OS-X Mavericks Summary

Here's what I know to date, so you can forget the two previous rants. I was and still am angry at Apple for their habit of dropping cool tools and features some informed, meaning not just mindless users as Apple likes, want to see and know about their Mac and applications.

First, the Activity Monitor is almost completely different, more so with how they define memory. Active memory is now App Memory, inactive memory is now File Cache. Adjust your thinking to their new vocabulary. Same information, different words.

The purge command, which to some seems unnecessary, is useful since the inactive, er file cache, memory can under Mountain Lion and especially now under Mavericks get huge, like 1 GB and even 2-3 GB, meaning it has to start compressing or swapping space. That's not performance, but just wasteful design.

The menu bar apps don't start in the order they do under previous versions. Before they added right to left in the order you opened them. Now it's almost random, and if you want them in order, you have to kill and reopen them until the show in the far left place. A bug they need to fix.

They broke a number of apps which are accessed from the menu bar. They removed a commonly used library or functions, eg. CGContextErase, and sandboxing denies hid control which freeze the app (the feature which open and hides it by clicking on it in the menu bar icon). This includes some social network apps, like Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Mail no longer has the remote server window to control the mail on the remote (host) server. I don't know why they did this stupid stunt except Apple doesn't want you now to send unencrypted passwords to those server. They did with all previous versions of mail but not this one.

This means you have to use the preferences to remove the mail on the server, which of courses send the unencrypted password to the server (Gee, oxymoron there with Apple?) to delete the mail there, and it deletes all the mail, meaning you can't store mail there as backup, it's removed by the mail app if you set it.

Apple iBooks. Ok, you can now read them on your Mac. That's a start, but you still can't print the damn thing! What's good if you can't print pages, sections or a chapter if you don't want to read it on the Mac, but make notes or take it somewhere. Oh, yes, use your iPhone or iPad, but even then, still you can only read it, you can't print any pages.

This is why I don't buy iBooks unless there's no choice, and why some authors only provide their books in iBooks beside the obvious it was produced in iBooks Author which only makes iBook for the Apple bookstore, is beyond me.

Safari bookmarks format is different, and sucks is an understatement if you edit or more  bookmarks and have an extensive list of folders and subfolders. Trying to move bookmarks around the window is cumbersome where the old version you could move them in steps without scrolling.

Again, Apple forgets real users in places of the user who doesn't seem to care how bookmarks are handled, just where they are. And I couldn't find a third-party app to edit and move bookmarks in a simple user interface like the old multi-column format.

If you're like me and like the bookmarks bar the opening page in one tab, you have to use the menu bar option now to "edit bookmarks" to open that format. Hitting the column button in the favorites bar only shows the bookmarks, you can't do anything with them.

Safari now puts each tab or window as a separate daemon and when you close a tab or window, it removes the active memory (killing the daemon), but keeps it in cache, somewhere different now than before. There are no more Webpage previews. So much for the cache cleaner apps.

Apple seems to like to keep the third-party app companies working with each update and more so each upgrade.