So Apple did something this week they've never really done before: they opened up a public beta program for OS X. Not developer-only, not "sign an NDA and pray," but an actual public beta anybody can sign up for, first come first served, up to a million people. I found out about it Monday and I already know what I'm doing this weekend.
I signed up almost immediately, which in hindsight might not have been the smartest move, because the only Mac I own that could realistically run it is the one I'm typing this post on right now. I don't have a spare Air lying around or an old Mini I keep for testing. Its this MacBook Pro or nothing, and I'm about to hand its operating system over to software that Apple itself hasn't finished yet.
Yosemite is the one with the flat redesign, if you haven't been following along. Gone are the skeuomorphic textures everyone made fun of for years (RIP faux leather Calendar app), replaced with this thinner, more translucent look that's clearly borrowing a lot of visual language from iOS 7. Helvetica Neue everywhere. Notification Center gets a Today view. Spotlight moves to the center of the screen and turns into something closer to a quick-launcher than a file search box. There's a new feature called Handoff that's supposed to let you start an email on your iPhone and finish typing it on your Mac without doing anything, which sounds a little bit like magic and a little bit like something that's going to randomly stop working three weeks after launch and nobody will know why.
I'm also curious about iCloud Drive, mostly because Dropbox has had my loyalty for years now and I'm skeptical Apple can just walk in and replace that with something that syncs reliably. My experience with iCloud syncing has been, let's say, inconsistent. I've had reminders duplicate themselves four times over. I've had a Pages doc just not show up on a second machine for an entire afternoon. So forgive me if "trust your files to iCloud Drive" doesn't fill me with confidence right out of the gate. Maybe Yosemite fixes that. I genuinely hope it does, because right now my file syncing situation is a mess of three different services doing three different jobs badly.
One thing I'll say for Apple: this is only the second major OS X release since they dropped the big cat names. Mavericks broke that streak last year after Lion, Mountain Lion, Snow Leopard, and however many others, and now Yosemite keeps it going with the California-landmark theme. I don't have a strong opinion on the names themselves, but it's a weirdly satisfying bit of consistency after a decade of cat puns. Somebody at Apple clearly decided cats were played out and nobody's looked back since.
The beta itself doesn't actually land until later this week, and I'll be honest, part of me is already regretting hitting "yes I want this" on my primary work machine. I've been burned by beta software before. Years ago I put an iOS beta on my only phone right before a trip and spent four days in an airport with an app that crashed every time I tried to open the camera. Lesson allegedly learned, except apparently not, because here I am doing basically the same thing again with a laptop I actually need for work every single day.
I'm going to back everything up to an external drive first, obviously, and probably a second backup just to be safe because I don't fully trust Time Machine either (another complaint for another post). If it all goes sideways I'll write about it. If it doesn't, I'll have a review of the new Mail app and whatever else they've quietly redone once the dust settles. Either way, wish me luck. My MacBook's about to become a lab rat.