Mac OS X Yosemite

Yosemite Annoyances

  • Safari's default behaviour is to have only the domain of the site appear in the address bar. This might make sense on mobile, but it doesn't at all on desktop. Thankfully there's a setting to change to get it showing the whole URL.

    • The Mavericks version of 1Password was incompatible with Yosemite after I upgraded. I had to update 1Password to get it working again, but that required my Apple password, which ... can you guess where this is going? Good thing I had a secondary device (my iPhone and iPad) to look the password up. So here's a riddle: How would I have managed if I didn't have a secondary device with 1Password? (Assume that my Dropbox password is in 1Password.)

    • The update took a few hours stuck at "About a minute remaining". I had heard, but forgotten, that some developers experienced long upgrades because of their Homebrew setup. I was lucky in that I started on a Friday night, and by the time I woke up on Saturday, the installation completed.

    • The update also renamed my computer from Lallafa to "Lallafa (2)". Whyyyyy? It's a bug? The fix was to go to System Preferences, then search for "Computer name", and find out that the setting is in "Sharing".

    • Notification Center's Notifications tab sometimes doesn't work. I restarted my computer to see if the problem would go away, and so far so good. This happens when you have a Today widget open, like the Twitter widget. Close/cancel the widget, and the tab works.

Habits from Mavericks to break:

    • In Terminal, when doing a find inside a window, a Find box (that was closable) would hover around. Now the Find in window is a search bar at the top of the window. I have to break a habit of closing the Find window with Cmd-W.

    • Safari's Back and Forward button are on the same row as the close/minimize/maximize buttons. I have to break the habit of going all the way to the left to click Back.

Moving to Yosemite

For the first time, I'm waiting out upgrading to the next major version of OS X, which in my case is Yosemite. I had heard that there were flareups, more than in the usual upgrades. I was initially meh on the new design, but it's slowly winning me over.

Reasons to be cautious:

Reasons to upgrade:

Issues on Mavericks that I'm watching out for on Yosemite:

    • Double notifications in the Calendar app. It hasn't been the easiest issue to search for, since the app name is the same on iOS. I would also get notified of events that were underway.

  • Notifications sometimes wouldn't clear after clicking the X button for the notifications group

I'm on Yosemite now. I'll update the issues below as we go along

Mavericks is the best version of OS X ever. My cute little 2010 MacBook Air seems to have gotten a new lease on live (everything's a little bit faster, if only a little bit). After a few attempts at yak shaving to get Flash back in Safari (going Flashless was a mistake), it works again in Safari 7 and I can disable it on per-domain basis. Perfect! Upgrading was totally worth the price, and the price was free!

OS

  • in a dual-monitor setup, full screen apps take up the full screen of the primary monitor, and leave the secondary monitor "blank" with the linen pattern.

    • A better approach would be to make the secondary screen a separate 'desktop' or 'space', making the apps moved there always on the secondary screen while one can flip through desktops/spaces on the primary monitor

    • True on Mountain Lion? Yes.

      • True on Mavericks? No! Full-screen apps behave as expected on multiple displays. One funny part about multiple displays is Dock location and menu bar ghosting. (The latter is smart, just takes getting used to.)

Terminal

    • Odd behaviour with typing, especially when looking back in a command line history while SSHing to a CentOS box. (It seems to be specifically CentOS...possibly? A support thread has similar issues.)

      • True on Mountain Lion? Unclear.

      • Sometimes when SSHing, anything I type goes into the ether.

Mail

    • still requires QuoteFix for Mac (which removes the line between the original sender and the quote, and places the cursor at the end of the message)

      • True on Mountain Lion? Yes.

      • True on Mavericks? Unclear.

    • default for signatures omits the dash-dash-space-newline

      • True on Mountain Lion? Yes.

      • True on Mavericks? Unclear.

    • the "delete" button on my keyboard archives email. I actually delete email (only ever notifications that I'll never need again, but I don't want them clogging up my search results in Gmail). To me, "delete" really means delete.

      • True on Mountain Lion? Different. The "delete" button now labels messages as "Deleted Messages", not actually putting them in the trash. This is true even if "Move deleted messages to the Trash mailbox" is set under Preferences, Accounts, Mailbox Behaviors.

      • True on Mavericks? Unclear.

    • saving on server goes to a folder named "[Gmail]/Drafts" (for example), not the actual Gmail-native Drafts folder (i.e. the one on the website). Archiving labels emails with "[Imap]/Archive".

      • True on Mavericks? Unclear.

    • Mavericks: evidently using Mail.app with a Gmail account requires you to download All Mail?

Those are all the reasons why I can't use Mail.app on my Mac. Postbox does a better job of keeping things Gmail-native.

Safari 7

Flash works again for me on Safari 7, so that's good. Also, one process per tab is a Good Thing™. The sidebar (tweeted links, Reading List) is a big hit with me. I also love scrolling from one article to the next when in Reading List mode, though this doesn't work with a mouse, only the trackpad.

    • ESC in full screen mode undoes full screen when a website could use ESC. For example, when adding a photo to a set in Flickr, typically you can press ESC to leave the overlay. ESC takes you out of full screen and out of the overlay, when I expect just to get out of the overlay.

      • True on Mavericks? Yes.

    • Full screen Safari

      • in regular screen mode, you can type Cmd-Shift-\ to remove the toolbar/address bar, but this key is not active in full screen mode

      • in full screen mode, you can right-click the toolbar and select "Hide Toolbar", which removes the toolbar, address bar, and tabs. But to get the toolbar/address bar/tabs back, you have to exit full screen mode. Also, Cmd-L (which moves the keyboard cursor to the address bar) has no effect in full screen mode in this view.

        • on the plus side, you can still navigate tabs with Cmd-shift-[ and Cmd-shift-] (and Cmd-[ and Cmd-] work as well for back and forward)

        • when I exit full screen mode (i.e. completely full screen mode, no toolbars or anything), and re-enter it, I have to right click and hide the toolbar again.

          • True in Mavericks? No.

        • moving the mouse pointer to the top gets me the Safari menu, but no toolbar or tabs

        • in Mavericks, Cmd-Shift-\ now shows tab exposé.

    • Doesn't periodically save tabs. Found this out after a crash, Safari will load the home or blank page. No, I don't want an extension if Safari is supposed to do this natively.

      • True in Mavericks? Unclear.

    • Sometimes if I'm impatient with a site loading, and I want to copy the URL, Safari will give me a truncated URL with '...' in it. That's a crazy bug that I fully expect fixed in the next update. Still an issue in 5.1.2. https://github.com/rs/SafariOmnibar/issues/62 (I think the issue there is with Safari, not with the plugin) points out that this may be a fullscreen thing only.

    • Somewhat jerky scrolling up and down. This is with iOS-style scrolling enabled (I'll call it "natural" without quotes when it starts to feel natural)

      • better in 5.1.1, but not as great as I expect

      • True in Mavericks? Unclear.

    • Copy & paste

      • when I try to copy a URL from the address bar, it only 'takes' after the second try. Hard one to search for to see if anybody else has this. I only even use Command-C (Apple-C) to copy, and usually it pastes in the previous clipboard to what I expect to have copied (i.e. the URL).

      • this is possibly Lion-wide

    • if you lose an internet connection when trying to visit a web page, or try to reload the page without an Internet connection, the URL switches to [of course I can't duplicate it when whining about it...] without the ability to click on something to get to the original URL.

    • Resources:

    • Tim Bray is annoyed with Safari 5.1

Mountain Lion

This section will have its own page eventually.

AppleScript

    • Not really sure if this is a problem anymore, but for some reason I noticed a couple of my scripts from Lion got corrupted. More investigation needed.

Growl

    • There's Hiss to forward Growl notifications to Notification Center, but it's currently in beta and not sure what the future looks like, other than apps themselves moving over to Notification Center.

    • growlnotify seems to be totally broken, but terminal-notifier (the link points out a Ruby Gem with implementation script; see also a growlnotify replacement) looks like a replacement.

    • As of October 2013, I haven't seemed to actually need Growl in a while.