Back in OS X Mountain Lion, it took a seriously complex shell script and recurring Calendar event to schedule Do Not Disturb times. While it’s fun to dig in and mess about with scripts, I much rather like the new Mavericks beta ability to just, you know, schedule Do Not Disturb using a nice, pretty graphical user interface.
If you’re like me, and you want to schedule your Do Not Disturb times on your Mac (much the same way you can on iOS), then here’s what to do.
The Dashboard has been getting less and less attention lately, and so it’s surprising that it’s still in OS X Mavericks beta, to be honest.
It does have a nicer background, to be sure, but if you’re feeling like it has outlived its purpose on your Mac, here’s how to get rid of it.
Of course you know already that you can send iMessages to your iOS or OS X using friends and family via the Notification Center, because we told you that a while ago.
Did you know, however, that you can reply to iMessages sent to you in that very same Notification Center? If not, read on and learn how to do so, and how to make sure that your Mac is set up correctly to allow it to happen.
OS X Mavericks beta, while not quite an overhaul as iOS 7, still carries quite a few new enhancements and features that you might not necessarily see at first glance. There are plenty of hidden features, which we’ve already detailed here on Cult of Mac, but more continue to be found. Lucky you, we’re here to help put them all together in one place.
Here are five of those hidden features for OS X Mavericks beta, each perhaps surprising in their own, special way.
AutoFill is a boon to those of us who have a ton of forms to fill in, and these days, who doesn’t?
One of the cool new features of Safari in OS X Mavericks beta is the ability to store credit card info, so you never have to pull that card out of your wallet at work while you buy giraffe statuettes from eBay again. Ahem.
Here’s how to get the credit card info into the AutoFill feature of Safari.
AutoFill has been a part of OS X and Apple’s browser, Safari, for a while now. When you fill out forms on the web, Safari will prompt you to use your contact info to fill in the form, or to use the form data you entered as your AutoFill information. This is helpful as you fill out a lot of web forms, of course.
Now, in OS X Mavericks beta, Safari has a new trick up its sleeve, with the ability to suggest secure passwords to you, and then saving them for you when you go back to that site. It’s called iCloud Keychain, and here’s how to set it up.
Calendar, previously iCal, has had Time Zone support for a while now. The Mac I’m using that runs OS X Mountain Lion let’s my turn on Time Zone Support in the Advanced tab of the Calendar preferences, so I can be sure to be on time for meetings when I travel away from my current timezone (AKDT).
However, when using Time Zone support in Mountain Lion, calendar events that I scheduled in one time zone wouldn’t ever show me visually that they were. OS X Mavericks takes care of this problem with a small visual cue–now events scheduled in one time zone will show that time zone in their title in Calendar. Here’s how to make that happen.
In the new OS X Mavericks beta, there’s a new Notification system in place that mimics much of the way iOS handles notifications. Your iOS notifications, in fact, can push right to your Mac desktop as well.
Much like iOS, each app that uses Notification Center can be set to a fine-grained level of customization, letting you show them in Notification Center (activated with the icon in the upper right corner of your Mac’s screen), decide whether to let them use a Badge app icon, and whether or not to play a sound for each app’s notifications.
If, however, you value your privacy, you may want to disable the default setting that has your notifications showing up even when the display is off or locked.
Here’s how.
Just like in iOS, OS X Mavericks beta has gone to auto-updating of apps. This way, you don’t have to click thorugh to the Mac App Store each time it gets a red badge of update and click the Update or Update all buttons. It’s pretty slick, and will be a time saver as more and more apps run through the Mac App Store.
But what if you want to update things on your own schedule, or check the list of potential updates, picking and choosing the updates you want to activate, and ignore the ones you don’t?
All you need to do is disable auto-updating, and here’s how.
When you’re galavanting about with your MacBook Air or Pro, it’s important to manage you battery power. It just wouldn’t do to show up for an important meeting or interview with a dead battery, let alone not being able to watch a movie on the airplane, now would it?
Knowing which apps are sucking up the most juice is key to this effort, of course, and OS Mavericks beta makes it severely easy to know which ones are the most power-hungry. That way, you can quit the apps that are using up too much battery in order to leave enough power for the important stuff.
Here’s how it works.
One of the lesser talked-about features of the upcoming OS X Mavericks system is that of Mac App Store subscriptions. In iOS, developers are able to charge users on a recurring basis, like a subscription. Magazines in Newsstand do this fairly easily, and I have several subscriptions to magazines there.
This wasn’t available to OS X apps until the release of OS X Mavericks, and you can manage your subscriptions from the Mac App Store right now if you’re running the new Mavericks beta on your Mac right now. Here’s how.
It used to be that if you wanted to increase the size of your mouse pointer, you’d hop into the Universal Access pane in the System Preferences and then click on the Mouse & Trackpad tab to find the Increase Cursor Size slider.
With OS X Mavericks beta, if you go looking for the Universal Access preferences pane, you’re out of luck. It’s called Accessibility now. However, if you know that much, and drop into it, you won’t find a Mouse & Trackpad tab.
So, in OS X Mavericks beta, if you want to increase the size of your mouse pointer, here’s what you have to do.
One of the coolest things about Messages is the cross-device functionality, in that you can send messages to and from your Mac and your iOS devices. I use it while at work to chat with folks who text me from their iPhone; it’s a really handy way to avoid using a tiny screen while at work, not to mention letting you keep your iPHone in a bag, instead of beeping or vibrating on your desk.
Now, though, you can send an iMessage in the Notification Center in OS X Mavericks beta. Here’s how.
Let’s be honest–sometimes it gets a little tricky to see the stuff on those tiny little iPhone screens, especially as we all get a little (ahem) older. While the accessibility feature to set large text has been around for a while, there’s a new feature in iOS 7 beta that holds promise, and isn’t actually in the accessibility section.
Dynamic Type will let any application that supports the feature adjust the font size in the app to better match what works best for you.
Here’s how to access and change the settings for Dynamic Type in iOS 7 beta.
One of the features I’ve been most looking forward to in OS X Mavericks is the ability to send directions from my Mac to my iPhone, to be able to take my directions on the go, even when I’m searching on my Mac. I hate having to go to my iPhone (or iPad) and re-enter the starting and ending addresses again; I just did that on my Mac!
While you still can’t do that with Google directions, you can now send directions from OS X Mavericks Maps right to your iOS Maps. Here’s how.
In yet another addition to the OS X Finder in OS X Mavericks, you can now tag your files. This is a wonderful way to keep track of stuff, since unless you’re an obsessive folder and sub-folder maker, tags are much easier to define and apply on the fly, making the dynamic organization of your files easier and less permanent.
OS X Mavericks tags seem a lot like Labels did, with a couple of differences. You can apply more than one tag to a file or folder, and you can sort your files by tag, as well. Here’s how.
After I started my Mac mini running OS X Mavericks Developer Preview, or beta, today, I visited the Mac App Store to see what was new.
What greeted me there was a host of new software updates, all part of OS X Mavericks Developer Preview 2, as noted by Apple on the Developer page.
As you can see in the screenshot above, there are quite a few of these little updates bundled together.
Safari has been updated in OS X Mavericks, of course, with a host of under-the-hood improvements, along with quite a few new features. One of them lets you see what your social connections are recommending to their various social network sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Linked In.
If you want easy access to the links your friends, acquaintances, and business contacts are sharing on their social sites, all you need to do is add your social network credentials, and then open up Safari.
OS X Mavericks (named after a surfing hot spot in California) was announced recently, and it contains a ton of new features for Mac users to pore over and learn anew. While not as incredible an overhaul as the concurrent update to iOS 7, Mavericks still contains some fairly helpful features and additions to make it worth some poking around, even in the beta.
Speaking of the beta, remember that any of the stuff we talk about below may only exist in the beta, or in some other form, so enjoy playing around with these things, but don’t worry when things are different when Mavericks releases for real in the Fall.
That said, let’s take a look at five new, hidden, and above all, interesting, features of the latest beta for OS X: Mavericks.
Remember that the OS X Mavericks beta isn’t a final version—it’s meant to be used by developers to ensure that their software will work with Apple’s latest and greatest. With that disclaimer in mind, let’s check out yet another little feature in the beta.
Prior to OS X Mavericks beta, the Dashboard, loaded with useful widgets of all stripe, used to be limited to two states: disabled, or locked to the top left side of the Mission Control screen.
Now, however, with the advent of OS X Mavericks beta, that’s no longer the case. The Dashboard is now treated the same as any other Space when enabled. Here’s how to get it enabled, and then how to move it around.
Don’t forget that the OS X Mavericks beta isn’t a final version—it’s meant to be used by developers to ensure that their software will work with Apple’s latest and greatest. With that disclaimer in mind, let’s check out a new little feature in the beta.
Many apps have had access to special characters before, like iChat and Messages. You’d simply click the little smiley face, for example, and get all the fun emoticons Apple has provided.
If you wanted to type a special character in a text document, though, you’d have to remember that Option-8 is a text bullet, and Option-K is the degrees symbol, and Option-2 gives you the Trademark symbol.
Now, though, in OS X Mavericks beta, you can see visually what special characters are available to you across all applications. Here’s how.
Speech to text is the next new thing, with all devices we use, including our Macs, having the ability to listen to our speech and type what we say for us. What usually makes this magic possible are network-connected processing data centers, that take your speech and convert it to text, all somewhere other than your iPhone device, say. But what if you want to keep what you say to your devices private?
In the new version of OS X, Mavericks beta, there’s a new option to do just that. It’s called Enhanced Dictation, and here’s how to enable it.
As we continue to look at some tips for the new OS X beta this week, remember that OS X Mavericks isn’t a final version—it’s meant to be used by developers to ensure that their software will work with Apple’s latest and greatest.
With that disclaimer in mind, let’s continue.
If you need to use Java for any reason on your Mac, and you install OS X Mavericks beta on it, you’ll be sad when you try and run that Java-reliant bit of software.
For me, it was setting up the Minecraft server for my kid after I installed the beta last night to take a look at things. When I went to run it in Terminal, I got an error, saying there was no Java installed. So, even though I’d had Java installed in Mac OS X Mountain Lion, the Mavericks install seems to have taken Java off my Mac. No worries; it was kind of an easy fix.
OS X Mavericks (named after a hot surfing spot in California) was released last week, and even though it may have been overshadowed by the iOS 7 announcement at the same time, there are bound to be some new things in the operating system we can tip you about.
Remember, though, that as with all beta software, OS X Mavericks isn’t a final version–it’s meant to be used by developers to ensure that when it’s released this fall, all the devs with apps on OS X will have had time to make tweaks to their current Mac software, and start integrating Mavericks stuff into their next bits of software.
That said, let’s take a look at how to enable the new Do Not Disturb toggle in OS X Mavericks beta.
Mac OS X is full of great accessibility features to help those with differing abilities access their Macintosh, whether they have visual, hearing, or motor challenges. One feature, Full Keyboard Access, is set for those who can’t use the mouse reliably. You can use it, too, if you just want to keep your hands on the keyboard, focused on the task at hand.
Here’s how to activate it and make it work for you.