Still not convinced that you want to switch to OS X Mavericks? Here are our top five picks of the best new OS X 10.9 Mavericks features available for you and your Mac.
One of the main focal points that Apple followed, in developing the new OS X 10.9 Mavericks features was that of more battery life for the end-user. As such, there’s a sense, with this new operating system, that they really did their best to improve life spans, reduce power consumption and, all the while, allow the machines to maintain their speed and impressive computing prowess. Here are three new features that aim to do just this, introduced in Mavericks:
· Timer Coalescing
Timer Coalescing is a rather revolutionary new feature that Apple introduced to its new OS X, which acknowledges the fact that running numerous low-priority tasks and processes at the same time can take a heavy toll, both on the processor and, implicitly, on a computer’s battery, too. So they came out with this feature, which basically frees up the CPU for more frequent spans of time. What it does is to group together several of these small-scale operations and coalesce them into a batch action. When this batch action is performed, the CPU goes into a low-power state, hence consuming less battery energy. Apple estimates say that this feature can reduce the utilization of the CPU by as much as 72 per cent, when running on battery power.
· Compressed Memory
Another thing Apple did, for the new OS X 10.9 Mavericks features, was to literally compact the most recently used processes, stored in the memory of your machine. By compressing them by more than 50 per cent, the OS frees up much needed disk space, which the CPU then uses for running all the apps the user wants to use. One may, of course, wonder if it hadn’t been more efficient to find a method to swap information to and from the disk. However, according to Apple, it takes less time to compress and then decompress information as needed, than to have the OS X reading and writing virtual memory files on the disk. Not only does it take less time, but this process also eats up less battery power.
· App Nap
App Nap does something we wished all devices and gadgets did, be they laptops, smartphones or tablets. It looks at minimized apps, which are not running in the foreground, as ‘napping’. In other words, when you minimize the window of an app to the dock, for instance, the OS X puts said app into a low-power state. The allotted CPU usage for that app is reduced, as are the timers and the level of input and output activity generated by that app. Not only does this preserve battery life, but it’s also one of the new OS X 10.9 Mavericks features that keep napping apps from cutting in on the CPU usage required by active ones. Of course, for some apps you might want to avoid ever using App Napp – and you can do just that by unchecking this feature for each of those apps, in turn.
· Motion detecting light sensors
Another one of the great new OS X 10.9 Mavericks features effectively leverages the light sensors that numerous Mac computers come equipped with, so that they’re able to detect motion in front of them. If you’re not in front of the machine, the Energy Saver sleep features will be activated, but they will reset when the sensors detect motion.
Better Finder
Much has been written already about the facelift that the Finder feature got for the OS X 10.9 Mavericks. In this OS version, there are Tabs in finder, under which you can merge multiple windows into a single one – much like you can do in web browsers like Safari and Chrome. In one tab you can see icons, but in a different one you might opt for list view, etc.. Tags have also been introduced to Finder, so that you can group together different documents from multiple locations on your computer.