Apple’s latest desktop operating system, OS X Yosemite, won’t officially come out until sometime this fall. But now that its public beta is open, both developers and a large number of Mac owners are able to use a preview version of the landmark OS.

For those who’ve just started using the beta, or are just anticipating its launch later this year, we’ve got some tips on how to best take advantage of the redesigned OS and its many new features. In this edition, we explore Notification Center.

Notification Center first made its OS X debut in Mountain Lion in 2012. As its name suggests, it was a hub for collecting notifications from apps and services, as well as recent emails and messages. You access it with a two finger swipe from the right edge of your trackpad, or by clicking the Notification Center icon in the upper right-hand corner of your home screen. Truth be told, I didn’t see reason to use it very much.

Fast forward two generations and Notification Center has transformed into something that's actually pretty useful—or at least something you'll want to access periodically throughout the day. Taking a cue from iOS, Notification Center now houses a lot more than just a stream of notifications thanks to a handful of Apple-built, and soon, third party-built, widgets.

Notification Center opens to the Today view, which defaults to showing the date, what’s on your calendar for the day and the next day, your reminders, stock information, and the weather where you are. You can rearrange the order of all these sections, remove sections you don’t need, or add optional widgets like the calculator, a world clock, or social (which lets you quickly post to networks like Twitter or Facebook). The experience is very similar to Notification Center's Today view in iOS. After Yosemite launches this fall, you’ll also be able to download additional widgets from the Mac App Store to customize this experience further; these widgets could span across the Mac and iOS experience, if a developer decides to make both a desktop and mobile version.

You might remember these types of widgets used to live in the Dashboard. They still do, if that’s the way you prefer to see them, but I think having these tools accessible in Notification Center will make them more useful and accessible to many Mac users (and will eventually be the demise of the old Dashboard view in OS X).

At the top of Notification Center, you can click on Notifications to switch out of Today view and into Notifications view. There, you have a list of updates and notifications from various apps, offering you a history of past messages, emails, and social media notifications, among other things. As before, you can control the way different apps deliver notifications, and whether they appear in Notification Center at all, within System Preferences.

As of now, there's nothing tricky or hidden about Notification Center in Yosemite's beta. It's a hub for information about your day, and for app notifications. But with the addition of Today view, Notification Center will become an OS X feature you'll want to use far more than before—especially once we can add third party widgets to the experience.