Apple OS X Yosemite 10.10.1 Review

OS X Yosemite—the tenth version of Apple's desktop operating system—gets its first update after a month of existence, with 10.10.1. The update addresses issues with Wi-Fi, email, Back to My Mac, and several other kinks and security concerns. Yosemite remains the most technically spectacular manifestation of Apple's desktop OS ever, and now it's better than ever. It's a free update for anyone using a Mac made in 2008 or later (and some 2007 models), but (of course) it works best with recent hardware. In our testing, Yosemite was blazingly fast on a MacBook Pro with a Retina ( at Amazon) display, and, unsurprisingly, a bit slow on a 2010 MacBook that's also sluggish with everything else.

Everything in the OS gets a consistent, cleaned-up, flattened look. New features like annotations and markup in Mail and Preview are slotted smoothly into familiar apps. Terrific Continuity features let you use your iPhone or iPad (running iOS 8.1.1 ) as an extension of your Mac. That means you can answer a phone call on your iPhone and continue the conversation using the mic and speakers on your Mac. Or you can start a mail message in OS X, then rush out the door with your iPad or iPhone and finish and send the same message from your iOS device.

Windows 8.1 is certainly no slouch as a fast, convenient desktop OS, but where Microsoft's OS struggles to jam together a tablet OS and a desktop OS into a single system—and ends up with two different browsers and other needless duplications—OS X gets it right by letting the desktop OS and the mobile OS each do what they do best, while letting them share and communicate in a completely new way.

As always with OS X upgrades, the learning curve for the new features is essentially nonexistent, but you'll need to learn one or two simple tricks to use the new Continuity features to their fullest. The visual design is, overall, a triumph of elegant efficiency—and the new look is spectacular on a Retina display—though I have mixed feelings about some aspects of the redesign and some minor doubts about a few new features. But there's no question that with Yosemite, OS X has again widened its lead over the competition as the world's best desktop operating system, and it remains our Editors' Choice.

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Continuity and Handoff
First, the spectacular Continuity features—which, by the way, can be switched off in OS X's System Preferences and iOS's Settings if you don't want them. If your iPhone and Mac are connected to the same Wi-Fi network, and both are logged into the same iCloud account, you can answer the phone on your Mac. The phone and the Mac both ring (with the same ring tone), and a notification appears at the upper right of the OS X desktop. Click Accept to take the call, using the Mac's speakers and microphone. You can also click on a phone number in OS X (for example, in the Contacts app or on a webpage) and call it, using the Mac or your iPhone to talk and listen. A related feature lets you use your Mac to send and receive SMS text messages—the ones that appear in green on your phone because they're not part of the iCloud ecosystem.

Another Continuity feature is called Handoff. When you start writing an email message on your iPhone or iPad and it's on the same Wi-Fi network with your Mac, a Handoff icon will appear next to the OS X dock. Click on the icon, and finish the message on the Mac—it's been handed off from one device to the other.

You can also do the reverse. Start writing in OS X and a Handoff icon appears on your iOS lock screen. If you swipe the icon upward, you can continue writing the message on your iOS device. It took me a while to discover that I had to swipe the lock-screen icon upwards to make this work, but once you figure that out, you won't forget it. Handoff also works in every other OS X app where you'd expect it, including Safari (which opens to the same page you were using in other device), Contacts, Reminders, Maps, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, and more.

One small limitation of Handoff is that if you start writing a text in the Messages app on one device and then switch to your other device and click the Handoff icon, the Messages app will switch to the same conversation you were in on the first device, but (unlike Handoff in Mail) the app won't display the text that you were typing on the first device.

One nifty feature for travelers is the ability to use your iPhone as an Internet hotspot. It shows up in Yosemite's list of available wireless networks like any other network—although you'll need to make sure that Bluetooth is enabled on your phone and Mac. I tested this on an iPhone with iOS 8.1 installed, and it took a couple of tries for the phone and MacBook to pair with other, but then it worked perfectly and surprisingly quickly. All the Handoff features, by the way, work only with Macs from 2012 or later (late 2013 for the MacBook Pro).

Yosemite: A New Look Everywhere

A New Look Everywhere
Over the years, OS X got barnacled with a lot of inconsistent interface features. For the first time, everything—and I do mean everything—has a consistent look, and it's different from that of all the earlier versions.

As in iOS 8.1, everything is flat. There are no more sculptured buttons or toolbars, no more 3-D dock. Toolbars are reduced everywhere, with buttons and icons that used to be spread out over two or more toolbars now combined into one, and all the toolbars are more consistent and elegant. I especially like the way the Safari URL bar is centered, not jammed in anywhere. The Calculator no longer pretends to be the pocket calculator that you threw away years ago. Instead it gets an elegant, flat design that's fully at home in the digital world.

The red, yellow, and green buttons in the upper left of all windows are now consistent everywhere. Red closes the app, yellow minimizes it, and green expands it to full-screen view. When you hover over the buttons, they show little icons indicating what they do. The rectangular full-screen button at the upper right, shoehorned in a few versions ago, has disappeared, replaced by the newly consistent green button.

All the app icons that weren't updated in Mavericks have been redrawn, some of them splendidly—the translucent Recycle Bin is a wonder to behold—some of them less so. The smile on the new Finder icon looks both smug and goofy, and the new folder icons are a garish distracting blue that I hope someone figures out how to change. The iTunes icon is now red, not blue—and jazz lovers will miss the old blue-note style.

For the typeface used throughout OS X, Apple has replaced Lucida Grande with Helvetica Neue, the same font used in iOS 8.1. The new font is spacious and legible, and, like much else in the new design, is less in-your-face than the old design, but it has a slightly chilly, mechanical look. That's probably part of the point of the change—it lets you focus more on the content in your app, less on the OS itself—but it's going to take some getting used to. (I've had my say elsewhere about what's wrong with the original Helvetica, and the new Helvetica is a lot like the old one.)

OS X veterans know about a well-hidden option that lets you reverse the OS's color scheme for use in dark places (see System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > Accessibility). Yosemite adds an optional "dark menu bar and Dock" option (accessible in the General pane in System Preferences) that replaces the light-colored menu and Dock with unobtrusive dark ones. I prefer it to the default setting, and you'll see it in most of the screens in this story's slide show.

Windows 8.1 has its tiled Start Screen, designed to look like the start screen on your phone, but many expert Windows users search out the option to boot directly to the Windows desktop, and they pin to the desktop's Taskbar the apps that they use most. In Yosemite, as in all recent versions, OS X has its counterpart of the start screen—it's the Launchpad display that you can pop up by tapping a function key, which displays all your apps in a start-screen-like grid. Over the years, I've met exactly one person who uses Launchpad, which suggests why OS X, unlike Windows, gets things right by defaulting to opening on the desktop instead.

Today and Tomorrow
Borrowing some ideas from iOS, OS X now adds a Today view to the Notification panel that slides in from the right edge of the screen when you click the notification icon at the upper right or make a two-finger swipe from the right of the trackpad. This customizable panel can display calendar items, reminders, weather, stocks, a calculator, and a world clock. A social-media widget lets you post to Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook or Apple's Messages. For those who think ahead, the Today view also includes a small list of events and reminders for tomorrow. One caveat about Notifications is that every Mac-savvy site now offers to add to them; beware when clicking that OK message on MacRumors.com.

The Today view replaces the almost forgotten Dashboard from earlier OS X versions, but you can't use the old Dashboard widgets in the new Today view. If you buy a new Mac with Yosemite installed, you won't see an icon for the Dashboard in your Dock, but if you want the Dashboard back, just type "Dashboard" into Spotlight, press Enter, and watch the Dashboard fill the screen as it always did. If you upgrade to Yosemite over an existing system, and you've used the Dashboard in the past, all your old widgets will remain available.

The biggest change in the built-in apps is the new Spotlight. It's no longer banished to a small window in the upper right, but now takes center stage with a big window in the middle of the screen. It also gets a lot more abilities, like Wikipedia searches and local movie times—complete with the ability to start a phone call direct from a phone number found in Spotlight. It also does iTunes searches, map searches, and unit conversions. Type "100 euros" in Spotlight, and get the equivalent in dollars; press Enter, and the Calculator opens. It reminds me a bit of the Google search field, so I keep expecting it do things it can't. For example, it doesn't recognize misspellings and suggest alternatives, so you'd better know how to spell Kookamunga (or whatever else you're searching for).

Yosemite: Mail, Markup, Finder

Mail, Markup, Finder, and More
Mail gets a new clean look and shares with Preview a new Markup feature that lets you annotate images and PDF files. With an image or PDF open in Mail or Preview, click on a toolbar icon to access markup tools, including a pen, a shape palette (including arrows), a magic wand for selecting, text overlays, and more.

Another new feature in Mail is automatic maintenance of your account settings, which silently updates your mail server address if your ISP or mail provider changes it. This option is enabled by default—and you can see that it's enabled, because the Incoming Mail Server field in the accounts settings will be grayed out and apparently unchangeable. If the automatic setting gets the server address wrong, disable the automatic maintenance option in the Advanced tab of the affected account, and you'll then be able to type in the correct address. Apple uses a database of server addresses for this automatic maintenance, and if your server isn't correctly listed—yet—in the database, you can use this technique to override the database.

A lot of users reported nonfunctioning mail accounts after upgrading to Yosemite, as a search on "mail Yosemite" in Apple's support forums shows, but the 10.10.1 update addresses this. Mavericks had mail problems at launch, too, especially with Google Apps mail; updates fixed that, too. For those experiencing mail issues, Apple provides an OS X mail troubleshooting page. Another email problem fixed by the update is for accounts using Microsoft Exchange, which also affected Calendar syncing.

Speaking of syncing, OS X and iOS now make it easy to sync and save files on Apple's iCloud Drive, which is also available for Windows, just as Microsoft's OneDrive is available for the Mac. Your iCloud Drive appears in the Finder like any other drive—although expert users will notice that the folder hierarchy in iCloud Drive is a "virtual" hierarchy, not the ordinary OS X file system, so you can't use the Finder's "Go to Folder..." menu item to get quickly to an iCloud Drive folder.

Yosemite also supports the Family Sharing feature introduced with iOS 8.1 that lets up to six people, each with a separate iCloud account, share apps and iTunes downloads. One of the best new things about iCloud is that Drive and Photos are now available in any Web browser by logging into icloud.com. Yet another iCloud capability, Back to My Mac, which lets you pull files off a remote desktop or engage in screen-sharing, has been fixed in the 10.10.1 update after some initial snags.

Integration between OS X apps, already impressive, gets even better. Calendar items display miniature maps showing the location of an event. Click on the map, and a larger version opens in the Maps app, complete with an icon telling you how long it will take to drive there from your current location.

A few other nifty changes that took me a while to notice include RSS support in Safari (finally restored after disappearing from Mail two versions back) and a preview pane available in all Finder views. And you don't need to use a service like DropBox or WeTransfer to mail large files; an option lets the Mail app upload the files to iCloud and send a link to the recipient.

My Wish List
I still use a Windows machine for getting some of my work done—mostly because Word for Windows suits my working habits better than Pages or the current version of Word for the Mac, and because Windows remains more keyboard-friendly than OS X. But I carry a Mac with me when I travel and use one whenever I can at home and at work. That's not going to stop me from making a few complaints about Yosemite, and I'll get to that now.

First, I wish OS X would include an option to set the Finder so that it works the way I think most expert users want to use it. By default, it displays a list of "All My Files," but expert users know where their files are, and want to see them listed in a traditional folder hierarchy. I want a "Use Expert Options" button that changes the Finder settings so that my hard disk appears on the desktop and the Finder defaults to showing my user or Documents folder.

I could live without the new translucency feature, which gives a vague glimpse of the underlying window beneath some toolbars and other interface elements. There seems to be no way to turn it off, and to me it is more distracting than helpful.

Also, I wish Yosemite included a dial pad to use when I want to make a call via my Mac—or at least an easy way to call a number using the keyboard. Yosemite's phone-calling feature works only with numbers that OS X recognizes as phone numbers, so the only way to type in a number and dial it is to type it into the search field in FaceTime and then click the Audio button. If, like me, you don't enjoy looking at your own face in FaceTime, you can also e-mail a phone number to yourself and click on the number in the received message.

Maybe Windows 10 will catch up with OS X in elegance and ease of use, and maybe it won't. In the meantime, Windows 8.1, though better than Windows 8.1, still lags behind. Yosemite outclasses every other OS in terms of coherence, consistency, and convenience, and it has the unique advantage of deep integration with the rest of the Apple ecosystem. I would guess that a huge percentage of Mac users also own iPhones or iPads or both, and all these devices now work together in ways that no one previously imagined. Many users will find a few nits to pick with Yosemite—even if it's only the goofy smile on the Finder icon—but in almost every way, Yosemite ranks as the best upgrade yet to the best OS there is, and the clear Editors' Choice for desktop operating systems.