Apple has debuted its new version of OS X, “Mavericks,” which marks the start of the next 10 years of the Mac OS X operating system. Oh, and no more big cats, Apple has switched to California locales, hence the “Mavericks” moniker.
Craig Federighi, head of OS X development for Apple, unveiled OS X 10.9 at the Worldwide Developers Conference 2013 keynote. Federighi highlighted three new features for the upcoming update: new tabs in Finder, tagging individual files, and enhanced support for multiple displays. Here are a few highlights:
- The new Finder Tabs allows users to create tabs in Finder on the fly from folders, merge windows into tabs, and the Finder also goes full-screen.
- Tags will let a user label a file with multiple tags such as “Important,” “For Review,” etc. and the tags will appear on the left side of the Finder view, with color coded tags to allow a user to more quickly locate associated files.
- Multiple display support will allow users to access the menu bar and dock separately on each display. To demonstrate, Federighi loaded different full-screen apps on two different displays.
- Mission Control has also been enhanced for multiple displays, as a demonstration showed a full-screen application being dragged across displays to a second screen.
- Mavericks adds improved Apple TV support, allowing it to act as a full-powered OS X display. Users will be able to view their menu bar, dock, and launch new applications on their television set.
- Another new feature call “Timer Coalescing,” allows CPU activity to be reduced by up to 72% in s0me situations.
- A new “Compressed Memory” functionality rapidly compresses inactive memory, which will free up space “almost instantaneously” for use by available applications.
Safari also gets some update love, with a new start page, a sidebar to give you quick access to bookmarks, your reading list, and shared links. The browser also includes performance enhancements including Javascript. The new Safari offers a JSBench score 3.8 times faster than Firefox, more than double the performance of Google’s Chrome browser. Safari will also use less memory and energy than its competitors. For more info, including a video overview, check out Apple’s official OS X Mavericks page!
To check out all of our WWDC coverage, head on over to our official WWDC Summary!
