Abstract
OS X Mavericks / OS X 10.9 is the latest operating system upgrade from Apple. It's much more than a maintenance upgrade as the size of it is 5.29 GB from the Apple Store. Mac OS upgrades usually don't cost much but this one is free, presumably to encourage people to switch to it quickly. This review will show what you can expect from the installation process and what you will see in the more dramatic of the new features.
Installation
OS X Mavericks presents an 'interesting' installation process as it goes through several steps. In the first it runs from the download for about a minute and then restarts at which time the main installation takes place and runs for about forty-five minutes. It then restarts again for the completion / clean-up step which takes about ten minutes. No action is required from you except to start it running.
Where the installation gets 'interesting' in the second and third steps is when in both cases it tells you there is 'less than a minute remaining.' In English this means, go off to jog around the park, come back to take a shower, and then have a sandwich. That's an exaggeration but take away from it that you mustn't break out of the installation process even if it seems to be running long, it's not broken and it will complete.
iBooks
The most obvious change is the iBooks icon in the Dock. Clicking it will take you to the app but there's not at first much you can do with it. When you're offline it will download all your titles from iCloud or you can go to the iBookstore to buy new ones or get some free ones. You can import titles from your iTunes but this isn't immediately useful to me.
iBooks Author has also been changed as the Preview function no longer demands an iPad unless it's already plugged into your Mac. It now gives the option of selecting the Mac for the preview and the result is excellent. Displaying the Table of Contents, etc is done by a menu rather than an icon at the top of the screen as it is done on the iPad but it's effective nevertheless. The proof is in the reading and this works very much like the iPad with swiping to switch pages, etc. It's smooth, brisk, and works like the iPad so there I'm calling this one a job well done.
Finder Tags
The next most obvious change is the addition of tags for files. You can find information for any given file with CMD-I to pull up the display window. At the top of it is now a section to set tags for the file. The simplest way to do it is to click a list of color tags and this will put a coloured circle at the front of the file name to show it has been tagged. After that you may want to create text tags and this works the same way by adding the tag in the Information window. You can color the text tag if you wish. Something that may get a little strange if you create a lot of tags for any single file is another coloured circle is added with the text tag.
The way to use the tags is in the Find command as you can select simply by color or by text to find all matching files with that tag. This is the type of function that will require use over a period of time to discover how important it will become for you but I definitely see potential in it. This goes well beyond simple searches by file name so it may well change how you use your Mac.
Finder Tabs
Next comes the addition of tabs to the Finder. What this means isn't immediately obvious as selecting New Tab from the Finder File menu just opens a normal Finder window. Where you see the tabs come into effect is when you select New Tab a second time as the tab will be created within the same Finder window you just opened. In this way you can quickly switch between file lists pulled from your Favorites on the left of the window or whatever else you might like to do with it. As with tags, how this will affect the way you work with the Mac will take some time to discover but Finder Tabs has a lot of potential to speed moving files about, etc.
An example of using Finder Tabs is when you want to move a file from one folder to another. Open a tab for each of the folders then click and drag the appropriate file. Hold the file over the second tab which you will discover is spring-loaded so it will open and you can drop the file where it needs to go.
Maps
The first time Maps is used it will download the map to your computer based on your current location. Maps can then be used offline from the Internet but it won't have the full function as it can't download all of the satellite images in one swallow. Even so, the offline capability gives Maps a huge advantage over Google as you could use it on an aircraft to look over where you are going before you get there.
Maps is the 1.0 release and there some things that are a bit cumbersome. You have to drop a pin on a location of interest before you can create a permanent bookmark for it. You then edit the bookmarks to add a name to it. If you could CTRL click the location and create the bookmark directly without needing to edit the name of it then that would be much more 'Apple.'
One aspect in which Google Map has an advantage is that you can create maps which are easily shared and also are easily propagated to additional maps on personal Web pages. The only way to share the Apple map is to create a PDF and then email it, upload it, send it to Twitter or Facebook, etc. The Apple approach doesn't have the same flexibility so hopefully that will be improved in subsequent releases.
WiFi
Something previously irritating was that after waking the laptop from sleep when there is no active WiFi elicited a prompt for other WiFi networks you might want to try. This is useful the first time you wake it as maybe you do want to try one but it's not at all useful to do that each time you wake it thereafter. That has been changed to eliminate the repeated prompts after each wake-up so this too is appreciated. The irritation was that sometimes the system would prompt three times before it gave up and you couldn't do much with the computer prior to it finishing with them.
There are additional changes but these ones are likely the biggest. You may want to review the notes in the App Store to determine if other changes will be more interesting to you.
Apple has an extraordinary knack for creating things you didn't know you needed which subsequently become indispensable. I wasn't really expecting iBooks on the Mac even if it's not such a difficult thing to predict. Now that it's here, I know it will be hugely useful to me as it's fairly time-consuming to create an iBook preview on the iPad whereas it's very swiftly executed on the Mac to give immediately what I want to see. The tags and tabs aren't indispensable but I suspect they will quickly become a significant part of the way I use the system.
Overall rating of the Mavericks / Mac OS 10.9: Outstanding
Price: Free download from the App Store and no license charge
Recommendation: For all Mac users
OS X Mavericks / OS X 10.9 is the latest operating system upgrade from Apple. It's much more than a maintenance upgrade as the size of it is 5.29 GB from the Apple Store. Mac OS upgrades usually don't cost much but this one is free, presumably to encourage people to switch to it quickly. This review will show what you can expect from the installation process and what you will see in the more dramatic of the new features.
Installation
OS X Mavericks presents an 'interesting' installation process as it goes through several steps. In the first it runs from the download for about a minute and then restarts at which time the main installation takes place and runs for about forty-five minutes. It then restarts again for the completion / clean-up step which takes about ten minutes. No action is required from you except to start it running.
Where the installation gets 'interesting' in the second and third steps is when in both cases it tells you there is 'less than a minute remaining.' In English this means, go off to jog around the park, come back to take a shower, and then have a sandwich. That's an exaggeration but take away from it that you mustn't break out of the installation process even if it seems to be running long, it's not broken and it will complete.
iBooks
The most obvious change is the iBooks icon in the Dock. Clicking it will take you to the app but there's not at first much you can do with it. When you're offline it will download all your titles from iCloud or you can go to the iBookstore to buy new ones or get some free ones. You can import titles from your iTunes but this isn't immediately useful to me.
iBooks Author has also been changed as the Preview function no longer demands an iPad unless it's already plugged into your Mac. It now gives the option of selecting the Mac for the preview and the result is excellent. Displaying the Table of Contents, etc is done by a menu rather than an icon at the top of the screen as it is done on the iPad but it's effective nevertheless. The proof is in the reading and this works very much like the iPad with swiping to switch pages, etc. It's smooth, brisk, and works like the iPad so there I'm calling this one a job well done.
Finder Tags
The next most obvious change is the addition of tags for files. You can find information for any given file with CMD-I to pull up the display window. At the top of it is now a section to set tags for the file. The simplest way to do it is to click a list of color tags and this will put a coloured circle at the front of the file name to show it has been tagged. After that you may want to create text tags and this works the same way by adding the tag in the Information window. You can color the text tag if you wish. Something that may get a little strange if you create a lot of tags for any single file is another coloured circle is added with the text tag.
The way to use the tags is in the Find command as you can select simply by color or by text to find all matching files with that tag. This is the type of function that will require use over a period of time to discover how important it will become for you but I definitely see potential in it. This goes well beyond simple searches by file name so it may well change how you use your Mac.
Finder Tabs
Next comes the addition of tabs to the Finder. What this means isn't immediately obvious as selecting New Tab from the Finder File menu just opens a normal Finder window. Where you see the tabs come into effect is when you select New Tab a second time as the tab will be created within the same Finder window you just opened. In this way you can quickly switch between file lists pulled from your Favorites on the left of the window or whatever else you might like to do with it. As with tags, how this will affect the way you work with the Mac will take some time to discover but Finder Tabs has a lot of potential to speed moving files about, etc.
An example of using Finder Tabs is when you want to move a file from one folder to another. Open a tab for each of the folders then click and drag the appropriate file. Hold the file over the second tab which you will discover is spring-loaded so it will open and you can drop the file where it needs to go.
Maps
The first time Maps is used it will download the map to your computer based on your current location. Maps can then be used offline from the Internet but it won't have the full function as it can't download all of the satellite images in one swallow. Even so, the offline capability gives Maps a huge advantage over Google as you could use it on an aircraft to look over where you are going before you get there.
Maps is the 1.0 release and there some things that are a bit cumbersome. You have to drop a pin on a location of interest before you can create a permanent bookmark for it. You then edit the bookmarks to add a name to it. If you could CTRL click the location and create the bookmark directly without needing to edit the name of it then that would be much more 'Apple.'
One aspect in which Google Map has an advantage is that you can create maps which are easily shared and also are easily propagated to additional maps on personal Web pages. The only way to share the Apple map is to create a PDF and then email it, upload it, send it to Twitter or Facebook, etc. The Apple approach doesn't have the same flexibility so hopefully that will be improved in subsequent releases.
WiFi
Something previously irritating was that after waking the laptop from sleep when there is no active WiFi elicited a prompt for other WiFi networks you might want to try. This is useful the first time you wake it as maybe you do want to try one but it's not at all useful to do that each time you wake it thereafter. That has been changed to eliminate the repeated prompts after each wake-up so this too is appreciated. The irritation was that sometimes the system would prompt three times before it gave up and you couldn't do much with the computer prior to it finishing with them.
There are additional changes but these ones are likely the biggest. You may want to review the notes in the App Store to determine if other changes will be more interesting to you.
Apple has an extraordinary knack for creating things you didn't know you needed which subsequently become indispensable. I wasn't really expecting iBooks on the Mac even if it's not such a difficult thing to predict. Now that it's here, I know it will be hugely useful to me as it's fairly time-consuming to create an iBook preview on the iPad whereas it's very swiftly executed on the Mac to give immediately what I want to see. The tags and tabs aren't indispensable but I suspect they will quickly become a significant part of the way I use the system.
Overall rating of the Mavericks / Mac OS 10.9: Outstanding
Price: Free download from the App Store and no license charge
Recommendation: For all Mac users
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