Everything You Need To Know About OS X Yosemite In Under Three Minutes

Everything You Need To Know About OS X Yosemite In Under Three Minutes

Mac: Mac OS X Yosemite is coming out today as a free update and there are a lot of new features in this update, so let’s take a look at everything to help you get started.

A New Interface

Everything You Need To Know About OS X Yosemite In Under Three Minutes

Yosemite looks pretty different from Mavericks. Most of the menus are now translucent, buttons work a little differently, and it’s a bit more colourful overall. For the most part, this is just aesthetics though. If you’ve used OS X before, you’ll be pretty familiar with Yosemite.

A Brand New Spotlight

Everything You Need To Know About OS X Yosemite In Under Three Minutes

Spotlight gets a massive overhaul in Yosemite and it’s a lot more useful than it was before. You still launch Spotlight with Command+Space, but on top of searching for applications and files, you can now search for web sites, content on the iTunes Store, movies in the theatre, news, map locations, and more.

iCloud Drive

Everything You Need To Know About OS X Yosemite In Under Three Minutes

iCloud, Apple’s cloud storage service, is now similar to something like Dropbox. You can access your files in a folder view, upload anything you want, and access it on all your other devices easily.

Widgets In Notification Center

Everything You Need To Know About OS X Yosemite In Under Three Minutes

Notification Center is a bit more useful now because you can customise it with widgets. Just load up Notification Center, then click the Edit button to load up all the extensions you have installed. Speaking of extensions, you’ll find those in the System Preferences. Third-party extensions should be releasing shortly, so any app that supports widgets that you install from the App Store will show up here.

A More Powerful Mail App

Everything You Need To Know About OS X Yosemite In Under Three Minutes

Mail gets some much needed improvements in Yosemite. It looks familiar at first glance, but you can now mark up photos before you send them. Just drop in a photo, hit the markup button, and you can add all kinds of notes. You can also easily sign PDFs and documents from Mail now, so you don’t need to load up a third-party app. If you send large files to someone, you can upload it using Mail Drop. This uploads documents to iCloud instead of attaching it to the email itself.

Handoff, Continuity And AirDrop

Everything You Need To Know About OS X Yosemite In Under Three Minutes

Handoff is a fairly big new feature. Essentially, you can now easily send content from your iOS device to your Mac or vice versa. You can also accept calls on your Mac and reply to SMS messages.

AirDrop also now works between iOS devices and your Mac. So if you need to quickly send something over to your phone you just need to open up AirDrop on both devices and send away.

A New Safari

Everything You Need To Know About OS X Yosemite In Under Three Minutes

Finally, Safari gets a major overhaul. It’s now just a single toolbar and looks similar to Safari on iOS. You can also now open up private browsing sessions without totally closing your previous browsers.


Mavericks is a free update for Macs from 2009 and later. Download it using the Mac App Store.

Music by Plurabelle.


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