Closer to Yosemite

Beta late than never

I’ve been a bad beta tester. Over the last month, I haven’t had much opportunity to use Yosemite. I’ve found myself needing to use apps that I did not want to bring over to the new operating system yet, and I had to repair a troubled Time Machine backup.[1] I downloaded Beta 3, and then really didn’t use it. Two weeks later,[2] I finally booted into Yosemite, for the first time since September 22.

As soon as the computer booted into Yosemite, it told me that Beta 4 was ready to download. It’s been out for nearly a week, but has received exactly no attention. While it was downloading, I checked the various Apple-centric blogs I read,[3] and none of them have a post up specifically about Beta 4.
I had wondered last night if there would soon be a new beta, since I had read that Apple had released the Gold Master candidate for Yosemite. I missed within all this the one line that the post gives to Beta 4, noting that it has a different build number than the Golden Master candidate (the developers get build 14A378a, and the beta program gets 14A379b). It was clear all along that Apple wasn’t going to update the Beta program as often as the developers, but this was an important release. It’s pretty close to, and might even be, the final version. There certainly won’t be any major changes between this one and the final.

And if we’re getting that close to release, then I’m getting close to the day in which the beta becomes my day-to-day operating system. I’m not too worried at this point. I’m the guy with redundant backups.[4] If something went wrong, I’m sure I could roll back to the Last Good Point with only a small amount of pain and cursing.

As I noted, there is no indication of any sort of major changes to Yosemite at this point. Things are going to get subtle. I haven’t used it long enough to actually notice anything. But I’ve seen the future for my Mac. Soon, I’ll be able to move my iOS devices onto iCloud Drive. I know that some people dislike new systems and stick with old ones. Me, I love seeing what new things they have for us.

Now I just have to wait for Photos to replace the crashy mess that iPhoto has become.

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1. On the apps, mostly iPhoto. I’ve done a lot in iPhoto, since I’m just back from some traveling. But given that I had to update the drive copying app in order to use it under Mavericks, I didn’t want to risk doing that in Yosemite.  ↩
   
2. A week of which was spent with a series of failed attempts to clone the good backup before I finally managed to get it right.  ↩
   
3. My top three: Apple Insider, MacRumors, and Cult of Mac.  ↩
   
4. After years of stressing to people the need to back up their systems, I concluded that I should do better than my own advice and keep a redundant backup. This opinion was forged in part when my backup drive failed right after I used to to restore from a directory problem. That’s never happening again.  ↩