Hi, this is Gary with MacMost Now.
On today’s episode let’s take a look at what is new in Mac OS X Mavericks.
Let’s start by taking a look at two major new apps.
The first one is iBooks.
Now for a longtime people have been asking for a Mac version of iBooks and here we go.
We’ve got it now.
Basically this accesses the same account that you use for iBooks in the iPad and iPhone.
You will have all your books there and you can download the ones that you want and you
can also go to the bookstore, here, and purchase books.
So you’ve got the ability to do this here and in iTunes as well.
In the library you can see the books that you’ve got.
You can go into them.
It is pretty straight forward.
I does open in multiple windows so you can have a window for the book and you can have
a window for say the entire iBooks interface here with your books in it.
You can shrink the window.
You can enlarge it.
You’ve got all the same controls, maybe a little bit more, for viewing here on the
Mac that you do on the iPad.
You’ve got bookmarks, you’ve got table of contents, the ability to highlight things,
and then leave notes.
You can search.
You can go into a very nice full screen mode and easily navigate using the keyboard.
So there is a lot you can do here.
You’ve also got the ability to use interactive books.
So if we go back to the main library here you can see I’ve got an interactive book
here and these are books especially made for the iBooks store that have lots of animation
and video and sound and interactive things like quizzes and models, 3-D models you can
manipulate.
Things like that.
So the other major app, of course, is Maps.
This is the equivalent to Maps on the iPhone and iPad.
Apple’s made it in an app rather than through a web browser probably for speed.
It can access the data in a custom way through an app instead of going through a web page.
It pretty much works as you would expect.
You can bring things up.
You can go for satellite views.
You can go in and get directions.
There is a 3-D view in here.
You can zoom in and get the fly over data.
Move around.
So it is pretty good.
It is pretty much the equivalent to what you would expect.
It is just that you don’t now have to reach for your iOS device to access all this.
You can do it right here on your Mac.
Now there have been two major improvements to the Finder.
The first one is Tabs.
So now you have a normal window here in the Finder and it looks pretty much the same as
it did in Mountain Lion.
I’m going to go to File and instead of a new Finder window I’m going to create a
new Tab.
Command T is how you do it.
Just like in the browser.
Now I’ve got two Tabs I can look at so I can easily navigate through both of them separately.
If I wanted to copy a file from one to another, say I wanted to take one from Work Docs here,
I can drag it and move it to this tab here and it would open up and then I could drop
it there and vice versa.
You can see it appears there.
So you’ve got Tabs which is very nice and you can add as many as you want.
It should clean up a lot of clutter here on the desktop.
In addition now we also have Tags.
So you can select a file that you want and you’ve got the Tags button here is one way
to add it.
You can see here I’ve got the colored labels that we had before.
So labels now basically morphed into tags but instead of just being limited to just
these colors and that’s all you can do, you can create your own.
I’ve created two here.
I can create another one by simply typing.
You can see I’ve created it and I’ve assigned it to this file there.
I can go into here and you can see that one is available too.
I can add it for it.
I can add multiple ones.
So Project 1 and Project 3 for that one.
Then in the sidebar here you can see I’ve got those projects.
I can go to basically a little smart search that show me those projects here.
This will allow for better organizing.
So you can say put your photos in a photos folder but your videos in a videos folder.
And if some of those folders or some of the videos are part of Project 1 you can assign
tags to them and then view them altogether without having to move them out of their folders.
So files don’t have to be in one place anymore.
It is very similar to having albums in iPhoto or playlists in iTunes.
Now one app that has gotten a major overhaul is the Calendar app.
You can see here it looks completely different.
It doesn’t have any of that wood grain paper design going on here.
It looks at lot more like the iOS stuff.
It is just a lot cleaner.
A white background.
There is some nice little features in it.
Being able to access maps and things like that in the interface a little cleaner.
It is just a much nicer display to look through even though, of course, it is a calendar.
So it basically does the same thing as previous calendars.
So you can see here that both Notes and the Contacts app have also gotten new looks to
them although the functionality is basically the same.
It is a little streamlined and they are a little nicer to use now.
There is lots of little things of course.
There is always going to be tons of little changes and sometimes people find those very
useful.
Like for instance here in Battery you can see it says collecting power usage information
when I click on battery.
It is actually going to come up with, after a little bit of time, some information about
if there are any apps it finds that are using a lot of power.
In this case it shows no apps.
But if I was running a bunch of them and I really wanted to know what was draining the
battery it is interesting to have that indicator.
Safari is pretty much the same but it brings up this new concept of a sidebar.
We’ve had that before.
You clicked on Reading List and you saw your reading list here.
But Bookmarks is now there as well.
You can basically use this left sidebar for Bookmarks and Reading List.
It will even show you links from your Twitter feed if you set up Twitter in your System
Preferences.
So it kind of creates this other way to surf with stuff here in the sidebar similar to
ways you’ve seen in other apps with items in a sidebar and then viewing here in the
window.
It kind of reminds me of how Mail works and how iTunes used to work.
Some people will definitely find this kind of useful.
We also have the iCloud Keychain.
So you are going to have similar functionality as before.
Inside of Preferences here you can see, under Passwords, I’ve got websites and I can look
at the passwords that have been saved for different websites and better manage what
is saved.
But the neat thing, of course, is that this will sync with iCloud so on my other Mac I
will have the same passwords and ID’s for sites and of course this will happen over
iOS as well.
You’ve also got new multiple screen functionality in Mavericks.
It is hard to show here but basically you can have docks across your screen and menu
bars across your screens making it easier to work with multiple displays.
So there is a quick overview of what is new in Mavericks.
Of course I will be going into more detail of some of these features in future episode
and tutorials at MacMost.com.