Beta, Take Two

New icon!

If there’s one thing that Yosemite has taught me, it’s how reliant I have become on the cloud. Because of the incompatibly between iCloud Drive and iOS7, whenever I boot into Yosemite, I’m going “cloudless.” No working on a draft on my iPad while I do something else (such as rebooting to swap between OSes). Yesterday, Apple released Yosemite Beta 2. I had been busy using things I’m keeping solely in Mavericks for a bit, so I wasn’t able to check it out until today.

After getting a few things cleared away,[1] I quit everything, opened System Preferences, clicked the Yosemite drive as my startup, and rebooted…

…back into Mavericks. What?

Tried again. It told me that it couldn’t bless that system. Noooooo! I opened up Disk Utility and checked my Yosemite drive. Nothing wrong with it. Tried it again. Success!

During all this, I decided to use the downtime to start a blog post, but since I wasn’t going to be able to type it on my iPad (unless I wanted to post from my iPad,[2] or boot back into Mavericks to bring it in through iCloud). Poor little me was writing a blog post longhand—the way they did in the Middle Ages.[3] Then the nine-minute download of the 1.7 GB that is Beta 2,[4] followed by an install process that took even longer. But I had pen and paper.

When I read about the update, the actual details of the update were unclear,[1] other than the update of iTunes. Like the prior update to iTunes, it’s been updated from version 12.0 to version 12.0. Play with a beta, update software, keep same version numbers. It may be that most the changes to the beta are stability improvements, based on the use of beta users like myself. The icons for drives now have flat art, and in the setup, there was a checkbox for reporting crashes to application developers.[5]
It’s still pretty. I’m still not ready to make it my primary operating system.

There are now rumors about when Apple will be releasing it to the public. MacWorld UK suggests that following the same timeline as Mavericks, it will come out in October, preceded by iOS8. I’m guessing that there will be an update to Mavericks to move everybody over to iCloud Drive.

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1. And other than two things, still are.  ↩
   
2. Never. Too many shortcomings.  ↩
   
3. Marginalia were the blog comments of their day.  ↩
   
4. Which beats the more than 5 GB for the initial download.  ↩
   
5. And MacRumors (which I read) has a more comprehensive list of changes.  ↩