Looks like Mavericks is starting to really fill out on features now. DP5 introduced new versions of iTunes and iPhoto, and iBooks is finally here. I personally haven't noticed whatever changes were made to iPhoto -- I hardly use that app, not being all picture-y-take-r-y myself. iTunes now has the Spotify-like streaming radio model. iBooks rocks. Just plain rocks.
It's definitely making progress; I'd say it's 85-90% done. I'm still having an issue where drag-and-drop temporarily freezes the application I'm in (mostly Safari) but it's waaaay better than it was. (Oddly, this seems to happen with every beta of OS X going back to 10.6. It gets magically fixed with the GM every time, too. Odd...) iBooks is indeed quite nice (it even downloaded all my books without me asking it to ). Also, there are hints of future OS X UI change here, such as the blue loading/progress bar under the toolbar. Disturbingly, there is also some iOS 7 UI here as well, such as the sidebar. The loading bar may be iOS 7-inspired too, but I haven't installed that so I can't say for sure. Progress still need to be made in certain apps: Reminders and Game Center are still over-textured, Contacts and Notes were stripped of their skeuomorphism but are very... bland? bare? not sure of the right word. I guess unfinished is what I'm trying to say. The tabbed Finder and improved multi-monitor support are my favorite new additions, and I really like the modest UI overhaul (removal of linen textures and such) as well as the new side-style Dock. I'm looking forward to the final version, but not as much as with 10.7 and 10.8.
The tabbed Finder is nice -- and I really like the addition of tags to that -- but, frankly, I'm not as impressed with that as I might have been had I not already been using TotalFinder for quite a long while, and I hope that BinaryAge brings TotalFinder back up to speed in short order. Not only has it enabled Finder tabs for a long time, but dual panes -- which means you can have, for example, Downloads and Documents open simultaneously side by side within the same window. One thing I also miss is the "visor" feature, which made it possible to open and close the Finder with a hotkey. iTunes Radio still has a way to go, too -- occasionally, a station will stop playing back normally and instead begin rapidly cycling through music sources; only quitting and reopening iTunes seems to fix it.
I used TotalFinder and XtraFinder for a while (I liked XtraFinder best, and it was free) but those apps are altering the Finder code in memory ... that makes me nervous considering I'm using it to move my files around and such. I'm sure it's perfectly safe, but it's not something I personally want to take a chance with.
The worst I've ever seen it do in a year plus using it is the occasional crash necessitating a restart of the TotalFinder app itself. Whenever TotalFinder has crashed (maybe half a dozen times, total) the system just defaults back to normal Finder until I launched TotalFinder again. Sincerely, between dual-pane tabs and the visor feature, TotalFinder is one of my two must-have file-handling apps, the other being Alfred.
I will say that dual panes are pretty nice to have in certain situations. I do own PathFinder, but that's way, way overdone for what I would use it for. I have an app called ForkLift that's supposed to be an FTP client mainly, but works pretty damn good as a tabbed/dual-pane Finder replacement. Trouble with all the third-party apps is that I forget to use them when they would be helpful - I just end up with 30 Finder windows open. At least in Mavericks I will be able to click one menu command and clean all that mess up...
I've never had that issue with TotalFinder. Launch it, it stays launched. Then double-tap Control+Control to launch the window, Control+Control again to dismiss it. I like that for Finder navigation.
So as an interesting update: iBooks has done something... peculiar. For no apparent reason, it has imported all of the other media from my iTunes library into its own library.
I suspect Apple is attempting to reengineer their OS and apps to work more like Google's, where each piece of software essentially becomes part of a larger, Borg-like gestalt.
I saw a bunch of people posting about this on MacRumors so I checked my iBooks library and sure enough it happened to me too. No one seems to know why... especially weird since it worked correctly for the first few days.
Possibly. I had already noticed that the iBookstore is just a section of the iTunes store. There could be something in the iTunes dependency that went haywire in the DP5 iteration of iBooks. The DP6 release, notably, fixes this. We'll see whether that fix is permanent or temporary, though. As another unhappy aside, the DP6 version of Safari 7 has developed a nasty snag -- I'm not sure how widespread it is, but it has decided to hang with disturbing frequency over the last hour or so. I've run Activity Monitor to see if this is something specific to my combination of hardware and apps, but haven't turned up anything definitive yet. EDIT: It's not isolated to any one website. It is repeatable, though, and is triggered by a "Back" swipe gesture on my Magic Trackpad. E2: Logging out/in and/or restarting seems to clear this glitch, though we'll see for how long.
So I'm now on Developer Preview 8. Features appear to be finalized, now it's all down to performance tweaking and bugfixes. The system runs silky smooth on a 2011 Mac Mini with a 2.3Ghz Core i5 and 4Gb of memory. Actually, Mavericks is quicker, smoother and overall more responsive and stable than Mountain Lion was. A bit about the apps: Maps is quick and stable. First couple Dev Previews, it would get crashy if you took it to Full Screen. It's fine now. It integrates Yelp data, too, which is interesting. iBooks is fine. iTunes 11.1 came with this DP, apparently, bringing podcast "stations" functionality with it. Nice. Anyway, that's it. Nothing really new or alarming going on here. Looks like Mavericks is going to be a good update.
Looking for info everywhere but dont seem anyone has it yet: Is it crapping on Boootcamp for Win7 or is it stable?
So I have the full on released version of Mavericks now, and I must say that it is big bouncy titties.
