MacOsX Mavericks: free upgrade, no revolution (part 3)

Notifications

  
This new feature allows users to respond to messages and to reply or delete emails in the notification alert without being forced to open a new window or to stop their current activity.

Mavericks supplies an improved Do Not Disturb functionality, that turns alerts and banners off for one day.


 Dictation & Speech

This functionality had been introduced by Mountain Lion and it can be very useful.

In Mavericks, it's been improved, thanks to Enhanced Dictation. Once you've enabled Enhanced Dictation and downloaded a file, you can use Dictation when offline, too, unlike the past.
Once activated the key from the Shortcut options, you can start the service by pressing the fn key two times (you can also select a custom key if you like). Dictation is almost real time, so you see your words popping up on the screen while you talk and you can use the keyboard to correct the text without stopping the process.

Though the output of this function is still far from what you can accomplish using specific commercial software, it's nonetheless decent and, as it's free, it won't hurt giving it a shot.

Multiple monitor support

This feature has been dramatically improved from Mountain Lion.

You can now use Mission Control on both monitors without messing up, because what you do on the first one has no influence at all on the second one.

So, if you need to switch from different screens on one monitor, this leaves the other monitor unchanged, unlike what happened before.


System performance and battery life

System performance has been improved again compared to Mountain Lion. Thanks to advanced technologies like App Nap and Timer Coalescing, OS X puts any app not currently being used into a "sleep" state.

Timer Coalescing, also used by Microsoft starting from Windows 7, aims to save energy and RAM memory, optimizing the operating system idle time.

This way, instead of letting any single application "wake up" the CPU, several tasks are gathered together and run all at the same time. This, in Apple's intentions, allows a lower usage of RAM and a longer battery life.

App Nap comes in handy when you want to keep many apps open at the same time.

It monitors the open apps and, when one or more of them are inactive, it reduces their CPU and memory usage level.

This feature can be disabled by the user for a particular app, accessing the file information (select the app with the mouse and press the Command and I keys, or right-click on the app and choose File/Get Info from the resulting menu) and then clicking on Prevent App Nap in the General section.

For more details, I would refer you to this interesting article.



Conclusions

It's worth upgrading, because Mavericks does improve performance and stability of the Apple operating system and it's free (which surely won't hurt), but more could have been done.

Though this upgrade surely won’t mark a revolution for Apple desktop operating systems, and namely for iPhone and iPad users who utilize their iMac mainly to store and share files, it does introduce several interesting features worth trying, like notifications and dictations.

For the power user, the better performance is surely a plus.

Though Apple's official statements claim that this upgrade addresses the lower battery life issues, which were the main source of complaints against Mountain Lion, in fact, they haven't been completely resolved (see here for details).

It's reasonable to expect that Apple could release a patch in the coming days to this purpose.


Back to part 2 of the review 
Back to part 1