Another WWDC has come and gone, and now that I’ve had time to use the Developer Preview of Yosemite, I’m going to offer my opinions on some of the changes. This is not a review, as Yosemite is still very much in development, and much could still change between now and it’s shipping date.
UI
I knew after the reveal of iOS 7 last year that OS X was going to get a similar treatment. It just makes sense for them have a familiar look between them. Not having been a fan of the visual stylings of iOS 7, this was something I was very worried about.
Now that Yosemite has been revealed, I’m breathing a sigh of relief. Yes, it drags the OS X UI kicking in screaming in to conformity with iOS, but it still retains much of it’s ‘mac’-ness. That said, there’s much to complain about. Like:
System wide use of Helvetica Neue: Look, I love Helvetica Neue. It’s one of my favorite fonts for layout and design. And maybe I’m just an old crumudgeon who can’t adapt after looking at Lucida Grande for 14 years. But Helvetica Neue as the OS X system font makes the typography look bland to me. The kerning between some characters looks off to me, and I’m just having a difficult time adjusting to the change. Maybe a few months with the betas will soften my opinion here.
And then there are the icons. While not as dumbed down as the icons were in iOS 7, they’ve been dumbed down significantly from the beautifully detailed icons we’ve grown accustomed to over the last 14 years. The Finder icon itself, while still retaining the familiar duality face, now has a more ‘whimsical’ look to it.
In this release, not all of the icons have been given the new treatment. For example, the Migration Assistance (Applications > Utilities > Migration Assistant) is still using the old style Finder icon.
As demonstrated in the WWDC keynote, Yosemite uses transparency to a larger extent throughout the UI chrome. Safari, for example, features a semi transparent toolbar, so that when you scroll up, you can some what make out your content underneath, albeit blurred and masked. The Finder’s sidebar is also semi transparent, allowing it to take on muted hues from whatever your desktop background is.
Luckily, both of these annoyances can be disabled in the Accessibility Preference Pane.
But even with them disabled, much of the app chrome now has very little contrast between it and it’s content. I get that Apple is trying to design an experience where the app ‘gets out of the way’, but it just feels a little bland and washed out.
One feature I heralded during the keynote was the dark mode for the menu bar and menus. That feature is not present in the Developer Preview at present, but I expect it to be my default mode when Yosemite ships.
Safari 8 features some new UI features, designed to provide a better way to get to your favorites than the venerable Favorites Bar. The Favorites Bar still exists, so this is a change that isn’t obtrusive if you don’t like it. There’s also a new ‘tab view’ that shows you all your tabs, along with pages open on your other iOS devices.
All in all the UI changes in Safari seem pretty good…. except one. Apple has moved the toolbar in Safari to sit horizontally aligned with the close, minimize and full screen buttons. In theory, this is good because it reduces the amount of vertical space needed for the browser chrome – space that is at a premium on widescreen monitors. It’s bad because muscle memory means every time I try to use the back button, I end up closing the browser window. I didn’t like this change when it came to Internet Explorer, and I don’t like it now on Safari.
In an effort to make them appear more at home with the thin Helvetica Neue font, Apple has changed the menu bar icons to be thinner. For icons this size, this is a huge mistake. They are already very smaller targets that are hard to read, and now they are even harder to read. And for some reason, the battery indiciator is now green, like the old battery indicator in iOS 6 and earlier. I suspect this change might get reversed, as iOS 7′s menu bar battery indicator is a solid color (white) as well.
Spotlight
Spotlight gets it’s first real update in years, starting with a new prominent position centered in the display when it is activated (ala Alfred or Quicksilver). Spotlight also searches more than just your computer, pulling in data from web services. So far in the Developer Preview, there doesn’t seem to be a way to turn this off. I’m hoping this is fixed, because the last thing I was is for my kids to be able to perform a search and bypass any parental filters I have put on their web browsing.
Dashboard
If you are a fan of Dashboard, this is the release that prepares you for it’s inevitable doom. Apple is putting a large focus on using Widgets in Notification Center. These Widgets are unlike the old Dashboard widgets in that they are written in Cocoa and not HTML/CSS/Javascript, and they conform to the size restraints of the Notification Center container.
Dashboard is still present in Yosemite, but it’s buried in the Mission Control Preference. When enabled though, it can be displayed as Mission Control space, or as an overlay.
The Dock
After living with the angled platform dock since Leopard’s release, Apple has returned us to the simplistic dock of years prior. The dock background, like so much else in the OS now, uses blurred transparency. Not much else has changed about the dock, but if you are a fan of keeping it on the left or right hand side of the screen, and liked the dark background it had in this position since Snow Leopard’s release, you will be sad to know that it now features the same blurred transparency it has in the bottom position. Another design mis-fire has the application tooltip in a gray color with black type. This is a further example of the low contrast movement foisted on us in Yosemite, and one that definitely makes it harder to read the app titles.
The only other change present in the dock in Yosemite happens when you use the new Handoff feature. In this scenario, the app that can be handed off shows up on the left hand side of the dock (in the first position before the Finder). Since I’m not moving to iOS 8 until it is released, this is not something I could test.
Summary
Even with all my griping, I think I will be happy with Yosemite when it finally launches. Yes, the UI changes are not my cup of tea, but honestly, I expected them to go much further than what they have. There’s much to like feature wise in Yosemite, and I’m excited for it’s fall arrival.
