Apple unveils Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks

[caption id="attachment_8786" align="alignleft" width="300"] Mac OS X Mavericks.[/caption]

SAN FRANCISCO--Apple announced the next version of Mac OS X today at the Keynote for the WWDC. Named Mavericks, Mac OS X 10.9 brings more iOS features into the fold including a quicker way to multitask, the Siri voice assistant, Finder Tabs, and several other features.

Finder Tabs
The new Finder Tabs work much in the same way they do in Safari. A plus sign button on the right lets you open a new tab, and you can drag and drop tabs just like a Web browser.

Full screen apps
Full screen apps were unveiled in Mountain Lion, but users quickly realized the feature wasn't perfect, especially if you use multiple monitors. Fortunately, with Mavericks, the feature works the way it should. You can now put full screen apps on multiple monitors and switch between them effortlessly.

Safari
According to Apple, Safari now uses less GPU, less energy, and is faster than ever before. One of the more interesting new features is the quick launch screen where there's a new column for all your bookmarks. You also can drag a bookmark into your quicklaunch screen to keep it handy.

Notifications
The Notifications system got some tweaks as well. When you return to your Mac when it's in a sleeping state, you'll now get all the notifications you received while you were gone before even unlocking your screen. Mavericks will also update your apps automatically and let you know via notifications when the process is complete.

Pricing and availability
Apple says Mavericks will become available this fall, which is a departure from its release schedule from the last few years. Over the past few years, Apple has followed a fairly regular schedule for OS X releases, with the announcement of a new Mac OS in February, and then the release date announced during the WWDC keynote (with an actual release soon to follow).

This year, there was no announcement in the early part of the year, but a report form Daring Fireball said that Apple had pulled developers from the OS X team to work on the big changes in iOS 7, pushing the Mac OS X release to later in the year.