OS X El Capitan: Installed

2015-10-07 • SEND FEEDBACK |
Related: Apple, Apple iOS, Apple iPhone and iPad, Apple macOS, iOS, Java

I downloaded OS X El Capitan via an iPhone personal hotspot high in the mountains, just to prove out the viability of internet via iPhone. But I deferred installation until I returned home and could make backups of everything.

For anyone getting work done day in and day out, MPG advice remains the same: WAIT at least a month after a major new OS X release in order to let things settle out, and professional users that depend on specific hardware or software that might not have solutions as yet (or ever) should wait three months or so—what’s the hurry? Nothing important is in El Capitan.

About

Overview dialogs from OS X El Capitan shown below. The 3.3 GHz 8-core CPU is a custom upgrade from OWC. The NEC PA302W is my workhorse display, and the NEC PA322UHD is used as a 2nd display for viewing large images and web pages.

OS X El Capitan overview

Apple needlessly removes things. Download Java for OS X 2015-001 to fix.

OS X El Capitan removes legacy Java SE 6 runtime
(required by Adobe Dreamweaver CS5.5)

Storage summary

I suppose this godawful mess (below) helps someone with a single drive/volume, but exactly what information is there to work with for any meaningful course of action?

The “other” category is probably most useful for novice users (since photos and music and videos are likely to be in one place), yet there is nothing there to help explain what “other” means, or what to do about it.

For that matter, “Apps” might gives no help in seeing apps never used in the past X days or anything like that. So MPG sees this as mainly visual clutter, and of exceptionally visually distracting color palette at that. It does not bear up to scrutiny as more than eye candy, more like bad tasting medicine.

OS X El Capitan storage summary

DreamWeaver

The first thing I noticed with El Capitan was very poor performance with Adobe Dreamweaver, as in taking 3-4 seconds to open a 2 kilobyte html file along with the new childish looking rainbow-beachball spinning cursor*. It seems to be related to fonts; an entire CPU goes 100% busy for that time period before the file will open. Another step backwards—will Apple ever stop making things worse? Since I use DW many hours each day, this is an ugly problem, and I hope that no others crop up. Later versions of DW are the same old anal-cut sausage.

UPDATE: I disabled or removed 40 fonts or so, rebooted and tried again—the performance issue has not returned. Good!

* Whose juvenile tastes are responsible for the godawful icons in iOS and now OS X? Now we get to be annoyed by performance issues with a “made for children” look.