Apple unveiled the latest version of its Mac operating system, the Mac OS X Yosemite, at the company’s annual developers conference in San Francisco on Monday. The Cupertino giant also showed off iOS 8, and released the iOS 8 SDK.
Apple CEO Tim Cook announced last year that the company would be naming its operating systems after California locations. Mavericks, for example, is a surfing location north of Half Moon Bay in California. This year the new operating system will answer to the name ‘Yosemite’, a beautiful California destination and national park.
Lets take a look at all things new with the Mac OS X Yosemite:
SMS & Phone Calls
You can make and receive iPhone calls on your Mac with Yosemite. So if you’re working on your Mac and your iPhone rings in another room, you can leave it there and still take the call. If you have an iPhone, Yosemite lets you send and receive both iMessage and SMS messages right on the Mac.
Notifications
The new Today view in Notification Center features widgets for Calendar, Weather, Stocks, Reminders, World Clock, and social networks, for an aggregated view. Users can also download additional widgets, to customize their view.
Spotlight
Spotlight now appears front and center on the desktop. It also adds new categories of results, letting users view search results from Wikipedia, Maps, Bing, App Store, iTunes Store, iBooks Store, top websites, news and movie showtimes.
iCloud Drive
Mac OS X Yosemite will feature a new iCloud Drive, built into the Finder. The iCloud Drive, capable of storing files in the cloud, will work just like other Mac folders; letting users drag documents into it, organize them with folders and Tags and search for them using Spotlight.
Safari
Safari has a new streamlined design. A Favorites view gives users access to their favorite websites, and a new Tabs view displays thumbnails of all open web pages in one window. Safari also gives users more control over privacy, with separate Private Browsing windows and built-in support for DuckDuckGo, a search engine that doesn’t track users. Safari is over six times faster than Firefox and over five times faster than Chrome when executing JavaScript found in typical websites, says Apple.
A new Mail feature called Markup will let users fill out and sign forms, and even annotate images and PDFs from within Mail. Mail Drop allows will allow users to send large videos, images or files up to 5GB from the Mail app to any email address.
Messages
Messages has a new look. Users can add titles to ongoing message threads so they are easy to find, and add new contacts to ongoing conversations. With the new Soundbites feature, users can create, send and listen to audio clips right in Messages.
Handoff
When your iPhone or iPad is near your Mac, the new Handoff feature lets you start an activity on one device and pass it to the other. Instant Hotspot makes using your iPhone’s hotspot as easy as connecting to a Wi-Fi network. Now the SMS and MMS messages that previously only appeared on your iPhone appear in Messages on all your devices. You can even send SMS or MMS messages directly from your Mac and make or receive iPhone calls using your Mac as a speakerphone.
The developer preview of Yosemite is available to Mac developer program members starting Monday. Mac users can participate in the OS X Beta Program for Yosemite this summer and download the final version for free from the Mac App Store this fall.
[Images courtesy: Apple]