The IT Nerd

Now that I’ve got OS X Yosemite installed, I can speak to the key improvements and features that most users will notice right away. One thing to keep in mind is that as far as I can tell, there is no performance penalty that I can discern which is a good thing. Now, to the key improvements and new features:

• Continuity is my favorite feature in Yosemite. I can start an e-mail on my iPhone and continue it on my Mac. Or I can answer a phone call that is coming into my iPhone on my Mac if my iPhone isn’t at hand. I can even start surfing the web on my iPhone and continue surfing on my Mac. This makes the Mac and iOS devices one coherent unit as opposed to two separate devices, which I think users will appreciate. Yosemite now has a iOS 8 look and feel to it which will help that coherent feeling.
• A new feature is Dark Mode which turns some aspects of the OS a much darker shade of grey, to make it more comfortable to use your Mac in dim lighting. Seeing as I use my MacBook Pro on planes and trains often, this is a handy feature.
• For the first time, you’ll actually have a reason to use Notification Center. This iteration has a Today panel that is just like iOS 8’s Notification Centre. It displays your Calendar appointments, the weather, world clock, and other elements you choose. And it supports third party widgets too.
• Spotlight has been vastly improved. Besides helping you to find whatever is on your hard drive, you can type in the name of a movie and you’ll get a thumbnail image and a plot summary with credits courtesy of Wikipedia. If you type in the name of a restaurant or hotel, Spotlight will display a  map along with details of the establishment and reviews from Yelp. Handy!
• The new Safari seems minimal at first, but there’s a lot of change that makes Safari a lot like what you would find on iOS 8. Ditto for iTunes. Users of iDevices will feel right at home. Users who have never seen an iDevice may be in for a bit of an adjustment.
• Mail doesn’t look any different. But it is. The first way it’s different is Mail Drop which allows you to send attachments up to 5GB in size to anyone via iCloud. The second way it’s different is that Mail now supports third party extensions so that you can add additional functionality.
• Calendar looks and feels like its counterpart in iOS 8.
• You can FINALLY use AirDrop to transfer items from say your iDevice to your Mac. If they could get this functionality to work with PCs, it would be amazing. But I’m pretty sure it isn’t going to happen.

And the best part of this is that this is a FREE upgrade. Thus there’s no reason not to upgrade if your hardware supports Yosemite. I think that it will be quickly adopted by Mac users because of the features it brings to the table.

This entry was posted on October 20, 2014 at 11:03 am and is filed under Products with tags Apple. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.