What features of Mavericks are beneficial to you?

Question

This question serves to share and collect the enhancements that make a large difference to how you use your Mac.

Please post one feature per answer. Please also check to see if your answer has already been posted - duplicate answers will be deleted. To search answers for this question use inquestion:this (directly from the question page) in addition to your search terms in the search box in the upper right hand corner of this page.

The best answers will not only list a feature, but provide details on how to configure that feature, and provide an image of how to use the feature to be more efficient or effective with Mavericks.

Answer 1

The overhaul of the virtual memory system makes it clear that memory pressure is the primary factor to track and not how many free pages, inactive pages or overall virtual memory is allocated.

The bottom panel is invaluable for diagnosing a slow machine and knowing whether to rule out memory contention as a cause of the slowness. After running your Mac for a week, you should reach a nice steady state like shown above and can know if adding more RAM or adjusting the programs you run will affect performance.

Answer 2

With a text field active, Control ⌃ + Command ⌘ + Space opens a characters panel including Emojis.

Answer 3

The energy consumption view that collects 8 hours of history and graphs the charge level in your battery as well as showing each process that drained measurable amounts of energy is going to make squeezing extra productivity out of one charge much easier.

Not only will developers (I'm looking at you Dropbox) know that they have to be better stewards of battery life, it makes it easy to see which apps support App Nap and even that a program that is quit now was responsible for using energy in the past 8 hours. This tool provides actionable information for users to better manage their experience when away from wall power on a portable Mac.

This detail is quite hidden inside Activity Monitor, but Apple does expose the biggest users of energy in the menu bar for apps using significant energy.

Answer 4

Secret Wallpapers

OS X ships with a bunch of really cool sample photos that are not normally available for use as desktop backgrounds.

Previously in OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, these were located at:

/System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.Framework/Versions/A/Resources/Default Collections/

In OS X 10.9 Mavericks, they’re now located at

/Library/Screen Savers/Default Collections/

Here's how to get them:

• from Finder, use the menu Go → Go to Folder… (or hit ⌘⇧G) and paste in: /Library/Screen Savers/Default Collections/

You should see 4 folders, and inside them you’ll find lots of really cool Wallpapers:

Answer 5

Bring Your Home Folder's Library Back with One Checkbox in Mavericks:

Apple decided to hide the Library from its users in recent OS X updates, but in Mavericks you can now change that with a simple checkbox.

In the past you had to enter a Terminal command with every little system update:

chflags nohidden ~/Library

With OS X Mavericks, you can just navigate to your home folder, press Command+J to bring up the folder settings, and check the box next to "Show Library Folder" instead.

Answer 6

Using multiple desktops on multiple displays is finally usable. Now I can switch desktops on my left hand monitor while the right hand monitor doesn't change.

Answer 7

Put your computer to sleep quickly

If you're using OSX Mavericks on a MacBook, tapping the power key briefly immediately puts your computer to sleep—a simple tweak that makes saving energy even easier. For the usual shutdown dialog, just keep holding for three seconds, or press control+power.

As always, you can put just the display to sleep by pressing control+shift+eject or control+shift+power, depending on your model.

Answer 8

The battery menu in the top bar now shows apps using high amounts of energy - nice for killing energy-hogs:

Answer 9

Mac App Store Notifications Now Include Multiple "Later" Options

You can choose from a handful of times in the future to remind you about pending updates from the Mac App Store.

Credit to this reddit.com/r/mac post.

Answer 10

Move Dashboard in Mission Control

You can now drag to rearrange the Dashboard to move it between your desktop spaces and full screen apps. It can even be dragged to alternative monitors, providing that "Displays have separate Spaces" is enabled in System Preferences → Mission Control.

Answer 11

Battery Life

It's hard to beat getting an additional hour of use on a battery charge. I've been getting at least that much more use before having to plug in my 2012 MacBook Air. My experience matches up well with Apple's claim during the announcement keynote where the 13 inch Air from 2013 with Haswell benchmarked with another hour to an hour and a half of battery life just by installing Mavericks.

Answer 12

Finder messages are now Notification Center alerts

Prior to Mavericks, alerts from Finder would show up as a modal window, however they now show as a Notification Center alert, such as below:

Answer 13

Disable App Nap on a per app basis in OS X Mavericks:

You may or may not know that one of the more discreet features in OSX Mavericks will be App Nap.

Apps will enter App Nap when they’re completely hidden from view by other apps and when they aren’t actively working. This is a great way to reduce your running apps from killing your Mac’s battery life.

Also, you may want certain apps to never enter App Nap. This could be true for apps that are important to you but sometimes perform long non-interactive tasks.

To prevent apps from entering App Nap, go to Finder -> Applications -> right click on the app you want -> click on Get Info -> and look for the option that says “Prevent App Nap” right under the copyright section, as shown on the picture below:

Please note that said option won’t be there for apps that don’t support App Nap.

Answer 14

Show Desktop using Trackpad now follows motion

Using the Show Desktop gesture, the motion of the windows now follows the motion of your fingers on the trackpad. No longer is it a set speed, you can move the windows at the exact speed of your fingers, and even pull them back half way through to cancel the motion.

Answer 15

Gatekeeper shows most recent app in System Preferences

After Gatekeeper blocks an app, going to the relevant option in System Preferences shows the app name and a button that allows you to open the app.

This means it is no longer required for new users to know that clicking Open from the right-click menu will bypass Gatekeeper.

Answer 16

Open PSDs directly in Safari

You can now preview PSD files (Photoshop Documents) directly in Safari without actually opening Preview, or even downloading the PSD to your Downloads folder.

Answer 17

AirPlay display:

The Apple TV makes it easy to see on your TV the media content that is on your Mac, such as to stream videos or photos.

In OS X Mountain Lion, you could also mirror your Desktop to the Apple TV, such as for presentations.

OS X Mavericks takes that to the next step, treating the Apple TV as just another monitor, so you can extend your desktop onto an Apple TV-connected TV or projector.

Answer 18

Enhanced Dictation

Enhanced Dictation allows offline use and continuous dictation with live feedback.

Great for those without Internet connections and those not wanting to have their dictation processed outside of their network.

Answer 19

ColorSync Utility: New Calculator

This little known included application continues to improve with a new colour Calculator.

Not new to Mavericks but certainly hidden, ColorSync continues to provide interactive 3D colour space visualisation for profiles.

Answer 20

Improved Multiple Screen Support

It is pretty awesome having a menu bar on each screen and being able to full screen apps on a per screen basis. I never used full screen mode before since I always had the linen background on my other screen.

Answer 21

Driving directions for iOS:

OS X Mavericks adopts iOS's Maps app. That by itself is not a huge deal, even though it's nice to have an alternative to Google's Web-based maps. But what's cool is the ability to get driving directions and send them to your iPhone or other iOS 7-based device. They show up in the iOS Maps app, ready for you to follow while driving or walking, and they remain in your bookmarked directions for access later if needed.

Answer 22

Easily Identify New Apps:

If you use Launchpad, any new apps you download will sparkle to denote their newness.

Once you acknowledge them, or they've sat there neglected for awhile, the sparkles will disappear.

Answer 23

New Safari setting to power off plugins when inactive to save battery life as featured in this Ars Technica article.

I have high expectations that this will stop the issues occurring when my girlfriend has 15 tabs with flash players open in the background while working in other programs.

Answer 24

Move Dock Between Monitors

The Dock starts on your main monitor, but if you put your cursor in another monitor, go to the bottom of the screen, and then keep moving down, the Dock will pop up (and disappear from wherever it was previously). This is really nice if your "main" monitor isn't actually.

The motion has to be pretty straight down and surprisingly long - it's a bit finicky.

Answer 25

Responsive scrolling

In Mountain Lion and earlier, any window content that doesn't fit in the current frame of the window (like a long webpage) isn't drawn until scrolled into view. In Mavericks, this offscreen content is "pre-rendered" during idle time, which results in vastly improved scrolling performance (especially noticeable with complex documents or webpages).

Answer 26

Disable Notification Center on the Lock Screen:

Notification Center doesn't see a whole lot of improvement this time around, but the update does mess with your settings a little bit. If you're not a fan of getting a million notifications, you're going to want to pop into System Preferences > Notifications and take a look at the new options. The big one to check is "Show notifications on lock screen."

If you don't want your emails or anything else showing when you're computer is locked, uncheck this box.

Answer 27

Zoom pictures in QuickLook

You can now zoom pictures in QuickLook using the default zoom gestures: Pinch In & Pinch Out, as well as panning with two fingers.

Answer 28

Debug menus have been updated

The debug menus have been updated for various apps.

_{Below is the debug menu for App Store and Contacts:}

---

To activate the menus, run the following commands (and restart the apps):

defaults write com.apple.appstore ShowDebugMenu -bool true
defaults write com.apple.AddressBook ABShowDebugMenu -bool true

Replace true with false to remove.

Answer 29

iCloud Keychain stores and syncs Secure Notes across Macs.

The new iCloud Keychain stores website usernames and passwords, credit card numbers and Wi-Fi network information and keeps the data up to date across all of a person's Apple devices, including the iPhone and iPad.

It also stores and syncs Secure Notes across Macs, like this:

Answer 30

Notification Center appears on current monitor

In a multi-monitor setup, Notification Center now appears on the monitor where your cursor is currently located. This is a nice improvement if you invoke it while you're working on a secondary monitor: it appears on the monitor you're looking at, rather than the primary.