In a struggle to be happy and free

Drystone Wall

Welcome to Yosemite

Despite knowing better, I went ahead and installed OS X 10.10 Yosemite. Others are glad to rush in and report the problems if I wait a day or two, but I seem to be one of those who rushed in.

During the upgrade I received an ominous error:

There is not enough free space in the Core Storage Logical Volume Group for this operation. Reboot and try again.

Yea, whaaaat? It offered a reboot button, and no other option. So I rebooted. After a moment, the Mac’s log in screen presented itself … but it was the Yosemite log in screen. I had a very bad feeling about this unexpected turn of events, but I logged in and the installation continued onward, seemingly without incident.

I have my main volume encrypted with FileVault2, and perhaps after a reboot, the installer couldn’t access the drive. Still, I would think that they would have tested installation with FileVault2 enabled! Still, I don’t know that was the issue so I’m doing nothing more than guessing.

Regardless, I seem to be okay. The installation finished without obvious problems and I’m running Yosemite.

I have a some random thoughts after just a few hours:

  • I’ve read that the user interface is much flatter with fewer elements to simulate depth. I read correctly. This interface is flat. It’s hardly objectionable, though.
  • The flat dock is a return to old times for many, but I joined the Mac bandwagon with 10.5 Leopard, just as interface elements really started gaining depth.
  • I hate the Finder icon. It looks demented.
  • I love the desktop drive icons.
  • My mid-2011 iMac is a year too old to support Handoff and the other Continuity features. Bluetooth 4.0 with its Bluetooth Low Energy support is required, and any iMac older than mid-2012 doesn’t have it. I will not be taking any phone calls from my Mac.
  • The iCloud Drive and its integration with the iWork apps looks cool so far. Happily, despite Apple’s wanting to differentiate iCloud Drive from Dropbox and other similar services, the files you’ve put into iCloud Drive are on your local disk at /Users/username/Library/Mobile Documents, and therefore backed up with Time Machine.
  • The sidebar in iTunes 12 is largely gone. You can bring up a sidebar by choosing the Playlists option at the top, but the sidebar that appears shows only your music, music videos, and playlists. The one-stop sidebar seems to be history. It wasn’t pretty, but it was entirely functional.
  • If something just looks different and you can’t quite nail it down, it’s probably the typeface. Lucida Grande it out and Helvetica Neue is here to replace it. The change isn’t huge, but it’s noticeable.
  • Safari still doesn’t offer inferior (lowercase) numbers despite being directed to do so with the font-feature-settings option of the @fontface CSS command. Every other browser I’ve tried, both webkit and non-webkit, handle it correctly. If even Internet Explorer can do it, what’s your excuse, Safari?
  • My first Time Machine back up after upgrading to Yosemite and allowing the Mac App Store to update my apps was just over 13GB.

Overall, I like it so far.

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3 Comments

  1. _Don

    Well, I’ve got it installed, and other than it taking forever to download and load, no problems for me on my more recent MacBook Pro.

    However, I gotta say, from first impressions, I do not like it. It feels like a step back in design. yeah, I see what they are trying to do, but it looks terrible. And I hate it when they change things and it takes more time to find where the setting/look/feature has moved. There have been a couple in Safari that I had to search out. For example, favourites. I like having that bar of them available. Apple conveniently turned them off with the new version. Thanks. In poking around to get that put back where it should be, I see that private browsing has moved to a per-window basis. Again, after another few minutes of searching the net.

    Same goes for iCloud Drive. I chose not to connect to it, but if I didn’t, I couldn’t access the files I have in iCloud. What? Good thing my other iDevices will work with it, or I’d be up the creek.

    Hopefully the these striking changes will fade into the background of awesomeness, because isn’t any other choices availble.

    • Rick

      I do certainly agree when things seem simply moved around to be different. It wastes all kind of time after upgrading. No doubt about it.

      Regarding the look, I’m remarkably “meh” about it. It largely looks different but works the same. Sure, many button no longer have outlines, but one still single-clicks on them. I’m good. 🙂

      Strange about the iCloud drive experience you had. I switched over to iCloud drive, and all my docs were already in there. I can go into the iCloud drive folder in the finder, and there they are. Similarly, the Favourites bar in Safari…it was already there, just the way I left it before the upgrade! So my experience was significantly different because I didn’t have to reset (as many) things to be the way I left them. Strange.

      That said, I’m already finding that the changes are fading into the background of awesomeness. 🙂

      • _Don

        Well, my issue was during the install. It came up with the “do you want to connect to iCloud” thing. Not knowing fully what the result would be regarding my other iDevices, I wanted to wait. When installing iOS 8, going to iCloudDrive would have rendered my iCloud files useless on my Mac. So I thought I should abstain until I could look into it further. However, after saying no, this warning came up saying that if I didn’t set it up, I wouldn’t be able to access iCloud stuff.

        So I did it anyway, hoping it would all work out (I must also say, I was doing two other things at the same time so I was slightly distracted).

        In the end, it all worked out. I have access to everything. But again, they change things “for the better” but I’m always left wondering what was wrong with the previous way. What problem are they trying to solve that doesn’t even exist.

        Anyway, as you say, I’m hoping the awesomeness overshadows any odd-ball changes.

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