I might not be in the majority, but I actually like the new system font Helvetica Neue. I am a huge fan of it and on a Retina Display it makes so much sense. Understandably those who do not have the luxury of a Retina Display, I can understand the frustration, but having said that, I think the whole system font change thing has been blown out of proportion.<p>Even though I like Helvetica Neue, I really dig the new San Francisco font, it is a pretty nice alternative that seems to work pretty well for those who are using a non-Retina Display. If you want to bring back Lucida Grande, this Github repository has a handy script that will do that for you (some work colleagues of mine, designers mainly did it to bring back the old font): <a href="https://github.com/schreiberstein/lucidagrandeyosemite" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/schreiberstein/lucidagrandeyosemite</a>
For Apple aficionados of a certain vintage, <i>San Francisco</i> will always be the 'ransom font' of the original Mac:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_%28typeface%29" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_%28typeface%29</a>
Typeface designer Tobias Frere-Jones' opinion about Helvetica in Yosemite: <a href="http://www.fastcodesign.com/3031432/why-apples-new-font-wont-work-on-your-desktop" rel="nofollow">http://www.fastcodesign.com/3031432/why-apples-new-font-wont...</a><p>It echoes Erik Spiekermann's view as well: Helvetica wasn't designed for small sizes on screen.<p><a href="http://spiekermann.com/en/helvetica-sucks/" rel="nofollow">http://spiekermann.com/en/helvetica-sucks/</a>
I was actually saddened when I saw people starting with their patches forcing Lucida back in OS X 10.10.<p>Helvetica was one of the things that made the iPhone so great.<p>Helvetica is neutral, timeless and easy to read. It's the perfect user interface font, especially the UI-optimized version OS X 10.10 is using.<p>As always, people just hate change.<p>That said, San Fransisco is a cool font, it just looks horrible as a computer font: too much space, and it's almost like all the characters look the same. But for a small device like a watch it's perfect.
Looks like a straight up knockoff of Google's Roboto font: <a href="https://twitter.com/jm_denis/status/534802341770186752" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/jm_denis/status/534802341770186752</a><p>Only big difference I can see is the 'Q'.
Eventually, I think it's quite likely that Apple will adopt San Francisco across all its operating systems, but that will only happen after a lot more behind-the-scenes typographic tweaking. It may look good enough as a drop-in replacement right now, but everything from stroke widths and hinting for non-retina displays to kerning tables and metrics within the interface will get some attention before anything other than the watch ships with these fonts.
Noticing a few issues like so:<p><a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/cl4to142icjw2ay/Screenshot%202014-11-18%2017.20.20.png?dl=0" rel="nofollow">https://www.dropbox.com/s/cl4to142icjw2ay/Screenshot%202014-...</a>
Does anyone here have a "low res" (like 1440x900) MacBook? I do - it's from 2012 and was the last to have a CD drive so that I could write CDs for bandmates, plus it has a dedicated Ethernet port instead of a mass of external adapters (useful for AVB testing).<p>Anyway, since Yosemite the font for the menu bar has been a bit "bitty" and not smooth which contrasts sharply with the rest of the shininess seen everywhere - does this resolve this? I thought I'd ask before taking the plunge.
Am I the only one that thinks Segoe fonts from MS (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segoe" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segoe</a>) would look <i>much</i> better than this for the original use (Apple Watch)?
I don't know what some designers today have with these ultra thin fonts. One can use thin font variants but only together with big font-sizes.<p>Form follows function => Font Function = legibility => don't use too thin fonts in smaller sizes.
> You must be a registered Apple Developer to use these fonts. Do not download if you don't have a paid Apple Developer Program account.<p>I presume that this is against github's TOS.
Good god, I've installed it and what a mistake! The weight of the font seems to be very variable and the spacing between letters i s m a s s i v e.<p>Uninstall sadly :-(
After looking over the Yosemite change logs, as a non-iPhone user, it looks like a new font was all I had to look forward to. Every other update seems to concern sharing content between the desktop and iOS devices.<p>And now I'm finding out this new font- my only real reason for a 5GB update- is so unpopular that a hack to replace it is front page on HN.
So, Apple dedicate a cohort of designers to revitalize UI and what people do in return? They ruin all this by replacing system font with one from a goddamn 40mm watch.<p>Disgraceful.<p>As much as I don't like Yosemite (they really broke Spotlight), its UI is much better than that of previous versions.