So the week when .1 came out I was fighting with internet provider about an intermittent DSL outage (restored to 100% after 10 days), so I didn’t know it was out and wouldn’t have tried with intermittent internet.
Anyway, long list of notes below for your entertainment.
First impressions though are ‘meh’, ‘ugh’, ‘why is this better?’, and ‘I wish they wouldn’t keep on turning on stuff I’ve turned off’ and a couple of ‘ok, yeah maybe that’s cools’…
Software Update settings changed to favor Apple so I changed back to my prefs
iCloud > Manage Storage, I always delete Siri data and now it takes more steps to do so and at one point a window told ‘your request is being processed’. Wait, am I not the Administrator of the Mac? I did not make a request of Apple, I gave a command
On/Off buttons/sliders are now oval and wider, how is this better
Animation of the sliders has some lines along the edge of the buttons going partway across and I don’t get the iconologic meaning of these lines. I’m not sure how to show that as I think I’d have to take a screen video and crop it very tightly…
Corner radius of windows seem larger, don’t see how this is better
Finder and Settings left columns are in rounded box, with blank space above, below and left which seems a waste of screen realestate
I was checking Widgets in notification center and was told they’d been moved to the desktop, regardless of my wishes. At least there was an option to revert!
Editing Menu Bar Controls in Settings takes you to Control Center. What? I wanted to work on Menu Bar…
Calendar Widget, hm. I had been hoping for a multiple month display, there is room for 2 months side by side, but no, there is still only one full-month Calendar Widget alas
Stocks Watchlist Widget still limited to 6 items. Used to be 10 or 12
I guess for some reason they want users to open the associated apps for these 2 Widgets
Default Web Browser is hidden in Settings > Desktop & Dock > Widgets. Maybe it has been there for a while but seems an odd place for it
Settings for Spotlight are quite different. There is a long list of Apps and maybe that’s useful but it might make sense to have a standard for ‘turn on/off all’ if any list of buttons is more than x.
There used to be options for types of files, now it’s just ‘files’
Clipboard history in Spotlight seems new and nicely enough they note that ‘personal and sensitive information may appear in search results’, which is uh, kind of obvious and makes me wonder why they warn users about it, perhaps Spotlight shares its activity with Apple. But I already use LaunchBar for this for a long time so turned it off
In Login Items & Extensions is something called ‘hdutil’, shown as from unidentified developer. I thought I’d turned it off but it’s on again. Would be interested to know what that thing is
In Application Notifications is ‘Kerberos’. I think it was in previous MacOSes but I still don’t know what it is and it’s not explained. If it’s important enough to list in Notifications you’d think they’d explain what it is. I don’t recall ever seeing a Notification from Kerberos
Menus are now chock full of tiny icons to the left of the text commands. I don’t find this an improvement. The icon department must be very busy
Saved to iCloud, as usual with software updates, lots was turned on although I’ve had them off for a very long time through several updates
In Settings > General > Storage > ‘Store in iCloud’, Desktop & Documents, Photos, and Messages are all selected On. It’s a non-standard dialog (not new in 26.1 btw), because if you turn them all off then the button lower right to confirm the decision is not clickable, you can only Cancel. Gives the impression you cannot turn storing all this stuff in iCloud off, and gives no indication of current status
Settings > Accessibility > Display shows several on/off buttons at the top that are off and gray (as if not able to be clicked) but clickable. I discovered this by clicking Invert Colors, and then turning back to normal. Oddly enough then the Settings and other windows had dark backgrounds as if in ‘night mode’ (which I have set for 10 pm but it’s now only 830 pm)
Then I looked in other Settings Panes and discovered that on/off buttons are often gray even though clickable. Maybe it’s been like that a long time and only now I noticed
When the Desktop is visible behind open windows, it used to be the icons of items on the Desktop were visible. Now they are only visible when showing the Desktop. I don’t see why this is better, it gives me the feeling Desktop is broken or lost
Folder icons in Finder Windows had turned themselves to Red. Then I discovered this was some automatic change based on my change in text highlighting. So I picked a color from the apparently new Folder Color option in Appearance > Theme
Then I noticed that Folder Icons take on the color of the Flag, but… wait there’s no reference to Flags (or was it Tags) in the context menu, just colored dots and… ahoy! there’s a Customise Folder option that allows lots of interesting changes to Folder icons, whoop!
That led me to notice in Mail, The Favorites are in my highlight color when selected, Smart Mailboxes don’t change from black when selected, and the On My Mac mailboxes are some other color I didn’t choose, when they are selected; nothing in Mail Settings about it
Changing Keyboard or Display brightness with Function Row keys, instead of a big centered indication there is now only a tiny barely noticeable indication up by the Status Menu. I don’t see this as an improvement
Connecting to my same years long in use Wifi router takes about 10 seconds instead of previous 2-4 seconds
I’ve set up a new cellular data wifi box and Tahoe rarely remembers it, I have to select Other… and enter the name and long password about 3 out of 4 attempts to connect
Sometimes clicking on the wifi symbol in Status Menu connects to the wifi, sometimes it presents the long-standing pop down where one can turn wifi on/off or go to Settings, etc. I thought maybe it was the setting for ‘automatically connect’ but I turned that off and it is still inconsistent
In Mail, I noticed that keyboard command equivalents shown are in gray text, not sure if this is new but I now find myself confused, Apple seems to have done away with the idea that gray means inactive/not available yet in fact it now has no such meaning. I don’t know if this is a Tahoe thing
Also in Mail, perhaps other apps, there are commands in black with > symbols for further options but the options are all gray. I thought if all the after > options were gray so would the main command before the >. Hm. maybe also not recalled correctly but is frustrating
Maybe not new in Tahoe but Apple demands the User Account Password with some activities related to iCloud. This puts full login data about my account in Apple’s hands, which doesn’t seem right. I always change my account password after being forced to give it up like this
This whole ‘Liquid Glass’ thing, seems like a waste of space with bigger roundings and more gaps, and makes things more visually confusing for me, with blurred gunk behind search fields, option buttons etc. One nifty thing is the reversed image of the material displayed behind clear buttons, along the edges of the buttons, like real glass (more noticeable in iOS)! Still, I need to look again at Mr. Engst’s article about making it more like the old style…
Used to be, you could drag a window to the right to put it in a new ‘Space’, but now nothing happens when I drag a window to the right edge.
Anyway, congratulations if you made it this far, though maybe the Reply was deleted for being too long…