for speed. When it gets extensions (coming RSN) and therefore adblock, it'll be just adorable.

Back to good stuff. Edge has a dark theme. IT HAS A DARK THEME. (As does Office 2016, which is a pleasing change from the "Bright, really bright, or retina-searing" choices 2013 gave)

In fact, my Windows 10 is agreeably dark throughout, although the white background of the Settings app can go DIAF.

Similarly, I'm hearing that OS X 10.10 and the upcoming 10.11 are brighter than the surface of the sun, although you can make the menu bar dark.

Amusingly, for a piece of software that comes from a company that is moving all its devices to high-DPI, iTunes doesn't have a fucking clue what to do with a high-resolution display on Windows. You have a choice - fuzzy as hell, or Just Wrong.

tl;dr for AS: JFDI - you'll be fine.
New Agreed that, it's a bit early and something of a teapot in a (Pontiac) Tempest
..to rue, anew the utter disdain for Our fi-fis--and any logical expression of customer reasoning--in a corporation now clearly with bit-in-teeth, heading for Trillionaire status. Might as well try for an existential discussion with any old zealot. Anyway.. Now that I have a bitchin 24"-diag. of screen and the barely-OK 8 GBs with which to clutter same, I shall try to wade through the {doubtless randomly rearranged combos), as the last refuge of a scoundrel er, innovator, see if I can remedy various annoyances:

1) A screen bright enough to kindle a fire, with decent magnifier focus ... even at [0] (there are no [-]s on that axis

2) The default Fashion-industry soft pastels/the enemies of a necessary Contrast
..seeming everywhere (with colours bleeding-into Text boxes! a dead-giveaway that the design honchos were on some Owsley-2015 substances. I know nada about "Style Sheets" nor--at best--how such a thing might deflect this race to Cutesiness into a casual lope towards: needing fewer keystrokes + guesses ..just to Get Stuff Done. Surely The System will fight-off any serious efforts to ameliorate.
But, ignoring Why Contrast matters // Grey-over-WHITE! TEXT!! ... What Can one say to that?

3) Meanwhile.. Console reveals that: Yosemite is/remains *unhappy with the utterly-essential iStat:
8/17/15 1:43:59.782 PM DashboardClient[661]: (com.iSlayer.iStatpro4.widget) file:///Users/gort/Library/Widgets/iStat%20Pro.wdgt/Wide.js: TypeError: undefined is not an object (evaluating 'data.outputString.split') (line: 615)
..this amidst the deluge of nightly subterranean chatter ‘twixt Apple’s minions at the iTunes Pavilion (a place I never had to deal with, in all recorded history.)
Its own log snippets evoke the quips of their fabricating minions via such as ... Good Night, Gracie, Love. It. Did note though, that the glacial delays to use or make bookmarks, seem to have auto-cured self via—presumably—some patches slipped in (? but never Called That, natch). Unless one believes in software-with-a-healing-immune-system.

Well, I had a good run on Snow Leopard and have read that I’m not the only one who recalls that One-year Reprieve from insanely-great betas: wherein they refined, compacted the guts AND the upgrade to Snow-Leopard could not have been more painless even with methyl-benzoyl-ecgonine hydrochloride, in a drip-feed.

Now with a certified-Spare machine, I trust I can next go back to that 1/09 well-earned Sleep after those yeares of The ƒeare that, perhaps Today? shall be the day the Registry eats-self and spews smiley-faces across the rotating-storage in its death throes. As this pair shall not be networked, seems pretty unlikely that both next could perish simultaneously. Right?

(‘Course, pour moi, a switch to Windows 12 or 16 may be my only feasible next leap, if Apple keeps aiming for the 3% rather than 10% who can afford their boutiques for boutique-pricing. Oh. Well. Lose a planet? Lose an O.S. What’s the diff.

ED: second try to add a note here:
* unhappy, but Launched anyway! earning a +3 Attagirl! to the Apple coder-boffin who left some slack in that Boolean straitjacket.

(Not that any of these gripes can hold a candle! to the massive-other Impendings now inflicting upon our dilettante species.)
Maybe bitchin about Apple's solipsism deflects from noticing our own?
Expand Edited by Ashton Aug. 18, 2015, 09:17:40 PM EDT
New re iStat Pro - you can still get it.
He's not wanting to keep updating it as Apple seems to be wanting to do away with Dashboard Widgets. But you can apparently still get it - maybe a fresh install with a later version will work better?

See this thread.

HTH!

On the rest, yeah, too often "progress" isn't. :-( I figured that as we got more pixels on our screens, we'd be able to get higher information density and greater clarity. The fashion and OS designers seem to have intentionally gone the other way - less information on the screen, more blank space, less contrast. Things aren't quite as bad as the very early days of Wired magazine and HotWired, but they're bad all the same.

WIRED magazine, with its ever-changing typography and fluorescent text, had been defiantly unreadable. Its designers wore that charge like a badge of honor.


Oooh. Edgy.

:-/

Cheers,
Scott.
New Thanks, al punte.
Since iStat-Pro seems healthy (chatter notwithstanding) I don't see how this mini-version appeals. Yet.. 'Seems' in that it displays sane data, verifiable via Sys. Info. Of course, with all the yammering, preps of new betas for developers etc. one day next it might just not pop-Up. I expect its author will find a way 'round Apple arbitrariness, (lest there be mobs/torches in Cupertino.) Will watch for a new release.

Next to decipher: where the sensors for the two Northbridge inputs are attached, assume it's Si tech of standard sort: and keep those/too below 130ish °F, just because. Thermodynamics ..the nag that bites many an ass.

Ah well, trying to decipher most Console messages is a fool's errand (as Greg tried to convince moi, early on ) but I've still looked at enough to discern routine -vs- strangeness. RIP Greg; nobody ever knoze what suffering occurs in others' jelloware, as was also timely recalled yesterday. :-/

Wired.. Mosaic.. PineMail! ... out-geeking the Unix-Pros at IU/Bloomington: to get Cyrillic into e-mails for my friend and her classmates. Starting from scratch, I was amazed at how easy was the hack, solved by just Man unix and w.t.f. 'Home' meant. Amazing shit so far, from PDP-8s on through Northbridge-y things. (And I didn't much like programming as any avocation, either!) Maybe its just ego gratification that attaches to Boolean exercises: 'Solved!' gets brownie points/endorphins.

We're such robots.. no wonder the demagogues can pander to vanity in the vastly-inept ... (just by repeatedly telling them how smart they are?)



Sell short!
New Wired!
In one of his books some years back a writer (probably Neal Stephenson) tossed off an allusion to a tech/culture magazine so aggressive in its design that its subscribers were obliged to don welders' masks to read it.

blinded with science,
New Don't fall in the root hole...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/08/18/apple_local_root_os_x_yosemite/
A vulnerability has been found in Apple's operating system that allows ordinary software on the computer to gain all-powerful root privileges, ...

Unchecked null pointer dereference in the kernel. Oopsie!
New Whoops.
     Mac OS X Yosemite (re Ashton) - (rcareaga) - (14)
         Yosemite has some defaults that annoy J. - (Another Scott) - (7)
             Apple design has some ... holes. - (static) - (5)
                 I would have thought that NextStep (or NEXTSTEP or whatever) had it. - (Another Scott) - (4)
                     It's a complicated problem. - (static) - (3)
                         Indeed. - (Another Scott) - (2)
                             Oh I know the upgrade problem. - (static) - (1)
                                 Yup. :-/ -NT - (Another Scott)
             Windows 10 is the *tits* - (pwhysall)
         Agreed that, it's a bit early and something of a teapot in a (Pontiac) Tempest - (Ashton) - (5)
             re iStat Pro - you can still get it. - (Another Scott) - (2)
                 Thanks, al punte. - (Ashton)
                 Wired! - (rcareaga)
             Don't fall in the root hole... - (scoenye) - (1)
                 Whoops. -NT - (Another Scott)

Thanks for noticing.
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