Very Detailed 25 Page Assessment of Yosemite!

[gunug]

Ars Technica has a nice large evaluation of Yosemite for you to consider before you commit to it:

QUOTE

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.

In truth, Yosemite’s new look is not a signifier of any particular fitness (or lack thereof) for upgrade purposes. The standard rules apply. Don’t upgrade until all the applications you care about are compatible. Make sure you have good backups. Point-zero releases are always a little more risky. Wait for version 10.10.1 if you’re nervous.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/10/os-x-10-10/1/

[Xairbusdriver]

Saw one comment about not having access to a sub-menu to individual System Prefs items. Left a post about MaxMenus, which was last updated in 2007! It does exactly that and a whole lot more. What is amazing is that it runs in Yosemite (at least the Public Beta) just fine! Well, it does start up by opening the System Prefs app and its particular page. One must then manually close SP for the startup to take effect... no problem! Of course, one can access SP from the Dock, but that requires some mousing since the normal way to use MaxMenus is to mouse to an assigned screen corner, the most accurate and easy to hit target.

If you liked 25 "pages" you'll probably not like a total of <ONE>! This is an extremely limited list of seven things (subtle at that!) on Yosemite.

[Gary S]

I heard that Yosemite is a real RAM hog. Apple says 2Gigs of memory will run it but you'll need at least 8Gigs to do anything. True or False?

 Source-for Yosemite

[daryl66]

QUOTE(Gary S @ Oct 18 2014, 01:20 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I heard that Yosemite is a real RAM hog. Apple says 2Gigs of memory will run it but you'll need at least 8Gigs to do anything. True or False?

 Source-for Yosemite

Good video. Curious to see ABD and Paddy's comments on the video.

Daryl

[Xairbusdriver]

While I've had the Public ßeta of Yosemite running on a Mac Mini, I really haven't played with it much and certainly not 'pushed' it with multiple, heavy duty apps. I mainly wanted to see how the apps/Pref Panels I absolutely must have worked on it. 1Password supplied a ßeta version that now works perfectly. URLMPro and PathFinder worked with the versions already working in Mavericks. And even MaxMenus, last updated in 2007 works in the ßeta! I'll leave it to others to report RAM needs, but that's always reported as "more than the old one" with every new app and certainly an OS. It is extremely rare to see an update of anything reduce in size from the previous version. I think Snow Leopard was said to be smaller because they got rid of a lot of code that they didn't want to continue supporting (Classic?).

Paddy also had the Yosemite ßeta installed but I think she used it even less than I did!

[Xairbusdriver]

Here's an example of what's available for future implementation in apps. It's already available in some Apple apps but it's available for any third-party developer that wants to join the "party"!

QUOTE("gunug's ars link")

Handoff takes aim at the difficulty of transitioning between devices while continuing to work on the same task. Imagine you’re composing an e-mail on your iPhone as you ride to work on the train. You arrive at the office, but the e-mail isn’t complete. You’d like to sit down at your Mac and finish the e-mail on your big, comfortable keyboard.

Most people reading this know it’s possible to save a draft of the outgoing message on the server and then launch Mail on the Mac, sync with the server, find the saved draft, and resume typing the message. To fully understand Handoff, you must accept that Apple thinks this perfectly functional interaction is not good enough, that it contains too much friction and too many steps.

Assuming you’re using a Handoff-capable e-mail application like Apple’s Mail on iOS and OS X, here’s how the same task could be accomplished. Upon arriving at your desk in the office, the Apple Mail icon appears in a single-item mini-dock to the left of the real Dock (or on top, if your Dock is on the side of the screen).

Obviously, this is more code than was in Mavericks, ,ore than was in iOS 7, and there will also be bits in any app that wants to use it. It also requires Bluetooth low energy hardware, none of my hardware has that, but the code is already in the iOS/OS X. Read that 25 "page" article for more details like this. Do these things make Yosemite a "RAM hog"? Is this functionality worth carrying around extra code? Even if you can't use it? Fortunately, Apple is doing a much better job of not simply loading every last byte of the OS just because you turned on your Mac...

[Paddy]

David Cox apparently doesn't understand Yosemite's memory management and is misinterpreting what he's seeing. As one of the comments notes, as long as the Memory Pressure is green, you're fine. And there are quite a few people posting responses to his video that are running Yosemite with 2 or 4GB of RAM.

I won't be a good gauge for anyone - I have 16GB on my MBP and 18GB in my Mac Pro.

I never did get around to installing the Yosemite beta - I was just too darn busy, and it would have had to go on an external drive since I was at the cottage with the MBP all summer. I will get to it sooner or later...

[sandbox]

Apparently they changed the font.
http://www.fastcodesign.com/3031432/why-ap...on-your-desktop

[Xairbusdriver]

Perhaps we should point Mr. Cox to the ars article? The font change is fulling explained there along with about a hundred other items.

[krissel]

Long read but covers it pretty well. I'm in no hurry to upgrade. SL is doing just fine these days on my 15" MBP, ML on the Air and dual SL/ML on the 17"...oh, and L on my DA.  

The main criticism I had upon reading that article was the system font change. These old eyes did not take to the pale, more compressed look. Found this thread with info on how to put Lucida Grande back as the system font.

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1768362

[sandyman]

OK. One pretty major issue regarding upgrading to Yosemite. It affects me but will not affect most folk here.

I have a Crucial SSD in my MacBook Pro as I was not prepared to pay Apple prices for one. However if I want to enable Trim I have to turn off kext-signing. This is a security measure brought in by Apple. As Apple keep their hardware drivers closed source companies like Crucial can't write a Trim enabled driver. The same applies to applications like Trim Enabler. I found a patch for the Beta releases of Yosemite but have found nothing yet for the released version. I'm not sure that I'd like to apply a non Apple kernel patch anyway.  

I only found this out after upgrading. Thank goodness for Carbon Copy Cloner. Mind you it does mean that I upgraded unnecessarily to CCC4. £26 wasted  

So it looks as though I will be sticking with Mavericks

[Paddy]

QUOTE(sandyman @ Oct 21 2014, 05:54 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

OK. One pretty major issue regarding upgrading to Yosemite. It affects me but will not affect most folk here.

I have a Crucial SSD in my MacBook Pro as I was not prepared to pay Apple prices for one. However if I want to enable Trim I have to turn off kext-signing. This is a security measure brought in by Apple. As Apple keep their hardware drivers closed source companies like Crucial can't write a Trim enabled driver. The same applies to applications like Trim Enabler. I found a patch for the Beta releases of Yosemite but have found nothing yet for the released version. I'm not sure that I'd like to apply a non Apple kernel patch anyway.  

I only found this out after upgrading. Thank goodness for Carbon Copy Cloner. Mind you it does mean that I upgraded unnecessarily to CCC4. £26 wasted  

So it looks as though I will be sticking with Mavericks

Yeah - looks like if those of us with SSDs not installed by Apple want to enable TRIM, we're stuck - we either opt for the riskier option of enabling it and turning off kext-signing (with the attendant possibility of issues if we forget and do a PRAM reset) or the potential for a decline in performance of our SSD drives. I'm not sure how MUCH of a decline in performance one sees, of course....

I'm assuming you've read this: http://www.cindori.org/trim-enabler-and-yosemite/

I didn't know anything about this (and don't have TRIM enabled on my SSD in my Mac Pro either) so thanks for the heads up. I will probably proceed anyway. My SSD is not used for massive amounts of file storage - most of that happens on my regular hard drives and I can move the remaining files over too, so that there is relatively little writing to the drive other than application updates etc.

See: http://superuser.com/questions/188985/how-...de-without-trim for more discussion of the issue and how/why it makes a difference.

Hmmm...another thought. Perhaps I'll enable Trim with Mavericks, tidy up my SSD (move all non-app files off) and then disable it before installing Yosemite.

[sandyman]

Paddy,

I had seen the post from the developer of Trim Enabler. Only after I upgraded and found out that it would no longer work  

There is an alternative method for enabling Trim but it does necessitate the use of the Terminal. That doesn't bother me but I guess it would put off most users. He does also give a, slightly biaised overview of Trim on OS X. Note the it still requires kext-signing to be turned off.

As an aside I discovered something else during my little upgrade adventure. I had of course made a cloned backup before attempting it    When I restored Mavericks I discovered that I appeared to have no Recovery Partition. Turns out that it WAS there but was not seen by the system as it was a Yosemite one. I will not go into details but suffice it to say that getting a completely restored system was not a barrel of laughs. Don let CCC attempt to erase and install, Boot the CCC drive, repartition using Disk Utility and THEN do a recovery seems to be the best bet.

Despite what the guy in the new link implies, it DOES appear to be an issue with Apple not releasing details of the relevant driver and not the only driver related issue with Yosemite. I discovered this after chatting with a French friend who is an accredited Mac developer

QUOTE

if I want to enable Handoff on my 2011 machine I need to disable kext signing and hack a driver using a hex editor

Personally I think that part of the problem is that Apple are trying to force us to use their supplied SSD's rather than 3rd Party offerings. When I suggested this to my friend his reply was

QUOTE

I know, but aside from a few Mac Pros changing the HD for an SSD is not “officially supported” so they don’t have any obligation to help. I’m sure there’ll be a safer hack soon.

Sandy

[krissel]

Oh, wait!  Noooooo, the worst thing about Yosemite is that they took away the puff of smoke!  How could they do that?!

 

[Xairbusdriver]

Kriss, please stay calm. Turn off the Mac. Slowly move away from the desk. Take several deep breaths. Close your eyes and think of floating peacefully in that warm pool at the Y. Count to 256 in Binary.

BTW, I've been using "Dark Mode" (General->Appearance) with Yosemite running on my mini. It has a definitely non-retina 15" display and the menubar is now much more easily readable! There is also an "Increase contrast" option that helps a lot: Accessibility->Display. Not installing on my iMac yet, so I don't know how these setting would appear on a modern LCD.