Reprinted from TidBITS by permission; reuse governed by Creative Commons license BY-NC-ND 3.0. TidBITS has offered years of thoughtful commentary on Apple and Internet topics. For free email subscriptions and access to the entire TidBITS archive, visit http://www.tidbits.com/ Apple Releases OS X 10.10.3 with Photos Josh Centers Photos for Mac is here at last! Apple has released [1]OS X 10.10.3, which includes the successor to both iPhoto and Aperture. You can obtain the update via Software Update for now ' it was a roughly 2 GB download ' and we anticipate it appearing on Apple's [2]Support Downloads site soon. For full coverage of Photos for Mac, see Jason Snell's description in '[3]Initial Impressions of Photos for OS X Beta' (9 February 2015) ' nothing significant seems to have changed from the beta. Our own Jeff Carlson also reviewed Photos for Macworld; his conclusion is that it's [4]faster than iPhoto but less powerful than Aperture. Be sure to check out the early-bird version of Jason's '[5]Photos for Mac: A Take Control Crash Course,' which helps you decide whether to transition to Photos right away, walks you through importing your iPhoto and Aperture photo libraries, and explains how to handle key organizational tasks. A free update in May will add coverage of iCloud Photo Library, editing and sharing photos, creating prints and other projects, and more. The other notable visual change in 10.10.3 is the addition of over 300 new emoji characters and a new emoji picker that displays emoji in a single, scrollable list. The highlight of the new emoji characters is the addition of more diverse symbols to represent various ethnicities and same-sex couples. Some emoji now feature various skin tones, which you can select by clicking and holding an emoji, and then selecting your preference from the popover. There are also new emoji for the Apple Watch, as well as new flag emoji. [6]Image Here's a neat Easter egg: OS X 10.3.3 now displays the [7]Raised Hand With Part Between Middle And Ring Fingers emoji (ð), which you might also know as the Vulcan salute from Star Trek. Presumably, this is a tribute to the recently deceased Leonard Nimoy, who portrayed Spock. However, you will not find this emoji in the keyboard, so if you want to tell a friend to live long and prosper, you'll have to copy and paste. OS X 10.10.3 also fixes a potential privacy issue where Safari would save the Web site favicon URLs used in Private Browsing, which left a trail that could indicate which sites you had visited. Safari in 10.10.3 also 'improves stability and security.' Other changes include improved Wi-Fi performance and compatibility (fingers crossed that Apple has finally fixed the Wi-Fi problems that have bedeviled some Yosemite users), a fix for an issue that could cause some Bluetooth devices to disconnect, and improved screen sharing reliability. Plus, Apple added Spotlight suggestions (such as Wikipedia) to the popover that appears when you Control-click a word and choose Look Up. [8][tn_Look-Up-example.jpg] Apple also calls out changes in 10.10.3 for enterprise users, including a fix for Active Directory-bound Macs that become unresponsive at startup, the capability to [9]set a umask that's respected by graphical apps, and bug fixes for installing configuration profiles for 802.1x with EAP-TLS and for disappearing folders from DHS share points. The 10.10.3 update also includes a number of [10]security fixes for command-line utilities, CoreAnimation, graphics drivers, the system kernel, OpenSSL, and other key systems. Should you update to 10.10.3 right away? If you want to give Photos a try, you must ' Photos is available only with the new release. But it's never a bad idea to wait a few days. TidBITS publisher Adam Engst hasn't had the best experience so far ' his installation hung at the very end, and he had to power down his 27-inch iMac with Retina display to get out. Everything seemed to come back up fine, but since the update, the fans in his iMac and 27-inch Thunderbolt Display have been running for the first time that he's noticed (and the Thunderbolt Display's fan rumbles a little). This purely anecdotal, but it's always worth ensuring that you have a current backup before installing a major update. References 1. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204490 2. https://support.apple.com/downloads/ 3. http://tidbits.com/article/15403 4. http://www.macworld.com/article/2907180/review-photos-for-os-x-is-faster-than-iphoto-but-less-powerful-than-aperture.html 5. http://tid.bl.it/photos-crash-course-tidbits 6. http://tidbits.com/resources/2015-04/New-emoji-picker.png 7. http://sixcolors.com/post/2015/04/apples-emoji-lives-long-and-prospers/ 8. http://tidbits.com/resources/2015-04/Look-Up-example.png 9. https://support.apple.com/kb/HT201684 10. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204659 .