Apple’s new desktop operating system is out today, and the
final version of the major software update includes lots of changes for your
Mac. It’s still OS X, though – Yosemite hasn’t gone so far afield that people
used to Mavericks or Mountain Lion will feel adrift, but it comes with some
impressive new additions and feature tweaks that make the overall experience of
using any Mac – and using a Mac together with an iPhone or iPad – more
pleasant, and more productive.
Look And Feel
OS X Yosemite brings one of the biggest changes to Apple’s
desktop operating system in the past decade, thanks to a redesign of app
toolbars, as well as a new system-wide font, a brand new dock design and the
addition of translucency across system elements to give you a subtle peek at
what’s behind your active software, and what’s on your desktop. There’s also an
option to switch to a new dark menu bar and dock, which seems like a very small
thing, but in practice is actually quite useful if you spend a long time
staring at your computer each day.
The font is actually one of my favorite things about OS X
Yosemite, and it’s particularly useful now that many Mac users are shifting to
Retina displays. The new text renders much better when viewed at higher resolutions,
like when you dial up the screen real estate setting on your 15-inch Retina
MacBook Pro, for instance. It’s more legible at all built-in system
resolutions, however, and seems to both ease eye-strain and just generally make
your desktop computing experience more comfortable.
The new dock and toolbar feature a flatter look, which is
more in keeping with the design language Apple began to embrace in iOS 7. The
new look isn’t so dramatic that users will be confused as to the function and
purpose of interface elements, however; the change to the toolbars frees up
space to give more usable area to the app upon which it appears, and the new
look for Apple’s system apps in the redesigned dock make for easier legibility
and recognition.
Translucency is an element that lets you see through select
interface elements, in system apps like Messages, for instance, to get a better
idea of what else you have running on your desktop. This is the surest sign in
Yosemite that Apple isn’t moving towards making OS X and iOS the same, in terms
of design and function – it’s an aesthetic feature, yes, but it’s also created
because desktop users often have multiple application running at once, and
providing even an opaque look at what’s going on beneath your current active
window can help situate a person in that kind of multitasking environment. As
someone who frequently has a huge number of windows open at one time, I can
vouch for its effectiveness, even if the impact on the overall workflow is very
subtle.
Apple’s new look for OS X in Yosemite is a great blend of
progress and restraint – it’s significant enough that you notice the changes,
which are by and large for the better, but it’s not so dramatic that anyone
updating from a recent version should have any trouble adjusting.
Today View
The new Today View in Yosemite mirrors the new Today View
Apple introduced in iOS 8 in September. As on mobile, it makes the Notification
Center panel a lot more useful, thanks in large part to greater user control
over what they see, and the introduction of third-party widget support. Being
able to drop stuff from the Today View that I never use, like Stocks, entirely,
and then push up more useful features like the Calculator to the top is a huge
benefit.
Today View replaces Dashboard for much of my standard daily
workflow, but it does more than just replace Apple’s previous home for widgets,
because I actually open it more than once every couple of weeks or months.
Dashboard was solid in concept, as a place where lightweight, almost-apps that
don’t require your full attention and that serve very specific functions could
live, but it was too hidden and inconvenient to operate. Today View provides a
much better home for widgets, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple drops
Dashboard altogether in future iterations of OS X.
Spotlight
The new Spotlight is much more than a system-wide file
search, freed from Finder, which is what it has been mostly up until now. Apple
made it more powerful when it let it search from a variety of sources, but the
new look of spotlight and the Command+Space Bar shortcut key combination really
make it a full-fledged utility in its own right.
Spotlight will now autocomplete your queries based on what’s
on your Mac, and what’s being searched for and talked about online. It offers
much more information directly within Spotlight itself, too, eliminating the
need to even open up a separate app to complete a lot of tasks. The rich and
interactive previews Spotlight presents will give you full looks at photos and
documents, and complete contact cards and events from your Calendar, and you
can view and modify information just by clicking on it in these rich previews.
See the address for your next appointment by clicking that info in Spotlight
Preview, for instance, or call a friend from the preview of their contact card.
Previews also provide summarized Wikipedia entries, Maps
location previews, news from Bing and movie information including showtimes,
ratings and ratings from Rotten Tomatoes. iTunes results will display albums,
ratings and release dates, editors notes and track listings direct from Apple’s
digital store itself. Spotlight can also now do conversions directly within the
app, so you can go from metric to imperial (a daily chore for me) without even
opening a browser window.
Spotlight is a great app launcher, and made more so because
of its new design and activation methods, but Apple has also put a lot of
polish into the app itself, turning it almost into a Siri for the desktop, albeit
with text entry instead of speech – yet another sign the company is paying
close attention to the differences in usage habits between desktop and mobile
and designing experiences accordingly.
Messages
The new Messages in Yosemite is an app that recognizes
people use messaging more often than email now for quick, casual communication,
and even for work and longer missives. Conversations can now be named, so that
when you’re communicating in groups you don’t jump in and say the wrong one to
the wrong people, and this feature carries over to iOS and vice versa, so that
names are the same no matter where you set them up.
Other great new group messaging features let you add
participants to existing conversations, remove yourself from them entirely or
just mute them to ensure you won’t hear about every new update in a
particularly active (and perhaps not so interesting) family chat.
On the desktop, you can also now see all media attachments
used in a conversation in a pop-up viewer, which is great for most situations,
but also means you probably want to be more mindful about what you share.
Messages has always had a memory, but increased accessibility means you might
be surprised yourself to find what that memory contains. You can also now send
and receive quick audio messages using the microphone button next to the
message composition field.
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Apple has also provided Messages with screen sharing
support, which is a great feature should you ever have to do any family
troubleshooting, or remote workplace collaboration. Screen sharing lets both
participants in a conversation see one of their desktops, allowing for
activities like co-browsing the web, or viewing a representation in real-time
with a co-worker. Both parties can interact with the desktop, thought the
viewer can just control where the cursor points, with a spotlight showing you
when and where they click, and the Messages app begins a real-time audio
conversation as soon as you kick off a session, with the assumption being that
you’ll want to talk over what you’re doing without having to type it out (as
you’ll be interacting with the desktop at the same time).
Message-based screen sharing is a great idea, and a smart
placement for this feature. It’s been possible on Macs before, but this makes
the process simple enough that anyone can use it, and given that it’s a handy
way to collaboratively solve problems for novice users, housing it in Messages,
which is increasingly the hub of multi-user communication on the Mac, makes
perfect sense.
Continuity Features
Handoff
Apple’s attention to the changing roles of desktop and
mobile computing devices, and how users are integrating them into their lives
are perhaps best expressed by Yosemite’s Handoff features. With this version of
OS X, Apple now lets users start an activity on their Mac, and then pick it up
on their iPhone or iPad, or vice versa. So if you’re composing an email on your
MacBook, but need to run to the bus to avoid being late, you can seamlessly
continue composing on your iPhone.
Handoff’s rollout began with iOS 8, but since Yosemite
wasn’t yet publicly available, users were limited to being able to start and
carry on tasks between iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. It was useful as a
mobile-only feature, but with desktop integration, it becomes much more so.
Handoff works automatically, too – so long as both devices are signed into your
iCloud account, it’ll appear when deemed relevant or useful. So far, I’ve had
it reliably provide me with the right suggestions when I wanted it to be there,
as it seems like Apple errs on the side of caution in terms of popping up the
icon in the bottom left of your lock screen, or at the far left of your dock,
to initiate the switch-off.
So far, Handoff is supported by Mail, Safari, Maps,
Messages, Reminders, Calendars, Contacts, Notes, Keynote, Numbers and Pages out
of the box, but Apple is also offering an API so your favorite cross-platform
third-party apps can take advantage. Any developer out there who offers apps on
both iOS and Mac would do well to bake this feature in, as it’s hard to go back
to more manual ways of moving from platform to platform once you’ve experienced
it.
Make/Receive Phone Calls
Apple now lets you make and receive phone calls directly
through your Mac, which is achieved by routing the call through your smartphone
when both your Yosemite-powered computer and your iOS 8 iPhone are on the same
network. In practice it means that if you have your iPhone in the other room
and you get a call while you’re at your computer, you don’t have to run to
catch it. It also means that you can field calls to your mobile using whatever
headphone and mic setup you’re already working with on your desktop, which is
great for remote workers like myself.
It works well in practice, though I did experience a few
instances where there was noticeable lag on calls. Still, it’s very useful, and
a far better solution than any of the third-party apps I’ve tried that offer
similar experiences with Android devices. The fact that the phone and Mac have
to both be on the same Wi-Fi network means you can’t use it as a pseudo roaming
solution while your mobile’s at home and you’re in another country, but if this
version works out, maybe that’ll arrive at a later date.
Send/Receive SMS
This new iOS 8.1 feature allows Macs running Yosemite to
send and receive SMS messages, again routing them through the iPhone. The SMS
feature means that even your contacts who don’t have an iOS device will be able
to send you messages, and receive yours, no matter what device you happen to be
using. It’s essentially iMessage expanded beyond just iCloud users, and it’s a
great feature.
The first time you get those green messages on your Mac
feels like a revelation – you no longer have to campaign those contacts to
switch platforms just for the sake of convenience. Replying to them works just
as well as receiving, and in the end it means Messages become even more the hub
of interpersonal communication on your Mac, and beyond.
This feature requires iOS 8.1 to work, so it isn’t yet
available to the general public, but I was able to test it out ahead of launch
and based on my experience it should be solid when it hits general
availability.
Instant Hotspot
When Apple introduced the ability to use your mobile
connection on your iPhone as a hotspot to share internet access with your other
devices, it changed the way many of us use our devices. Instant Hotspot takes
that basic innovation and refines it, allowing you to activate and use the
hotspot on your iPhone or cellular-capable iPad without having to even take
them out or activate their screens.
When you have an iOS 8.1 (this one also requires the
upcoming update) device with a cellular connection, and you’re signed in on
that device to your iCloud account, signing in to the same iCloud account on
your Yosemite-powered Mac will make it appear as a connection list in your
Mac’s Wi-Fi menu, even if you haven’t activated the hotspot in your iPhone’s
settings. Clicking on it will automatically start the hotspot on the iOS 8
device, and log you in to the network, no password required. It really is that
easy, and once you’ve been using it for a while, it’s hard to believe it was
ever any other way.
iCloud Drive
Using the Dropbox app for OS X essentially gives you
cloud-based storage directly in Finder, but Apple’s own iCloud Drive now offers
you the same thing, with even tighter integration, using your existing iCloud
account. Where file syncing via iCloud used to be a mostly invisible process
surfaced only in relevant apps by developers, iCloud Drive now lets users have
greater control and visibility regarding exactly what’s stored in their iCloud
accounts, and what they do with those files.
iCloud Drive now appears in the ‘Favorites’ sidebar of
Finder, just underneath the ‘All My Files’ list item. It contains files and
folders just like an ordinary Finder folder, and you can add documents to it,
and copy documents from it, just like you would with any folder. You can create
new subfolders, tag items, and it’s indexed by Spotlight for easy searching.
Plus it’s available even when you’re offline, with changes syncing back to your
iCloud account once you reconnect. If there’s a conflict, it’ll let you review
and choose which version to go with.
The new iCloud Drive folder will show you apps created in
iCloud by documents on your iOS devices, too, and you can open these with
compatible apps on your Mac, with changes syncing. On iOS 8, you can open these
documents in the apps that support them directly, even if they weren’t
necessarily created there. It also works with Windows, given you multi-platform
access to whatever your store in your iCloud account.
This feature works for both power users and casual users
alike, since it makes it easier for those with an itch for stringent document
control to get at their content, while also keeping the hands-off syncing and
usability features of iCloud intact for those who don’t care to poke around too
much under the hood.
Mail
Messages may be becoming more important as a communications
center for your Mac, but Apple didn’t leave Mail out of the updates in
Yosemite. The changes to its desktop email client include powerful new features
that let you fill out and sign forms directly in replies, and provide built-in
annotation tools for PDFs, which let you more easily collaborate back and forth
with colleagues, or just with friends on a birthday party flyer.
The annotations tools user the Mac’s trackpad to let you
draw freehand shapes, and the tool cleans up the lines to make smooth callouts,
arrows and more. There’s a magnification tool so you can point out a particular
piece of a document or image for closer attention. Given that most email I deal
with these days seems to involve signing something or providing some kind of
feedback, these are very useful additions.
Mail Drop might be the most useful new Mail feature,
however; it automatically takes attachments up to 5GB in size, uploads them to
iCloud and provides a link to the receiver (or processes them automatically if
they’re also using Mail in Yosemite) so that they can receive it, no matter the
attachment limits of their provider. This works across email providers, so you
can use it with your Gmail or Outlook.com account, so long as you’re sending
via Mail and are also signed into your iCloud account on your Mac.
Given that the average file size is getting larger all the
time, and that most attachment limits haven’t kept pace with that development,
this is a great way to share stuff without having to upload it to a cloud
storage provider and get a link first.
Safari
New Safari is a big change from previous versions, with a
more streamlined look that devotes less UI to chrome and more to actual web
page content. There’s also a great new tab view that provides you with a
visual, thumbnail-based overview of all your open tabs at once, with nested
stacks of pages originating from the same domain. If you’re a tab-heavy browser
like myself, this is a huge boon to your workflow. Hunting through one or
two-letter tab headers is a thing of the past, when you’re trying to find that
one tab you opened ages ago and promptly forgot all about.
Spotlight also gets more powerful in Safari, offering you
suggestions from the same web-based sources that it polls when you’re using the
desktop-wide Spotlight app. You’ll see brief previews of articles from
Wikipedia, for instance, or films, locations and iTunes albums.
Apple has also added new Safari tools aimed at enhancing
privacy and security, like the DuckDuckGo search engine built-in as an option
for Smart Search. This was also added as an option for mobile Safari on iOS 8,
and gives users who don’t want to trade their data for search results another
choice. New cookie blocking options will allow you to specify cookies only from
the current site, making it more difficult for marketers to chase you around
the web, and an improved Private Browsing mode lets you open a new private window
while preserving your existing session.
Safari’s best improvements might be its under-the-hood
changes, however. Improved performance using the new Safari engine offer up to
two hours more browsing time while on battery power vs. Chrome or Firefox, and
special HTML5 support for Netflix streaming means you’ll also get up to two
hours more viewing time with the subscription video service.
This is the first time I’ve started using Safari on a new
version of OS X and stuck with it, even months later. Typically, I’m lured in
by the lists of new features, but end up slipping back into old habits with
Chrome before long. Apple’s latest Safari release has bucked the trend,
however, thanks to the battery benefits mentioned above, as well as usability
improvements like the new Tab view that offer concrete advantages if you spend
a lot of time working on the web.
Bottom Line
Yosemite isn’t a hard sell – Apple offers it as a free
download from the Mac App Store, and it’s compatible with essentially the same
list of computers that could support Mavericks and Mountain Lion. But even if
it didn’t have these advantages, it would still be worth installing; the
improvements here are much more than surface deep, and make forward progress in
terms of how we think about and experience desktop computing, especially in a
world where mobile occupies an increasing amount of our time.
There’s a lot more going on here than the things highlighted
above, too, including new AirDrop functionality that works between iOS devices
and Macs, and plenty of developer tools that will make Mac apps from
third-parties much more powerful, and much better integrated throughout the
desktop, so stay tuned for lots more to come on Yosemite from us.
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