Archive: Business & Technology

A few weeks ago I wrote about how much I liked the similarities between iOS 7 and iOS eight. Well iOS eight had a lot to offer, I didn't need to go through a large learning curve to read learn the things I already knew how to use.

The same can be said for the newest version of OS X Yosemite. It's the same, but different. What you know how to do doesn't change, but it adds features that you can learn at your own speed. The upgrade is free to OS X Mavericks users simply by going to the app store and clicking on the download button.

When Yosemite was released a week ago I thought I was being so clever. I would download the new, free Mac operating system from the App Store and let it install while I was asleep. Major upgrades like this take a while to download and install. When I got up in the morning I'd have what amounted to a new computer with all my stuff on it.

In Maverics, click on the App Store, and the free OS X upgrade is front and center. Click on the Download button, wait for it to downlaoad and install. It's free. Insomniac that I am, I got up around 3:30 to check on its progress. Whoops –– it was stuck on 50%. OS X Yosemite had only been available for half a day so there weren't too many posts to Google on recovering from bad installations. But I did find one guy who said that the same thing had happened to him. He reported that he turned off his computer.  When he turned it back on the installation completed quickly.

So, sleepless in Lansing, at about five in the morning I turned off my computer. When I turned it back on Yosemite took about a minute to install. As it turned out I needed to reboot one more time before the installation was really complete, but with a big sigh of relief I saw that I had the new operating system and all my apps and data intact. So I went back to bed and tried to go back to sleep.  As with my initial attempt to upgrade OS X, I wasn't entirely successful.

By the way, a lot of the folks on the Apple support message boards did not recommend turning off the computer, and I don't guarantee this will work if this happens to you. Many said to click Command+L to bring up the log screen and see if log entries were scrolling. If so, they said to be patient and the installation would eventually complete. But when I tried that I heard the little failure bleep and nothing else happened, which told me that my computer had frozen. Having no choice but to turn it off and back on again I thanked my lucky stars when it actually worked.


One major feature of the Apple–verse that I like very much is how the various gadgets integrate with each other. The promise of Yosemite is greater integration between phones, Pads, TV, and the Mac. The first piece that you notice is the look and feel of apps in Yosemite. For example OS X mail now looks a lot like iOS 8 mail. The same with maps, calendar, and all the usual suspects.  many third party developers have also scurried to make their apps look iOS 8-y.

The Notification Center notably looks and feels like the one in iOS 8. You can add widgets on the first notification screen to customize what appears there, and there's a second screen for notifications, just like on the iPad and iPhone.

iOS eight introduced iCloud Drive. For some time I have had Dropbox and Box, two cloud services, integrated into Finder. They simply appear in the sidebar as folders like the ones that are actually on my hard drive.  In Yosemite your iCloud folders can finally be accessed directly like they are in Dropbox. This is a big step forward giving you more control over iCloud and making it more usable.  Because a growing number of apps both from Apple and third-party developers use iCloud, this also gives you direct access to all of your stuff.  but you can just use it as another drive if you want, with the added benefit of accessing the files on your iPhone or iPad.

An integration feature that Apple has been touting is the ability to hand off tasks from your phone, and even to answer calls on your Mac. This may or may not be possible. Click About this Mac in the apple menu, and when the window pops up, click System Report.  The third item down his Bluetooth and about halfway down on the screen look for LMP version. If the number you see is less than 0x6, you're not going to be able to use handoff or answer calls on your Mac.  That's the case on my iMac, which is only three years old.  Mine says 0x4.  Bummer.

But all is not lost for those of us who don't buy a new computer every year. One of the things that has annoyed me for a long time is when I find a great website on my phone and then want to go to it on my computer. I had to type a sometimes very long address and not necessarily get it right, and then have to type the whole thing again. If you use Safari, your various devices have a screen on which you can see what's in the tabs on the other devices. For instance I looked up a website on my phone when I was out last night, and this morning I open Safari on my iMac and found a link to it on the screen. It instantly took me to the site -- with one click and no typing.


There are a lot of fun additions to existing apps. In the mail app, when sending a message with the picture and it hover your mouse over the picture and a little drop-down appears in the upper right corner. Click that and choose Markup. You get a little editor that lets you add text graphics to circle something important or just add a caption.

When I saw that Yosemite has dark mode I thought who cares? All it does is turn the menu bar a dark gray and the dock bar a dark blue. But then I decided I really like that look better. After a minute though, I realized that I could not see some of the black icons on my menu bar.  So I turned it off again.

I was traveling recently and our hotel had lousy Wi-Fi, so I was forced to experiment with personal hotspot. I enabled it on my phone, and was able to connect my iPad, which had critical tool installed on it.  With the introduction of Yosemite you can now hook your computer to an iOS eight personal hotspot.  That is going to be useful if you have a laptop, or if your cable goes down.

One of the major criticisms of Microsoft's Windows 8 was that they made the computer version too much like the touchscreen version for phones and pads. Critics said that made the operating system harder to use on the computer, And reportedly windows 10 – – what happened to nine? – – fixes this problem.  Yosemite doesn't try to be a phone operating system. It has visual and workflow similarities, but it still makes the computer easy to use -- as a computer. To me a sign of a great upgrade is that when you first load it you don't have to learn anything. The look and feel is similar to what you are already used to, and over time you begin to learn and enjoy the new features.

Except for my little installation glitch, that's exactly what happened for me. The first thing I noticed was that notifications looked more like those on my phone. I liked that. because now my learning curve was even less then it would've been when the computer only resembled the computer. Things like Notification Center work pretty much the same way on my computer and phone. They are optimized for the individual devices, but the look and feel and workflow are virtually the same.  Less tech stuff to clutter my brain.  That means the work is what is important, not the tool, which is as it should be for any computing device or software.

That is not to say that this is not a major upgrade. It is. A lot of what it does is purring under the hood. But the parts that we see in use, the integrations with iCloud and our other devices make Yosemite perhaps the most useful version of the operating system to date. That you can get it for free is frosting on the cake.

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