“The successor to OS X Mavericks and the second iteration in Apple’s current California places naming convention, Yosemite has a new design, new cloud features, an improved Notification centre and new Continuity features that aim to improve the communication between your iOS device and your Mac (but it doesn’t always work),” Ashleigh Allsopp writes for PC Advisor. “We love the new Notification Centre in OS X Yosemite, which has been significantly improved upon since OS X Mavericks… We think that Notification Centre will soon replace the Dashboard, a feature that was introduced to OS X in 2005 when Tiger was released. For now, Dashboard remains, offering access to similar widgets as those found in the Notification Centre. Spotlight is another feature that came to the Mac with OS X Tiger, and has been a real boon to Mac users ever since. Now, in Yosemite, it’s more useful than ever, allowing users to not only search for files and applications on their Mac, but also news headlines, maps, the App Store, iTunes, Wikipedia and Microsoft Bing (not Google, of course. Microsoft is the lesser of the two evils apparently) for web search.”
“Another one of our favourite new features in Yosemite, and one we’ve found to work really well, is iCloud Drive. It’s Apple’s answer to Dropbox, allowing you to save and store files including presentations, spreadsheets, PDFs, images and any other file smaller than 15GB in iCloud, which are then accessible from your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac or even PC. It’s also accessible via the browser, by visiting iCloud.com and logging in,” Allsopp writes. “Right now, iCloud Drive isn’t a way to share documents and files with colleagues or friends (you can use Mail Drop for that), but we suspect that Apple is working to make iCloud Drive even more useful in the future.”
“When Apple first announced that AirDrop would finally work between iOS and Mac, we were jumping for joy.,” Allsopp writes. “But, we actually had so much trouble trying to get OS X Yosemite [AirDrop] to work that it drove us round the bend. It did work, eventually, though not particularly reliably, but the point is that not everyone is going to go to as much effort to get it fixed as we did. In fact, if we hadn’t been trying it for the purpose of this review, we would have given up on it long ago… AirDrop between iOS and Mac is a step in the right direction, but right now it’s in need of some serious improvements so is a bit of a let down for us… Similarly, Handoff is a feature that got us excited when OS X Yosemite and iOS 8 were first unveiled… However, just like with AirDrop our experience with Handoff so far has been far from satisfactory. It seems to work better from iPhone to Mac than the other way around, with prompts appearing when we approached our Mac while writing an email in our iCloud account, but not appearing on the iPhone when we wanted to pick things up there and head out.”
Allsopp write, “As it’s a free upgrade, we’d recommend it to all OS X users if your machine is compatible, though we would advise waiting until the OS X 10.10.1 update is available if you’re using a MacBook because there have been some reports of WiFi issues with the current version that should be resolved by that update.
Much more in the full review here.