Apple’s latest update to OSX is out and it has some nice changes and some maybe not great changes. I keep finding tips, tricks and good things to know about Yosemite around the internets and I wanted to put them all together for, if anything, my own reference.

Apache Update

The default install of Apache has been updated to 2.4.9, which is great because it brings security fixes and all that good stuff. But if you have done any sort of configuration to your hosts file or httpd.conf for example, it will probably break something. Your probably used to this if you’ve ever gone through a major OSX update before.

Pro-tip: anytime I mess with a default config file, I make a backup of my changes and throw it on github. So if it ever gets overwritten with an update or anything, I can just copy my changes back over.

Transparency, everywhere

Not really feeling all the semitransparent stuff? You can turn reduce it in
System Preferences > Accessibility > Reduce Transparency

Before and after: Before and after transparency

The only weird issue that I’ve seen with this is system dialogues for things like volume and brightness now look like this:

Volume weirdness

Dark Mode

Get a dark version of the menu bar and Dock
System Preferences > General > Use dark menu bar and Dock

Dark Mode

Dark Mode Dock

Maximize Functionality

The ‘maximize’ button for windows is now just a full-screen button. But if you hold Option it will return to the old maximize functionality.

Default System Font

Apple changed the defualt system font for the first time ever, from Lucida Grande to Helvetica Neue. I’ve yet to try this but if it bugs you enough, check out this GitHub Repo for changing it back.

Twitter Avatars

Use the Twitter OSX app and want it to be a little more 10.10ish? Dump the following into terminal for circular avatars: defaults write com.twitter.twitter-mac CircularAvatars -bool true

Twitter Circle Avatars