OS X Mavericks - Best just got Better !!!
If you are still on Mountain Lion and have not upgraded to OS X Mavericks, its about time. The best part of upgrading to this entire new OS is that the upgrade is absolutely free of cost. Boy, don't we love free stuff and to our hearts content upgrade just makes it a lot better. One can visit the App Store and leave the upgrade to download and install.
The upgrade to Maverick is approximately 5 GB and it takes roughly 45 minutes to install. One of the best things about owning a Mac is that the upgrade happens without much hassles. Even though it is great to have auto upgrade, it is always a good idea to have a backup of your stuff incase you need to revert back.
What's Different
There are no iconic changes that you will notice out of the box, but certainly there are little tweaks which are all set to make your life much better. After using the new OS for a week, here are the noticeable changes.
Under the Hood Performance
Feels much better without doubt. With apple throwing in terms such as Accelerated Scrolling, App Nap, Timer Coalescing and Compressed memory, performance and battery life is certainly a boost. I have an 8 GB Mac Pro machine on which I run a VM with 4 GB and it has performed much better after the update. You would notice that the applications that are in foreground are given higher priority in terms of CPU and Memory as compared to the applications that are minimized or in the background.
Finder Tabs and Tags
This has certainly turned out to be one of the most useful features. Tagging certain folders with user defined tags makes it useful to quickly access certain files/folders which are resident in different parts of your machine.
In addition to this, introducing Tabs is a great thing since it allows you to run Finder in full view mode now and manipulate your requirements using tabs. This feature needs no explanation since browser tabs have already become part of our lives.
Multiple Displays
Multiple displays came as a huge relief specially for developers. Mac machines are most helpful for designers, artists, photographers who cannot live without multiple displays. Running full screen apps on multiple displays taking away all nuisances from previous Mac versions is a huge plus.
More Good Things
There are more good things present which are worth a mention such as Notifications which is still in nascent stages, a new overhauled calendar app which in my view still lags behind Google calendar and under the hood safari innovations which is easier on memory. Few more things added are Maps(good only for US) which still is far behind Google Maps and iBooks which is useful if you are an avid reader.
What Breaks - Developers Perspective
SVN would definitely be broken once you upgrade to Mavericks. Thus, when you would try to run your usual SVN commands, the chances are that it wont work. The reason is that XCode has been moved from earlier /Developer/XCode to /Applications/XCode.
There are many posts suggesting to do symbolic link of /Developer/XCode to /Applications/XCode etc. but none of them are a good solution. The best is if you follow the following steps even though, it might require a 2 GB download but is a very clean approach.
1. Go to App Store and Install XCode. This also includes Command Line Tools which is required for active development using terminal. If you are one of those people who like Eclipse plugins and do not use terminal, then you would not require to perform this activity.
2. Run the command - 'svn upgrade'.
If you have problems running GIT-SVN, then you can follow Victor Quinn's blog.
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