OS X Yosemite: The Missing Manual

The Mac Becomes an iPad

If you could choose only one word to describe Apple’s overarching design goal in its recent versions of OS X, there’s no doubt about what it would be: iPad. That’s right. In this software, Apple has gone about as far as it could go in trying to turn the Mac into an iPad.

Two things made the iPad the fastest-selling electronic gadget in history. First, it’s so simple. No overlapping windows; every app runs full screen. No Save command; everything is autosaved. No files or folders. No menus. All your apps are in one place, the Home screen. To beginners, technophobes, and even old-timers, the iPad’s software represents a refreshing decluttering of the modern computer.

The second huge iPad sales point is that multitouch screen. You operate the whole thing by touching or dragging your fingers on the glass. For example, you cycle through screens by swiping. You zoom out on a map, photo, or Web page by pinching two fingers. You rotate a photo by twisting two fingers, and so on. Everything feels like you’re more directly manipulating the objects in your digital world.

So, Apple thought, if simplicity and touch gestures made the iPad a megahit, why can’t we do the same for the Mac?

And it set out to bring as many of the iPad’s features and as much of its personality to your Mac as possible. Today’s OS X features like Full Screen mode, Auto Save, and Launchpad are total iPad rip-offs; if Apple hadn’t stolen these features from itself, it would be suing for copyright infringement. In the last couple of years, even the Mac’s app names have changed to match iOS: Reminders, Notes, Notification Center, Game Center, and so on. And perfect clones of some of iOS’s apps, like iBooks and Maps, made their way to the Mac, too.

And now, in Yosemite, the other shoe has dropped: OS X has been redesigned, top to bottom, to look more like iOS 8. Same font schemes, color schemes, design conventions. Out with photographic “materials” like leather, felt, paper, and brushed metal; in with flat, solid colors.

UP TO SPEED: Upside-Down Scrolling

If you haven’t upgraded OS X in a couple of years, you might discover something alarming when you try to scroll using your laptop’s trackpad: When you slide your fingers upward, the page scrolls down. That’s backward, isn’t it?

For your entire computing career so far, you’ve always dragged the scroll bar down to move the contents of the page up—and now Apple has swapped the directions. Why would Apple throw such a monkey wrench into your life?

The main reason is (what else?) to make the Mac match the iPad, where you drag your finger up to move the page up.

Anyway, you have two choices: You can spend a couple of days getting used to the new arrangement—or you can put things back to the way they’ve always been. (To do that, open System Preferences. For a trackpad: Click Trackpad, click Scroll & Zoom, and then turn off “Scroll direction: natural.” For a Magic Mouse: Click Mouse, click Point & Click, and then turn off “Scroll direction: natural.”)

Note: If you have a non-Apple mouse that has a scroll wheel, the Mouse pane may not offer this scroll-direction option. You can still reverse the scroll-direction logic, though, if you’re handy in Terminal (OS X’s command-line program).

Just open Terminal and type defaults write ~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences com.apple.swipescrolldirection -bool false. When you press Return and log out, you’ll find that the time-honored scroll directions have been restored.

Apple even brought the whole multitouch thing over to the Mac. No, you don’t touch the screen; you’d get screaming arm pain if you had to spend the day with your arm outstretched, manipulating tiny controls on a vertical surface three feet away. (The resulting ache actually has a name in the computer biz: gorilla arm.)

Instead, you use all those same iPad gestures and more, right on the surface of your laptop trackpad, Apple Magic Trackpad, or (if you have Apple’s Magic Mouse) the top surface of the mouse.

All of OS X’s big-ticket features are intended to work together. For example, suppose you’re looking at a document in Full Screen view (feature #1). How are you supposed to switch to the next app? By swiping across the trackpad in the “next app” gesture (feature #2). Then you might pinch four fingers together to open Launchpad (feature #3) so you can open another program.

It’s a new way to work, for sure. And it’s optional. If it doesn’t float your boat, you can ignore all of it (Full Screen, gestures, Launchpad, Auto Save). But you should at least make an informed decision—and this book should come in handy that way.