There are still many rough edges in the new OS but overall I am really excited about the visual direction that Mac OS X Yosemite is taking. It demonstrates a more mature and subtle approach in adapting iOS 7 design language. No ultra thin fonts, no crazy parallax, no ridiculous icons, just subtle use of translucent materials accompanied by a bright and cheerful palette. Using the new OS feels fresher, exciting, and more modern. I am looking forward to exploring other design changes in the the new OS that I may have missed.
I’m definitely pleased with the design direction Apple is taking OS X into, despite the fact that as it currently stands it’s clearly still in flux. We’re in beta, though, so that’s just fine. The two biggest issues to me are one, that text input fields and buttons are not visually different, and two, that neither of them get any mouseover effect whatsoever – both cursor and button/input fields remain exactly the same.
Something else I’ve noticed: is it just me, or does Apple use a different theme on-stage during a keynote than what actually ships in the beta right now? The transparency and colours pop way more during the keynote than while using the beta. Odd.
That translucence looks a lot Vista-ish to me.
I agree, those problems is hopefully fixed before the final release.
I installed the 10.10 beta to a flash drive. The FLAT dock and simplified icons are not only a step in the wrong direction, they’re SEVERAL steps backwards. It’s like I just installed Mac OS Tiger. A flat dock really? How KDE 3.5 Kicker-ish of you Apple. I have a rooted Android phone already capable of tethering, I don’t use iCloud, and I could care less how my MacBook Air and iPad integrate. Apple is in danger of having 10.10 be the Windows 8 of the Apple ecosystem. Clearly pleasing aesthetic design is no longer a concern at Apple. I really hope the UI design gets some polish as new betas are released. if it looks this terrible come release date, I see no reason to upgrade to it whatsoever.
It might be that Tiger was the first MacOSX i was introduced to when i brought a Mac but i love the flat dock. Since Leopard ive been using the terminal command to turn the dock 2D, the 3D dock looks stupid in my opinion, it looks like it takes up more space than it actually need and i don’t like the pseudo 3D effect.
I can’t wait to get 10.10, love the new UI and will especially love being able to SMS/Text through my Mac, it’s one of the features i really miss from my Android phone, hate having to keep swapping machines when im home, so being able to do everything from one will save a lot of messing about.
To each his own. I personally like what I see in 10.10. To me, it’s the best OS X has looked in a long, long time. Was never a fan of all that shiny-gummy-fauxy-gradient crap that Jobs had a fetish for.
I’m glad I’m not the only one who felt like the new dock looks like it came straight from Tiger. I have an old iBook G4 I boot up every once in a while for nostalgia and when I saw the new design for Yosemite I had a feeling I had seen that dock before. Lo and behold I booted the old iBook up after watching the conference and at that point I decided that Yosemite was just Tiger with shittier icons and UI design choices.
Did I miss a memo going around the tech industry that states that everyone needs to make their UI flat and boring and look like utter tripe? We took so many years to perfect and evolve the UI to where it had gloss and polish and it looked really good. It was a time when functionality and productivity met with elegance and beauty and they worked hand in hand seamlessly together. The next year its “lets all go back to Mac OS 9 and Windows 3.1 era style GUIs because it can’t get any better than this”. Black text on plain white? Really? A four year old can recreate the same thing in MS Paint in like 5 minutes with zero UI design experience.
What really throws me for a loop is that they say “well this makes the computer faster”. Are you joking? I installed Mavericks on my 2009 Mac Book air because the removal of the skeuomorphic designed UI (among other things) was supposed to make it faster and the damn thing now runs slower than the aforementioned iBook. And the iBook only has a 1.33GHz single core PowerPC processor and 256MB of RAM compared to the dual core 2.13GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB of RAM and SSD of the Air.
It seems the interface uglifying from Windows 8 is transferred to OSX.
All those flat user interfaces hurt my eyes. But it seems that flat and ugly telephone-like desktops is some form of progress.
Yes-I know. There are other things that are maybe more important, but taste is also an part of an working environment, and all that boring flatness leaves an bad taste in my mouth..
Progress seems to be an artistic-wise step backwards. I don’t like it at all, but maybe I am to old for this and ugly is the new shiny way to go…
It just goes to show that you’re NEVER going to please EVERYONE with a single design. No matter what they come up with, some people will like it and some will hate it.
Doesn’t OSX have support for theming? If not, maybe that should’ve been their priority. Then people could install whatever theme they wanted, and you wouldn’t have this pointless bickering …
As for me, I really haven’t liked anything besides the Win32 ‘classic’ theme (probably because I ‘grew up’ with it and got used to it), but I learned to live without it.
just like i totally hate iOS 7, but here i actually think most of the changes is for the better.
I like the flat dock (i never liked the 3D dock sitting on a 2D desktop) Surprisingly i also like the new icons, they are not as flat as on iOS and i think they look good. The widgets also look much better than the old, i think it was about time the old Aqua style widgets were killed, they were really nice when they came out but times change. (Oh the hours i spent getting KDE to look like Aqua back in the days)
What i don’t like is the translucency, i think it looks extremely tacky. (just like it did on Vista and it does on iOS)
What i am most happy about is that i can see nothing in the screenshots with either: Very poor contrast as some of the things can be in iOS, especially the quick settings menu where with certain backgrounds it is almost impossible to see anything, and plain text that is clickable so it is hard to know which parts of the screen is clickable and which aren’t.
All in all i think it has received a long needed upgrade to a more modern look. (but please kill the translucency)
So, Thom, you have the beta and therefore paid $99 (or equiv. in your currency) to join the Developers program? Because, otherwise, having the beta is a little sketchy surely?
If you can afford a Mac, do you really think $100 is any big investment for someone interested like Thom? It is like the price of 1-2 EA games..
Joining the developer program isn’t as trivial as putting down $99 and sitting back. And it’s aimed at “developers”, of which Thom is not – by his own admission. Also, why would anyone pay $99 per year just to get a BETA that will be a free product by Fall? The program is specific to Mac OS X also, so it would surely be another $99 for the iOS developers program.
Funny, when I put down $99 for my account it was just this trivial. And amazingly enough I did it twice, since I have both iOS and OS X! How I could possibly afford the expense of $200 we will never now! Maybe I am working two jobs to cover the expense!!
I don’t see what not being a developer has anything to do with it. It is not a protected title.
I know people who pay $600+ for an unlocked iPhone but throw a tantrum whenever I recommend them a $1.99 app.
OSNews needs more ways to moderate posts. This one I wish I could rate: depressingly true.
Because tech companies would never give away their products to the websites that review/advertise them, right?
Or maybe Thom did simply pay for it because it is the kind of thing he obviously likes (hence maintains a site like OSNews commenting on it).
Your accusationary tone is pretty pathetic.
You don’t need to pay 99 dollar for OSX: http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/389125/how-to-download-and-install-…
However you do need to agree to an NDA but only if you discuss things that you can only have learned from using the Beta. Thom is reporting on things that Apple showed onscreen and broadcast at WWDC
(I wish there was a way to get XCode6 without paying the 99 dollars)
How could parallax be done on a desktop or laptop in the first place? It’s not like a desktop or laptop contains the motion-sensing systems that a phone does. The author shouldn’t complain about something that could not be done in the first place.
Oh, and Thom paid the $99 to get the Developer beta. Doesn’t signing up for the program also come along with a non-disclosure agreement so that you can’t talk about what you see in the beta?
The author laments the loss of the current AirDrop icon and doesn’t care for the new Folder icon. He says the folder icon is too flat. Well, based on all the hue & cry from everyone over the past couple of years, Apple bowed to the skeumorphism=bad mantra, so of course the Folder icon can no longer look like an actual folder and the AirDrop icon can no longer look like a fun little parachute dropping a crate of something. This is one of the things that I have always liked about Apple design, the super-realistic and fun icons, but now that is all going away because folder icons are not supposed to look like folders, buttons are not supposed to look like buttons, etc etc. Very sad.
Edited 2014-06-06 10:04 UTC
Uhm, the folder icon definitely still looks like a folder.
And considering Thom is running a site called OSnews, I almost take it for granted that he keeps us updated on important betas, which in this case costs $99.
Looking forward to getting this on my MBA. I hope it looks okay on a low res screen. I have an iPad 2, and iOS 7 is ugly some places because of the resolution, and the design depending on thin lines and fonts. Considering most Macs are low res, I assume they will take it into consideration.
I bet Jobs would go ballistic if he saw that.
..so sue me. Not that I am using OSX but if I did I would like this direction.
(I also like the windows 8 UI. There are many things I dislike about Windows 8 but the tiles and the flatness is not one of them)
Edited 2014-06-06 11:50 UTC
Am i missing something here? Registering as an Apple developer is free. You don’t pay anything and you have access to all the tools and you are eligible for the OS X beta.
The USD99 as I understand it is to have access to the store to publish your apps.
Or have I misunderstood something?
UPDATE: OK I get it now. As registered Apple developer you are eligible to sign up for the 10.10 beta program.
As a part of the Mac Developer Program (which cost US99) you get pre-release versions of OS X available in general.
Edited 2014-06-06 14:09 UTC
I don’t know what this whole thing with sucking all the life and color out the UI is about, but people are doing it in literally everything from websites to operating systems. It is awful. From my experience dealing with designers in the various companies I’ve worked for, I’m pretty sure it is just so they have an excuse to feel smug about something.
Some of the elements in the OS X went from looking good to looking like one of the employee’s “computer genius” high school kids made them in Photo Shop (see the new “Done” button in the “Brighter & Flatter UI Elements” section).
The forward and back buttons in the finder no longer look like they are designed to be attached to each other. They now look like a developer was too lazy to add padding.
If you saw the example about the “Favorites” text now taking up less space because the font was smaller, look again. The font is smaller, yet somehow the space taken up by the title overall(with margin, etc) is actually larger than it was before.
If this isn’t bad enough, there is also the trend of actually removing the features that make an application useful in the name of simplifying the interface. Does it just make designers/developers feel better about themselves to believe that their level of intellect is so far above the user that they seem to perceive as completely lacking in any kind of intelligence?
As an example: there is no way that those retard’s puny minds could handle seeing http:// in the url as they have for years already? That wasn’t just decorative, it had a real use, as with most of the stuff stripped out of applications because “users are stupid”.
I can’t speak to the designers you have worked with, but simplification of the user interface is a difficult but important design trend.
it’s the push-back against information overload. us nerds like to have 12 windows across 3 desktops with toolbars, buttons, palettes, tables, inspectors, all over the place.
but even i have started to use more ‘single-screen’ concepts to help with focus, whether when reading, writing, or even white boarding something. so many distractions these days, literally every second you could receive news that changes your mood and your mode.
the non-nerds still hate computers and computer-y interfaces, even though they use them all day as smartphones and tvs.
people give steve jobs lots of shit on this site but his greatest gift to the computer industry was perhaps saying “no” continually, and forcefully, to any feature that clouded the primary purpose of the object, and any developer, engineer, or sales person that was forcing their feature in.
the greatest products focus on their task and perform them reliably with the least amount of hassle, they don’t try to please everyone all the time.
overall i like the simpler UI’s these days, with advanced features hidden or off by default. but then again i’ve been in the apple cult for a long time…
To a degree, there is nothing wrong with simplifying interfaces. But when it goes beyond simplification and into actually removing useful features, it goes too far.
I have actually been in a two hour meeting arguing over whether or not a user will understand what a category is. Sometimes user interface design just gets stupid.
ha that’s funny! i think 2 hours deciding if you need a category on the data layer, and what it’s implications are, could pretty useful. instead of 20 hours implementing it and 10 hours fixing it later, the discussion on how it works and if it’s needed helps up front before too much work is done.
whether or not it’s on an interface? i think this stuff takes time when your typical user is not a developer or IT type, or works in the industry you are building for (vertical market). when you have to design something that “the whole world” will use that meeting about a category menu could have been critical.
just saying, i hate meetings as much as the next guy, but good design is really hard and lots of people have to chew it down to the bare essentials. lots of feelings get hurt in the name of good product design.
if the discussion about color goes too long i start to lose it. even location of elements, to an extent, should be pretty natural or follow established patterns in UI design.
but whether something should show or not? those discussions can go long because that’s where the real design decision lies. that’s the axe, the cutting room.
every UI these days could show thousands of pieces of data or a single hi-res animation, the best ones pick a direction and then it’s about consistency of implementation, aka squashing bugs.
Well, there might be a reason why they are designers and we are not and vice versa.
What other protocols do you personally use in the browser?
I use others besides http & https, but I’m kind of in doubt that many people use other ones.
Or are you upset because they just hid it from you, and you liked the way it was before?
In other words, are you upset that developers/designers made things worse for everyone, or just you?
I never liked the green felt and I didn’t like the leather stitching in the calendar app on Mac OS X. But I don’t like the direction they are going with icons being flat. I MUCH prefer the inkwell icon for Pages MUCH more than I do the flat design. I much prefer the 3D look of icons.
I can’t believe I am saying this but this is a step forward from a feature point of view but, like, twenty steps backwards in terms of looks!
If there was one thing that could be safely stated about OSX was that it was attractive and elegant. Yeah, some things are batshit crazy and stupid like Finder but Apple, to its credit, really knew how to put together a nice looking package!
The colors were vibrating when they had to be and perfectly subdued where it makes sense even though the basic color palette was basically and suprisingly shades of gray, icons were relatively realistic like they were about to jump from the screen yet stylized and distinctive, gradients and shadows were used carefully to make sure that they were actually useful, fonts were rendered beautifully on the screen, there was enough contrast that you could tell at a glance what you were looking at among other things.
The latest iterations of OSX – and iOS to an even greater degree – basically throw all that out of the window!
Those “simplified icons” are horrible compared to the originals and is it me or the new Finder icon looks like a 2-minutes Photoshop hack?!?
The only thing I can’t complain is the 2D dock as I always found it more pleasing visually although it does look kind of drab and bland compared to the one on Tiger. Some UI elements are actually harder to distinguish visually than on Windows 8 and that is saying something!
I wonder what their designers were thinking when they green lightened this thing…
Apple unleashes the biggest advances for developers in 15 years and yet all the folks at OSNews can do is vacillate between bitching about skeuomorphism and flatness. Humorous.