Addressing Mac OS X Yosemite's most annoying "features"
Mac OS X Yosemite has been in the wild for about a week now, just long enough for tech bloggers and many users to find things that frankly drive them nuts about the new OS. Longtime Macworld writer and fellow ailurophile Kirk McElhearn toted up his list of Yosemite gripes, but instead of just kvetching about the changes he didn't like, he did something about it -- he wrote a post about how to set things back to the way they used to be.
Where's My iTunes Sidebar?
TUAW's Mel Martin already covered one of the annoyances, which is the loss of the sidebar in iTunes 12. That's a rather easy fix -- just click on the "Playlists" link at the top of iTunes 12 when in Music, Movies, or TV Shows, and a sidebar showing your playlists appears. It's not a total replacement for the previous sidebar, but if you "just gotta" have a sidebar, it should calm your nerves a bit.
Safari and the Missing Full Web Address
McElhern points out one of the flukes of Safari now -- looking a web page, all you're going to see in the address bar is the top-level domain. For example, pointing Safari to a post from a week ago (http://www.tuaw.com/2014/10/17/where-is-my-sidebar-in-itunes-12/) simply shows "www.tuaw.com". That's fine if you're just looking at one page on a site, but if you need to see the full address, it's nowhere to be seen.
My personal solution is to just click on the visible URL, which then expands into the full address. But if you'd always like to see the full address, McElhern points out that you can go to Safari > Preferences > Advanced, look for the Smart Search Field section of the pane and then check "Show full website address".
Those Translucent Menubars...
Can't stand those translucent menubars and windows? Although I've found these to be quite attractive, I can see why some people just don't want translucency in their user interface. It's easy to change; McElhern points us to System Preferences > Accessibility, click on the Display button, and then check the Reduce Transparency box.
McElhern also notes that the term "transparency" is incorrect -- it's "translucency", and hopefully this will be fixed in the Accessibility settings soon. Update, anyone?
Spotlight Has Become Too Bright
When you're searching for files, tunes, pictures or documents, Apple's Spotlight has become the go-to tool. With OS X Yosemite, Spotlight now does even more, providing you with search results from Wikipedia and assorted websites, as well doing conversions and more. But for some users, the wealth of responses from Spotlight under Yosemite is just too much!
To cut down on the responses, go to System Preferences > Spotlight and uncheck those items you don't want to see. McElhern notes that you can also make life better by putting the items you want to see first near the top of the response list, which is done by dragging the categories up or down into your preferred order.
Do you have other tips for your fellow Yosemite explorers? Leave 'em in the comments below.
