Mac OS X Mavericks announced
Apple has announced the tenth release of its desktop operating system – OS X Maverick. The new Apple OS includes numerous enhancements and new features.
Craig Federighi, senior vice president of Software Engineering at Apple, announced that the company would be moving away from naming its desktop OS after big cats, and would instead use the names of inspiring locations in California.
The OS X file explorer app, Finder, will get support for multiple tabs, and multiple display functionality has been fixed.
Federighi explained that users can now summon the dock across multiple displays, and that putting an app in full screen mode would no longer render the desktop on the other monitor useless.
Other Mac OS X features such as Mission Control have also been updated to work with the new multiple displays functionality, letting users pan independently between full screen apps on different desktops and moving apps and between monitors.
Maverick also adds tags you can assign to files when you save them, which then appear in the Finder side bar. These tags also get used in search, Federighi said.
Federighi also announced improvements under the hood to improve the performance of Safari and decrease power consumption by optimising CPU usage.
The OS X notifications system has also received an update in Mavericks, with Federighi promising that users will be able to respond to notifications without opening the relevant app, and receive push notifications sent to iOS apps on their desktop.
As rumoured, the skeuomorphic design of iCal is no more (among other changes), and OS X will be receiving Apple Maps and iBooks.
Users will be able to create routes and send them to their iPhones, Federighi said. A developer SDK for Maps will also be available for developers to add mapping functionality to their own apps.
The developer preview of OS X Mavericks is available immediately, with a final release coming “this fall”, Federighi said.
Previously, the upgrade for OS X 10.8, or Mountain Lion, cost $19.99.
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