Yosemite

I upgraded to the GM candidate this week.

There were two reasons for my doing that at this point in time:

1. My office mini was unbearably slow due to the “endless Spotlight indexing” bug (yes, it’s a thing, and yes, it comes back after you “fix” it) and I was tired of waiting 10 minutes until it settled every morning¹.
2. I wanted to avoid the inevitable network slowdowns next week (which seems the most likely release date) and get a head start on preparing a “migration kit” for all my development stuff.

So I left the upgrade running while I worked on my MacBook Pro and it took around two hours, give or take – but I didn’t pay much attention due to work and only glanced at it occasionally (pro tip: Command+L gives you an installer log to peek at now and then).

And then I did the same this weekend on my home machine – everything worked out fine at the office, but my near-identical (but a generation behind) home setup has a few graphics glitches on the secondary monitor, which is a big drag. I had something similar on an earlier upgrade, and my guess is that it’ll be fixed by release date, but fortunately I usually have something else wired up to my second monitor at home and it’s not terribly annoying to use just the one.

Update: The glitches went away after resetting the SMC on that mini.

I do, however, hate the new window decorations, the color picker, and, in general, a tiny menagerie of stuff I’m going to refer to merely as visual design regressions, both because it’s the most polite term that comes to mind right now and because I can’t really bring myself to insult people.

A lot of the new visuals might as well have been done with wax crayons, and let’s leave it at that. I rather like the new aesthetic (even though years of using other platforms have drilled into me the perception that translucency denotes inactive windows) and my habit of hiding the Dock turned out to be a great way to maintain my sanity in this regard.

The new Spotlight is OK, but not remarkable. I’m trying to make do without Quicksilver, and it’s a useful but frustrating stand-in (I miss drilling into folders, custom actions, etc.).

Software-wise, I have no complaints. I can’t actually get Xcode 6.1 from the App Store yet, but I in the meantime I did a complete Homebrew reinstall (always a good thing to clear out the dead wood) and all my Python stuff worked right away (both the stuff that relied on the system Python and the multiple environments I have setup with pyenv), so I was good until I tried doing some Clojure and had to install Java (which I ended up not doing yet because it was faster to just fire up my Linux VM).

As far as regular software is concerned, I only really needed three things not to break: Moom (for sane window management), Mail Act-On (the latest beta works fine) and Evernote (which still looks exactly the same – so far). Everything works, and all the minor trinkets I have installed (Day-O, MenuMeters, etc.) just kept on ticking.

I expect that to change somewhat as developers start shipping Yosemite-specific updates and actually breaking things, but for now I’m good.