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Open up Finder - or any app, really - and you'll see the left-hand pane is translucent, and will turn to the color of your wallpaper or whatever files you happen to have open in the background (see above for an example). You should get used to it pretty quickly. Oh, speaking of the stoplights, the green button now allows you to bring windows to full-screen.
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Even the "stoplights" for closing, minimizing and maximizing windows are flat - no 3D shading here. Throughout, too, Apple has moved to a new, less condensed font, and it's also adopted some of the same icons used in iOS (check out the "share" button in Finder, for example). The menu bar now sits flat with the rest of the desktop - not that it ever really got in the way. There's the dock, for starters, which features redesigned, flatter-looking icons for all of Apple's built-in apps. You'll notice it as soon as you restart your machine: OS X Yosemite takes many, many cues from iOS. Here's a quick preview for those of you who can't wait till tomorrow.
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In the meantime, I've been using an early build for a week now. Right now, Yosemite isn't quite finished - it won't arrive until sometime this fall - but you can sign up for the public beta, which will open tomorrow for the first million people who enlist. Safari works much the same way, and includes some enhanced privacy settings, too. You'll also enjoy improved Spotlight search, with results that include news, local restaurant listings, Wikipedia pages, movie times and quick unit conversions. Yosemite works more like iOS too, particularly the part where you can route phone calls to your desktop. The company's next-gen operating system ushers in the Mac's biggest makeover in years, with a flat, streamlined look inspired by iOS 7. You can't say that about Yosemite, though. But despite a handful of new apps and features, last year's Mavericks release still felt like the same old OS X. Don't get us wrong: We'll never say no to a free software upgrade. The last time Apple released a new version of OS X, we came away feeling a little.
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