Apple during the keynote here at San Francisco’s Moscone West just announced the next major version of its desktop operating system powering Macs. As rumored, Mac OS X 10.10 is codenamed “Yosemite” and focuses on clarity, translucency and precise typography resembling iOS 7. It also has a dark mode and much more, detailed right after the break…
Apple CEO Tim Cook opened his segment by noting that while the computer industry as a whole has declined five percent year-over-year, Macs grew by twenty percent.
The installed base of Macs has swelled to 80 million as a result.
Over 40 million copies of Mavericks have been installed sine its debut last Fall. That makes over 51 percent of installed base working on Mavericks versus just fourteen percent of Windows adoption.
It’s the fastest adoption ever of any operating system in PC history he said, jokingly remarking that “I knew somebody was gonna ask so I did a chart.”
There’s an all new Notification Center akin to that in iOS 7, except it can now show widgets from apps that export them.
There’s a brand new dark mode UI as well.
And, the all-new Spotlight appears anywhere on the screen under the mouse cursor and it now taps into the information both local and online, using a number of web sources, making it that much more useful.
For example, it’ll do movie showtimes, entries from Wikipedia, online maps, Bing results, restaurants and so forth
Spotlight will now collate information from a bunch of sources like before, presenting different pieces of data in a more obvious manner.
For example, searching for a contact would also produce a list of recent documents and email messages sent to Phil. Again, like before, only presented in a more visually pleasing manner.
You’ll also notice the translucent title bar of each window showing your underlying content.
Mail in Yosemite promises to be more powerful while addressing the fundamental problem with email – large attachments.
Now, with a technology called Mail Drop instead of your message bouncing off mail servers, you can send your attahcment up to five gigabytes in size encrypted via iCloud.
If your recipient has a Mac, they get the message just like before. If they are someone else, they get a secure link to an attachment where they can download the file. More on that feature in another article here.
The new Markup feature in OS X Yosemite Mail allows you to touch up image attachments without using a third-party application. For example, you could draw pretty arrows, add text, created cartoon bubbles and much more.
Sfari in Yosemite shows all your smart search suggestions and Spotlight suggestions right there in the completion menu, with previews of suggestion snippets, which is really nice. It can now Subscribe to RSS feeds that show in Shared Links and it’s better with a reworked tab view, with stacks for invidivual websites.
You can create a new Private window alongside your ordinary windows. Previously, launching a Private window would close all your existing windows.
It now supports SPDY, WebGL, HTML5 Premium Video to efficiently stream video and other modern technologies.
It’s more power efficient, too – up to two hours longer battery life for streaming from Netflix on a MacBook.
Another new Yosemite feature – Continuity.
This allows for much easier and seamless transitions between mobile and desktop devices. This extends to the new Instant Hotspot feature, Messages, phone calls and more.
For instance, when you receive a phone call, you Mac shows a notification. You can accept a call on your Mac and it can even use the computer as a speakerphone. More on Continuity is available in this post.
OS X Yosemite will be available this Fall as a free download this Fall.
Registered Apple developers can download a preview version of the software today and people who are on the OS X Beta Seed Program will be able to download Yosemite betas during the summer (so, not immediately).