Apple has announced OS X Yosemite, a new version of OS X redesigned with a new look, new apps and new continuity features that make working across your Mac and iOS devices more fluid .
The new Today view in Notification Center gives you a quick look at everything you need to know, all in one place. iCloud Drive is located within the Finder and can store files of any type. Safari has a new streamlined design that puts the most important controls at your fingertips. Mail sports new editing and sending attachments features.
Handoff 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. Yosemite even gives you the ability to make iPhone calls on your Mac.
"Yosemite is the future of OS X with its incredible new design and amazing new apps, all engineered to work beautifully with iOS," says Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering. "We engineer our platforms, services and devices together, so we are able to create a seamless experience for our users across all our products that is unparalleled in the industry. It’s something only Apple can deliver."
In Yosemite, translucent elements reveal additional content in your app window, provide a hint at what’s hidden behind and take on the look of your desktop. App icons have a clean, consistent design and an updated system font improves readability, says Federighi.
The new Today view in Notification Center gives you a quick look at widgets for Calendar, Weather, Stocks, Reminders, World Clock and social networks. You can even download additional widgets from the Mac App Store to customize your Today view. Spotlight now appears front and center on your desktop and adds new categories of results, so you can view rich suggestions from Wikipedia, Maps, Bing, App Store, iTunes Store, iBooks Store, top websites, news and movie showtimes.
Built right into the Finder, iCloud Drive stores files of any type in iCloud. iCloud Drive works like any other folder on your Mac, so you can drag documents into it, organize them with folders and Tags and search for them using Spotlight. With iCloud Drive, you can access all your files in iCloud from your Mac, iPhone, iPad or even a Windows PC.
Safari has a new streamlined design that puts the most important controls at your fingertips, according to Federighi. A new Favorites view gives you quick access to your favorite websites, and a new Tabs view displays thumbnails of all your open web pages in one window.
Safari also gives you more control over your privacy, with separate Private Browsing windows and built-in support for DuckDuckGo, a search engine that doesn’t track users. When you search for popular or common terms, new Spotlight Suggestions appear along with the suggestions from your search provider.
Safari supports the latest web standards, including WebGL and SPDY, and with support for HTML5 Premium Video Extensions, you can purportedly watch Netflix HD videos for up to two hours longer. Federighi says that, since it's powered by the Nitro JavaScript engine, Safari is over six times faster than Firefox and over five times faster than Chrome when executing JavaScript found in typical websites.
Mail gets a Markup feature that lets you fill out and sign forms and even annotate images and PDFs from within the app. The new Mail Drop feature lets you send large videos, images or files up to 5GB from the Mail app to any email address.
Messages has a new look and delivers even more options for communicating with friends and family. Now you can add titles to ongoing message threads so they're easier to find, add new contacts to ongoing conversations, or leave those conversations you no longer want to follow. With Soundbites you can create, send and listen to audio clips right in Messages.
Continuity features in Yosemite are designed to make your Mac and iOS devices true complementary devices. When your iPhone or iPad is near your Mac, Handoff 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.
What's more, 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.
Yosemite delivers platform technologies that make it easier for developers to create amazing new Mac apps. SpriteKit makes it easier to incorporate realistic motion, physics and lighting in games, and integrates with SceneKit to bring 3D casual gaming within reach of any developer. Storyboards for Yosemite and Xcode 6 take advantage of the new View Controller APIs [application programming interfaces] in AppKit to make it easier to build apps that navigate between multiple views of data.
New APIs allow developers to integrate Handoff into their own apps and create Today view widgets for distribution through the Mac App Store. Share Menu extensions add new destinations to the Share Menu, and new APIs let developers create custom Share Sheets.
The developer preview of Yosemite is available to Mac Developer Program members starting today. Apple is also introducing the OS X Beta Program, which gives customers early access to Yosemite and invites them to try out the release and submit their feedback. 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. Customers interested in signing up can visit www.apple.com/osx/preview for more details
