It’s always a pleasure to read his reviews, and that’s largely due to his intense attention to detail. Here are some highlights of things that I found to be “additional” of what most already know about the OS:
- Coverage of the dock: Apparently Apple is trying really hard for you to not notice when an application is open. Also I love the detail here: “. An icon must be dragged about an inch (~60 points) away from the Dock—and held there for some minimum amount of time—before the cursor will gain its “puff of smoke” badge.”
- Double tapping the track pad reveals scroll bars.
- A gears icon for notification center has reserved space on the bottom right: I agree with John here — it is odd that they didn’t use a little animation trickery to reveal the settings when needed (or that they felt they had to have it visible at all times).
- Dictation apparently is welcomed, but not such an awesome feature.
- Calendar has been polished, but most of the improvements are in the back end. I am glad they got rid of the page flip when using arrow keys.
- The notes application’s UI alters when moved into full screen — dramatically. This is the first instance of an app that changes the UI aesthetic significantly when changing resolution. This not unlike Windows 8’s semantic zoom feature, except the app doesn’t take the next step and present the user with more features given the larger context.
- Safari drops RSS support entirely, and the button is missing. Big bummer for people like me who rely on RSS to get to the news.
- The reality of using iCloud as your primary way to store and retrieve files is a little disheartening. Particularly telling is the sharing scenario he describes with mail.app. Sounds like I’ll be sticking wtih Dropbox.
- The default Gatekeeper behavior is to allow for both Mac App store developers and “verified” ones.
- A detailed overview of how “Power Nap” works. Though I wonder when DarkWake support will be approved for 3rd party apps.
- Quicklook has a sharing option. Awesome.
As always, a great review and a must read. Also do check out Marco Arment’s review of the review.