Hands-on review: OS X 10.10 Yosemite

Introduction and design

Later this year, Apple will release OS X 10.10 Yosemite, the latest version of its Mac desktop operating system. It will run on all the same Mac models as OS X 10.9 Mavericks, and will be a free download and update. According to reports, Apple is set to release Yosemite on October 21, and it's possible that the company will also host an event to unveil the iPad Air 2 and iPad Mini 3. It held an event last year October 22 that was used to announce the general availability of Mavericks.

That's all expected, but there are some unexpected changes coming with Yosemite. For a start, Apple is offering a public beta of the operating system, something Apple hasn't done since it was preparing to launch OS X in 2000.

Anyone can apply, but bear in mind this release is for testing bugs, not a demo of the finished OS. If you apply and are successful, make sure you follow Apple's advice on backing up and installing somewhere safe carefully.

I've been trying a beta build provided by Apple, though, and have had a chance to dig into the more important changes for most users: the extra features. Unfortunately, because I've only been able to preview Yosemite alone, and not iOS 8 or the new features of iCloud, I actually can't give my opinion on some of Yosemite's best features: Continuity and the new iCloud options.

Yosemite offers the ability to pass tasks between it and iOS (known as Handoff), and to take phone calls on your Mac, send SMS texts from your Mac, and set up your iPhone as a mobile hotspot instantly from your Mac. iCloud Drive, meanwhile, gives you a very smart way to get data between iOS and Macs without having to put any effort in. These are easily Yosemite's most exciting possibilities, so it's a shame I can't talk about them.

Design

That's not to say there wasn't a lot to dig into. The biggest and most obvious change to Yosemite is the design, of course. Taking a leaf from iOS 7's slightly transparent book, windows are simpler, and some have a see-through element, revealing soft hints of the windows beneath them.

It was a contentious look in iOS, but I'll stick my neck out and say that it really works in Yosemite. The change hasn't been as dramatic as the iOS switch was, with OS X retaining more of its earlier style, and having already made small steps towards slightly simple, 'flatter' design in aspects of Mavericks.

It's more colorful in some spots, less colorful in others, but pretty much always striking – at least, coming from using Mac OS X 10.9 or Windows 8 day-to-day. The new Helvetica font looks great on Retina screens, and the brighter, simpler icons match the starker window designs nicely.

On non-Retina, though, it doesn't sing quite as strongly. Small text can be hard to read, especially in areas such as the progress bar when copying files. Here the text is presented as mid-grey lettering on a light-grey background, which just isn't that legible.

Text layered on transparent background or over images can also be more difficult to read. There's simply less definition to the text, so in a busy setting, it can sometimes get lost a little.

The new font loses a bit of elegance in its more jagged form, too. It's not hard to read, but it has definitely been designed with Retina in mind. Nothing here is so bad to be a show-stopper by any means, but there's no denying that OS X 10.10 is much more at home on Retina than not.

The Dark Mode is a nice touch in theory, turning some white elements of the OS dark black to make thing easier on the eyes in lower light level, but it's kind of only half a feature. It makes the Menu bar and Dock darker, but that's it – all the shiny light grey and white windows are still bright.

The simplification aspect of Yosemite isn't about stripping away options so much as just putting them somewhere a little tidier. In some cases this means putting buttons that used to sit just below the title bar higher up, so less space is used for window chrome and more for whatever you're doing in the apps themselves.

At least, that's the idea. In some apps, it's been included well (such as Safari and Maps), but it's not consistent. For many apps, including Mail and Preview, the icons sit below the title as they always have.

This occasional change goes hand-in-hand with the new translucent elements. Again, they're not present in every app, and when they are it is sometimes surprising. Safari and Maps have translucent titles bars, enabling you to get a glimpse of the content within those apps that's 'hidden' underneath the interface.

But Messages is different. It's half translucent (the list of people on the left) and half solid (the actual message on the right) – a division that stretches all the way through the title bar, leaving a strange half 'frosted glass'-half solid effect

Then you have Mail, which has a solid title bar and a Messages-like split view below, except both the list of emails on the right and the message itself are solid white. If you bring up the Mailbox list to view your email folders that is translucent, but that translucency doesn't extend up into the title bar, as it does with Messages.

Popup windows are usually translucent (things like Share windows or details of a location in the Maps app, for example), but at the moment, I'm not sure this new element of Yosemite is as consistent as it could be.

Another thing that can trip you up is that Apple has moved the 'fullscreen' button from the right-hand corner of a window to the green button on the top-left, which used to have the slightly nebulous function of fitting the window to the content. That functionality is still there if you hold alt and roll over the green button, though.

However, not all apps support full screen, including Apple's own apps, which means that sometimes the green button is a plus sign, indicating it's the old behavior, and sometimes it's two arrows, indicating it can go full screen. Having two behaviors from one button color means you won't know what it does until you roll the mouse over it to see the icon, which seems a little odd.

Apple has definitely given OS X 10.10 a striking new look, and I really like it, but I wonder if the company might yet do a bit more tinkering with the interface in different apps before release. The inconsistency doesn't affect usability; the apps all work largely how they do in Mavericks, but when sitting down to explore Apple's new direction, it left me scratching my head in a few spots.

Features, apps and verdict

The design changes are only one part of Yosemite, of course. This might not be Apple's most feature-packed OS update ever (the new yearly release cycle and general maturity of OS X means that the huge blockbuster OS releases of old are probably a thing the past), but it does have some key new things to offer, both in the OS itself and its bundled apps.

One of the most useful changes introduced in Yosemite will be in Spotlight. Though it has always been a brilliant little tool, Spotlight is getting upgraded and made more prominent. Hit command and space and instead of a little window in the top-right, you get a big text field in the middle of the screen. Instead of just searching your Mac and offering a couple of rarely used extra features it's now a center of knowledge, pulling search results and information from both offline and online sources.

Type in the names of apps or documents and it'll find those, giving you a preview right in the same window, and you can launch them by just pressing return.

But type in a unit of measurement and it'll instantly bring up the most likely conversion result you'd want. If you type in "26c" it'll bring up the Fahrenheit equivalent without you needing to type any more.

Type in something you want to know more about and a Wikipedia entry will be shown, without you having to search the web for it. Spotlight will also be able to find local business information and maps data, and display it there without having to launch another app, though some of these are US-only at the moment.

The extra information promises to be useful (I'm particularly pleased with the conversions), but the visibility of that information is just as important. Siri has yet to make it to Mac, but it feels like this is Apple's substitute with the same kind of information presented immediately, without you having to use a specific service to find it.

Notification Center

Expanding on this 'information-at-a-glance' theme is the new layout of Notification Centre. It still lists your app notifications, but by default the first view is the new Today panel (with notifications in a second panel). Similar to the same tab in iOS 7 and iOS 8, it's like a watered-down version of Google Now, listing important information about your day – reminders, calendar appointments and so on.

However, it will now support widgets, so you can chop and change exactly what's in there, depending on what's best for you. This could be more scheduling information, the stocks ticker, or stuff that's more productive.

App developers will be able to make new widgets and release them through the Mac app store, so the scope here is nearly endless. From website analytics to eBay tracking and sports results – you'll be able to set up nicely customised results in the future.

For now, Apple's widgets give us a bit of a guide to some of the possibilities. The Social widget lets you post quickly to Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, or send a text message. The Reminders widget lets you tick off reminders, or edit them by opening the Reminders app. The 'Today' and 'Tomorrow' widgets pull through weather, events and other relevant information for the next day, presenting it all slightly differently compared to even the widgets for these respective tasks (again, like Siri does for iOS when asked).

Safari

Safari is one of the few apps that Apple updates with pretty much every new OS version. It's no surprise to see the new version is a poster boy for Yosemite's changes, then: slimline title bar, translucent interface and clear, unobstructed presentation of content.

At the top of your browsing window, you get the usual buttons for forward and back, followed by the Smart Search Bar, which is the unified URL/search box. In OS X 10.10 it includes new, quick ways to activate Safari's Reader view, stripping websites down to just the story and its images, and adding a page to your Reading List or favourites.

There's also a new Share button, the new Tabs view, a button to view your downloads, and a button for new tabs. It also pulls through some of Spotlight's options. Wikipedia and Maps results pop up separately to other suggested searches or websites but almost everything else is omitted, though, including conversions.

The Share button lets you save links to your bookmarks, or send a link to other people using a whole bunch of services, from AirDrop to Facebook.

It also showcases the great new 'recent people' sharing option. Below all of the generic services you can share through it brings up contacts you've been in touch with recently, so you can send links to them using whatever method is best to get them on.

It's a really smart touch: an acceptance that sharing is often about sending something just to one person, rather than broadcasting it to a bunch of followers, and making that easier.

The favorites view gets a bit more prominence, appearing not just as an option when you open a new window/tab, but also popping up below the Smart Search Field when you click there, helping to make that more of a one-stop-shop for getting to sites. You only get icons for each site, rather than a thumbnail of its latest content, but at the size of these squares, that's not really a problem.

The option to view all tabs has had an update too, with a new, stacked view for those who tend to keep dozens of tabs open at a time. Safari will put them in 'piles' based on the domain, so if you've been hunting TechRadar for the latest laptop reviews and opened a bunch in new tabs, they'll all be grouped, while your Gizmodo UK tabs are in a separate stack.

It's a simple but effective system as far letting you see them all at a glance, but it's missing one key feature: you can't see what's on the thumbnails of tabs that are at the bottom of the stack – just the title. Given that OS X has had the brilliant Quick Look feature for years, this seems like a strange oversight.

Mail

The Mail app is largely as it was in Mavericks, but with a couple of key additions. First is the ability to send huge files as 'attachments' that are just download links without having to use a third-party service. The recipient can download the file through iCloud. Sadly though, this is another feature I couldn't test.

What I could play with was the other addition: image annotations inside the mail composition window. You just click the image and look for a small arrow in the corner, then select the Markup option. If you've used Preview's tools in previous versions of OS X, the basic will be largely familiar, with a few useful changes.

The ability to add a signature is made prominent, so you can sign PDFs and send them back easily. Signatures can also be added by signing a piece of paper and holding it up to the FaceTime camera on your Mac, or you can sign your name on your trackpad. You'd think the latter would be terrible if you're just using your finger, but it actually works surprisingly well. Your signature won't be perfect, but you can get it very close with a couple of tries.

The other particularly smart addition is the ability to draw lines with the pen tool (or arrows), which are then turned into neater, less squiggly versions for sending. Otherwise, you can add shapes, adjust fills and strokes, type text and change its font and colour, and generally all the usual annotation tools.

Your drawings are burned into image files such as PNGs (though a copy is saved of the original), but are saved as separate annotations in PDFs.

Messages

Messages is the last app to get major new features in Yosemite, with the key ones here being better group messaging support and Apple's new Soundbites.

The group messaging suff largely amounts to more control over your groups, enabling you to leave group chats or silence them for a while. They're small additions in the context of instant messaging, but are still hugely useful.

Soundbites are little audio clips that you can record on OS X 10.10 or iOS 8 devices and send to other people in Messages. It's kind of an Apple twist on the push-to-talk idea (that never really took off).

iOS users need only hold their phones to their ear to hear the messages, without even locking the screen. It's really simple to use on the Mac – just click the microphone and talk. Not everyone will use this feature, but it has the potential to be handy and is integrated well.

Some of the other new features in Messages are clunky though, particularly when it comes to sharing maps and location. In iOS 8, sharing your location is a key feature, and while this obviously isn't as important on a computer, I was surprised that sharing any location to Messages from Maps in OS X 10.10 was actually kind of a pain.

There's a share button on any location in the Maps app, but that pulls up a blank new message screen. I had an existing group chat I wanted to share the location in, to direct people to. In the end, I had to copy out a clunky location with hyperlink all as text – I expected something smoother here.

Forthcoming features

As mentioned, there's much about Yosemite that I simply can't test yet. Sending/receiving texts on the Mac, making phone calls and Handoff all look excellent, and Handoff is easily the stand-out feature of OS X 10.10 for those with an all-Apple setup, but I couldn't try it yet.

I also couldn't test iCloud Drive properly to see if really could be a suitable replacement for Dropbox or Google Drive.

And though iTunes 12 was released during my time testing OS X 10.10, our build from Apple didn't receive it as an update, so I also haven't been able to get into the changes there. The version I had in this build was iTunes 11, which stood out comedically with its old-style buttons and design among all the simple glass apps.

Verdict

So far, my impressions of OS X 10.10 are really positive, with the caveat that I've been previewing a beta version. The apps are very usable and familiar for Mac natives, with less of the dramatic, sweeping UI changes that iOS 7 brought to its mobile devices.

It was very stable too – though I did encounter some bugs including popup windows that couldn't be closed and the inability to visit websites in Safari's Tab view. But these are to be expected – Apple is releasing Yosemite for testing, not as a demo of a finished product.

Like iOS 7 it's clear OS X 10.10 is designed for Retina screens. On a 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro, it looks brilliantly clear and crisp, and the extra brightness in the icons and interface makes the whole thing pop. It's clear and pleasant to use too – there's very little clutter, though the lack of clear dividing lines between windows makes me wish for some built-in window management/snapping tools more than ever.

Mostly, though, I'm looking forward to trying Yosemite out with iOS 8. It's a nice, solid update in the parts that I've been able to test, with only a few foibles currently, but there's so much more yet to come.

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