OS X 10.9 Mavericks Review

An anonymous reader writes "John Siracusa at Ars Technica has put together a comprehensive review of Apple's OS X 10.9 Mavericks. This is the first time a major OS X update has been free, and it works on any device that supports Mountain Lion. This suggests Apple is trying to boost adoption rates as high as possible. Siracusa says the following about Apple's move away from skeuomorphic design: 'Mavericks says enough is enough. The leather's gone, the fake pages are gone, the three panes are independently resizable (more or less), even the title bar is bone-stock, and it's boring?' On the other hand, he was a big fan of all the internal optimizations Apple has done, since the energy savings over Mountain Lion are significant. He found a 24% increase in his old MacBook Pro's battery life, and a 30% increase for his new MacBook Air. He also praised the long-needed improvements to multi-monitor support: ' Each attached display is now treated as a separate domain for full-screen windows. Mission Control gestures and keyboard shortcuts will now switch between the desktop and full-screen windows on the display that contains the cursor only, leaving all other displays untouched.' The 24-page review dives deeply into all the other changes in Mavericks, and is worth reading if you're deciding whether or not to upgrade."

Comments

Nothing about colour accuracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple has really fucked up big time on 10.9.

Basically, the sRGB spec is no longer sRGB, and colour managed applications that use ColorSync are completely hosed. Almost everything is more saturated then it should be. Towers of bug reports have been filed on this alone and absolutely nobody has received a response from Apple, which makes me think it's some retarded "stylistic choice" of theirs to literally try and make the OS "look better" (it doesn't).

So, basically, if you rely on OS X for colour accurate work, you're totally fucked.

Re:Nothing about colour accuracy?

[Just Some Guy]

Have a link? I'm not readily finding anything but I'd be interested in reading more.

Enough already!

[mothlos]

Here we have Soulskill yet again trying to act like skeuomorphic artistic design is some sort of big, bad thing which we should be concerned about. This is not an important issue in human interface design. This seems to be some sort of pet peeve lens which Soulskill keeps bringing up. Skeuomorphism may bother designers who don't want to be tied down to designs based on mid-twentieth-century conventions of office life and people who demand every last pixel of their screen be useful for them. ell, it may even be the plastic teak dashboard of the 21st century, but its presence or lack thereof has such a tiny impact on usability for all but the most constrained interfaces that it is not worth /.'s concern. Please stop.

Re:Enough already!

[drinkypoo]

It is an important issue. It's not the end of the world, but it's dumb to waste screen real estate on gewgaws to make the interface look like something from yesteryear to which it is superior. And notably, the world already rejected these ideas back in the classic MacOS days.

Re:Enough already!

[phantomfive]

From what I've seen, the anti-skeumorphic hatred started with WinPhone 7 users desperate to find a way their phone was superior to iPhone. They tied it with the idea that WP7 was a unique UI (and it was nice, but not as nice as the Zune HD, and not amazingly original). After that some Android users jumped on the bandwagon, also wanting to feel superior. Some iPhone users started to feel bad about it.

Skeumorphism is just a thing, if done right it is great, if done poorly, it is bad.

Re:Enough already!

[Billly Gates]

You would not pass any computer art class today with that attitude.

Every professor out there has been teaching this is the way to go and flunking out those who do these outdated 20th century things. Unfortunately, this trend is post impressionism which once became popular because herasy to do art any other way. These new students are landing jobs at companies like Apple and Microsoft. Simple color is it.

Re:Enough already!

[TheRaven64]

If you're asking an art professor about HCI, then you're doing it wrong. Try looking over in cognitive psychology for people who can give useful input.

Why App Store and not software update?

[Joe_Dragon]

app store should not need it's own password/ login for free stuff.

also Software update seems better for OS stuff.

It IS a big deal

[bussdriver]

We use computers and mice, maybe a track pad. It is one thing to theme something with fluff and quite another to try to simulate historical metaphors while ignoring known methods of user input and popular conventions.

Making something look like a book is a nice touch that is a matter of opinion but making you do the motions of the real world to interact with a computer program using a mouse... that is just idiotic and should be a cause for concern.

Skeuomorphism is great if you are making something tor a target demo that understands some real world item well and would instantly "get it" while you could slowly migrate them to something better suited to the newer technology that is replacing it.

You might want to use VHS tape or film reels as metaphors when introducing video editing in the 90s... But as soon as people can adapt, those metaphors can be chucked for more modern or abstract ones; as Apple and others have done with digital video editing. Some terms like film and reels still remain despite this generation never using or even seeing actual film.