Yosemite National Park

If you’re anything like me, you probably thought Mavericks was a character from Top Gun and Yosemite is that park in the States with big rocks and waterfalls. But it turns out they are infact the names of Apple operating systems – the software that runs your computer – and ‘Yosemite’ is going to be launched this autumn, bringing lots of exciting new features to Macs everywhere.

This was one of the key announcements at Apple’s developer conference this week – their annual event to tell the world of app developers what’s up their sleeve to launch later in the year. This gives the IT geeks a chance to work their magic with their games and other apps to take full advantage of all the new things Apple are doing. For the rest of us mere mortals, it just gives us a sneak peek into some quite exciting developments that will be coming to a device near you this autumn.

Here are some highlights:

1. Apple announced they will be launching iOS 8 (a new operating system for mobile devices) and Yosemite, or OS X 10.10 – the new operating system for Macs – both in the autumn.
2. One of our favourite developments is that these 2 new operating systems will be able to interact with each other – amazingly this hasn’t been the case until now. For example, you’ll be able to make phone calls directly from your Mac, or start writing an email on your iPad and finish it on your Mac.
3. You’ll be able to send text messages from your iPad or Mac, and you’ll be able to include voice or other sound recordings as part of the message.
4. Family Sharing – lots of our customers get in a muddle with the various iThings in their homes and tangled Apple IDs; this new development will make it easy for family members to share purchased apps or tunes across devices, and to have access to shared photo libraries without the need to plug in to a computer.
5. iCloud Drive – this is going to be an amalgam of Google Drive and iCloud, meaning that you’ll be able to do all the things iCloud currently allows you to, as well as sharing documents between your devices. You’ll even be able to share on Windows PCs too.

There are going to be lots of other, really useful new development with these new operating systems – if you want more of a preview you could go to the Apple site to find out:

https://www.apple.com/osx/preview/apps/

https://www.apple.com/ios/ios8/

A final word of warning – if you are going to upgrade your operating system on your devices at any time, it’s very wise to make a backup of your content before you do…just incase anything should go wrong during the process. Check back to our earlier blog if you need help with backing up. You’ll also need to check the Apple website to see if your device is capable of upgrading – some older models won’t be.