Apple released their newest iteration of OS X, called Mavericks (finally straying from the “big cat” theme that’s been prevalent from the first OS X release), a few weeks ago, and there are some important new features of use to designers.

While many of the features of the latest update are aimed at average users (as well as a ton of new accessibility improvements), some are much more useful to creatives in particular. Below is a rundown of the most useful of those new features, as well as how you might want to use them to make your more productive, efficient, and effective in your work.

New automation features

For anyone with even a basic knowledge of coding, Apple’s automation features have long been a useful tool. There are a few new additions you can now make use of:

• The AppleScript Editor and Automator can now support Documents in the cloud, so you can access your scripts, applets, and workflows from any of your Macs.
• Automator workflows can now be saved as Speakable items, making them available as voice commands.
• You can now sign your applets and droplets with your Developer ID.

New GUI features

There are a number of new improvements to the GUI on Mavericks that are likely to be welcome additions for designers. Check them out:

Finder tabs

One of my favorite new, albeit small, features in Mavericks is the addition of Finder tabs, much like those you find in web browsers. Forget about opening up fifteen different Finder windows and instead open the various folders and places you need in tabs, all neatly organized within the same window.

Sure, it’s a small improvement. But for web designers who are used to dealing with tabbed browser interfaces, this little change can greatly improve your productivity. This is particularly useful for those MacBook Pro and Air users with 11″ and 13″ displays, as it saves valuable screen real estate.

Already have a bunch of separate Finder windows open? Just go to the Window menu and choose “Merge All Windows” to consolidate them into a single window with multiple tabs.

Each tab can also have its own custom view (one in icon, with another in list view, for example).

Multiple screen improvements

If you use two or more monitors, one of the biggest gripes you may have had in the past is the uselessness of full screen mode. Your second monitor became an unusable, blank linen-textured screen whenever you went into full screen mode, which was incredibly annoying if say, you wanted to watch a movie tutorial, in one screen while working in the other. That’s been fixed in Mavericks. Now, the app that’s opened in full-screen mode will only take up its current screen, leaving any others as-is.

Menu bars and docks now also appear on each screen, allowing you to almost treat each one like its own computer. While it doesn’t seem like a huge deal, it’s bound to save time if you regularly use multiple screens, since you won’t have to constantly go back to the main screen to use the menu bar.

Application design improvements

While not directly impacting designers, the fact that a few native OS X apps have gotten UI design improvements is great news.

Most notable are the streamlined Calendar app and the newly redesigned Notes app, which has finally ditched the ugly yellow notepaper background. Both apps have gotten rid of the UI elements that were reminiscent of their physical, real-world counterparts — a welcome change.

Notification center improvements

The Notifications pane now lets you respond directly within alerts via Interactive Notifications. You no longer have to open the app itself in order to delete or respond to your alerts. In addition to working with Twitter and Facebook, it now also includes iMessage and LinkedIn.

Notifications has borrowed Do Not Disturb from iOS so that you can turn off notifications entirely for a specified length of time. Even cooler, though (and of use to many designers), is that Do Not Disturb is set to turn on automatically when you connect your Mac to a TV or projector (you can disable this setting if you choose). This is a huge improvement for anyone who makes presentations to clients or co-workers and doesn’t want their personal notifications appearing on screen.

Features for better battery life

Mavericks has a couple of added features for improving your battery life. Timer Coalescing groups together your low-level operations, allowing tiny (like, milliseconds tiny) periods of idle time that allow your CPU to enter low-power mode. It happens so fast and seamlessly that you won’t even notice it, and yet can reduce your CPU activity up to 72 percent at times.

App Nap is another power-saving feature that lets your hidden, unused apps save power even while they’re still running. If an app window is completely hidden and not actively doing something (like playing music or downloading a file), App Nap will slow the app down to conserve your battery. App Nap also works with Safari tabs, so only the active tab is working at full power.

HD video playback in iTunes has also been greatly improved, using up to 35 percent less energy while you’re watching video. This is a definite advantage to those designers who like to work from areas where plugging in isn’t always an option (or at least not a convenient one).

Improved responsiveness

Mavericks has made some big improvements to memory usage over Mountain Lion. Memory compression lets your Mac free up space by compressing data from inactive apps when you approach maximum memory capacity. Compressing and decompressing is almost instantaneous, so you won’t even notice it. But you’ll find that your Mac is 1.4x more responsive under load, and wakes from standby 1.5x faster.

Better organization

Pretty much by default, designers create a LOT of files. And keeping those organized can get a little bit overwhelming at times. New tagging options in Mavericks let you tag files in the Finder, and then easily find all of them via search or through the Finder sidebar.

Just select the tags you want to include in a document when you save it, or add it later. They’ll even work with files you keep in iCloud.

An improved Safari

The newest version of Safari has seen some noticeable performance improvements. Each web page now runs as its own process (like in Chrome), which will save your browsing session if a single page becomes unresponsive.

Safari also has some new social features. Connect your Twitter and LinkedIn accounts, and you can now access a list of links your friends are sharing. It’s a useful feature, and the fact that you can just keep scrolling when you reach the end of one link and Safari will automatically load the next one makes it even cooler.

Other small improvements

There are a number of other small improvements that have been made to Mavericks that you’re sure to appreciate.

Have a big meeting with a client in an area you’ve never been to? Calendar can now use Apple Maps to calculate your travel time for you, saving you the trouble of opening additional apps and looking it up yourself.

You can also access Maps directly from within your Contacts to view an address. It’s a small time-saver, but a useful one nonetheless.

If you use Reminders to keeping track of your todo list, you’ll be glad to find that now when you reorder things in Reminders on your Mac, those changes are pushed to the cloud so that your Reminders will appear in the same order on all of your devices. Small change, big productivity improvement.

The iCloud Keychain has a bunch of useful new features, too. You can now generate passwords that mix alphanumeric characters in hard-to-guess combinations, and then save them directly into your iCloud Keychain for access from any of your devices. It can also save your credit card information for faster checkout (particularly helpful if you make regular purchases from your iOS devices, or hate to have to pull out your wallet every time you want to buy something). And all of your iCloud Keychain info is protected with 256-bit AES encryption to keep is safe on your device, in transit, and in the cloud.

The Mac App Store lets you schedule updates that require a restart at night by simply clicking “Try Tonight” when you receive an alert. It will then try to update between 2am and 5am, and your Mac will be just as you left it when you return in the morning. It’s a great feature for designers who don’t want to take a break to run updates mid-day, but tend to forget to set them to run before quitting for the day.

Videos can now be shared directly from the Finder or Quick Look to Facebook. While it’s not necessarily a huge new feature for designers, you might find it useful and time-saving on occasion.

Conclusion

Considering that Mavericks is free, there’s really no reason not to take the plunge and make the upgrade. While there are no real groundbreaking, game-changing new features, there are a ton of small additions and improvements that can add up to big results and better efficiency and productivity.

Have you upgraded to Mavericks? What are your favorite new features? Let us know in the comments.

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The company says it wants to wire the world. But will it do more than make its own app work better?

Last spring, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg invested in an impressive domain name: internet.org. Then, in August, he posted a video featuring snippets of John F. Kennedy’s “Strategy of Peace” speech and blogged that he would “share a rough proposal for how we can connect the next 5 billion people and a rough plan to work together as an industry to get there.” With that, Facebook and six corporate partners—including Nokia, Samsung, Qualcomm, and Ericsson—became part of a swelling movement of tech companies declaiming a commitment to connectivity, seemingly moved by the fact that only 2.7 billion of the world’s seven billion people have Internet access. In October, Google helped launch the Alliance for Affordable Internet (whose members include Facebook and Ericsson). It is pushing for cheaper Internet access through policy and regulatory reforms.

Genetically modified crops will allow farming practices closer to the ideals of the organic movement.

I grew up on a farm on the North Coast of California in the 1970s. It had been a sort of commune, and after my parents bought the property, the hippies stayed on as farm workers and the place retained the style of the counterculture. Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, with its tools and ideas for the back-to-the-land movement, was the farm’s almanac.

Robots will be more useful when they can work alongside us, says Julie Shah.

Traditionally, robots were designed to work separately from people. That is starting to change as robots begin working alongside humans to courier medicine in hospitals and assemble complex machinery. New legged robots could soon accompany soldiers across treacherous terrain or perform rescue missions at stricken nuclear power facilities. But for the most part, robots still can’t function in human environments without requiring costly changes to people’s own working patterns.

Revelations about NSA surveillance have prompted Yahoo, Microsoft, and other companies to deploy long-overdue security improvements.

Last week, Google, Microsoft, and five other leading Web companies formally requested that the U.S. government rein in its use of dragnet surveillance. These companies don’t have to wait for the government to act, though. Encryption technology can protect the privacy of innocent users from indiscriminate surveillance, but only if tech companies deploy it. In the wake of the Snowden disclosures, they are starting to do so. It shouldn’t have taken them this long.

Professor Marie desJardins received a research award from the National Science Foundation focused on increasing the expertise of Maryland high school teachers for teaching computer science, with the ultimate goal of increasing the number of computer science classes offered in Maryland and the number and diversity of students taking them.

The project, CS10K: Collaborative Research: A Structured CS Principles Approach to Professional Development for Maryland High School Teachers, is led by Dr. desJardins and will involve collaborators from the Computer Science department at the University of Maryland, College Park, and high school teachers from Charles County and Baltimore County. The NSF award will provide $845,000 in funding over a three year period and is part of the Computing Education for the 21st Century (CE21) program, which aims to build a robust computing research community, a computationally competent 21st century workforce, and a computationally empowered citizenry.

The project is also part of the CS 10K community, which works to make computer science accessible in high schools. The nationwide effort has a goal of getting rigorous academic computer science courses into 10,000 schools taught by 10,000 well-prepared teachers. The project pays careful attention to the inclusion of women and minorities–groups that have been traditionally underrepresented in computing.

The project will develop and evaluate professional development activities focused on increasing the expertise of Maryland high school teachers for teaching computer science. Experienced higher education faculty and highly effective high school teachers will collaborate to train other high school teachers to develop and offer a college preparatory CS curriculum. In the first year, an initial cohort of 12 master teachers will collaborate with the project leadership team to develop standardized classroom materials based on the CS Principles curriculum and then offer the CS Principles course in their home schools. In the second year, the project staff will train less experienced teachers in the CS Principles curriculum, and in the third year, the leadership team will demonstrate scalability by supporting the delivery of multiple independently funded regional workshops. The project’s ultimate goal is to achieve significantly increased interest of Maryland students in studying and pursuing careers in computer science.

TO:  The UMBC Community

FROM:  Provost Philip Rous and Faculty Senate President Kathleen Carroll

As co-chairs of the Strategic Planning Steering Committee, we have the inspiring opportunity this semester to listen in as more than 30 faculty, staff, student, and alumni groups discuss proposed vision elements and focus areas for the University’s next strategic plan. The sessions held so far have been robust in attendance (nearly 800), insights, and thought-provoking questions. Our colleagues on the Strategic Planning Steering Committee join us in expressing thanks to all participants in this initial stage of the planning process.

Focus Areas for Planning

While there are several more conversations to come, we frequently hear similar views expressed from group to group, particularly the understanding that a focused plan is essential to the University’s progress and that issues and opportunities addressed in planning should be limited in number. The campus discussions have consistently identified three proposed focus areas as essential:

• The Student Experience (academic and co-curricular)
• Advancing Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity
• Innovative Curriculum and Pedagogy

Many groups also endorse a fourth focus area of Community and Extended Connection, encompassing opportunities for collective impact on campus and beyond in such forms as civic engagement, social responsibility, and economic development. Finally, the importance of infrastructure as a foundation for achievement in each area has been emphasized in all discussions.

During the break between semesters, the Steering Committee will further explore these emerging focus areas, outlining charges and research questions for Strategy Groups that will be appointed to develop goals, objectives, and progress measures in each area. Once focus areas and Strategy Group charges are established by the Steering Committee, co-chairs will be named for each Strategy Group – one a Steering Committee member and the other someone new the planning process.

At the beginning of the spring semester, faculty, staff, students, and alumni will be invited to apply online to serve as volunteers in the next stage of the process. Co-chairs will have the opportunity to draw from this volunteer pool as they build Strategy Groups of eight to 12 members, and all volunteers will be invited to participate in focus groups related to their area of interest. The University Retreat in August will also provide opportunities to discuss and respond to initial reports from the Strategy Groups.

Vision Elements

Campus discussions this semester have affirmed core elements of our current campus vision statement while pressing for new language that is more bold and inspiring. The word “leadership” came up in group after group as an important element for an updated vision statement, while the phrase “the best of our size” was noted in many conversations as an outdated, inadequate descriptor. Many groups also identified “community” and “students” as words currently missing in vision language that are important to include.

Once all feedback from fall semester meetings is analyzed, the Steering Committee will propose draft vision language that reflects these very useful conversations and aligns with the emerging focus areas for planning. We greatly appreciate the thoughtful responses shared by faculty, staff, students, and alumni in the first stage of the planning process and look forward to continued participation from the UMBC community next semester.

HTML5 development tools company Gizmox has announced the release of their Visual WebGui Version 7 with a new mobile feature set, a code assessment tool for analyzing legacy desktop apps, and integration with Microsoft Visual Studio 2013.