Notification Center

The new Notification Center in Yosemite is great. It’s split into two simple views, "Today" for your widgets and "Notifications" for, well, your notifications. The latter works basically as it has since Mavericks: you can reply to some pop-up notifications inline, and everything is aggregated into app buckets with a small "x" button to clear them.

But the big new change is the addition of widgets in the Today view. Instead of being scurried away in the ill-fated Dashboard space, they’re now available in a single, scrollable pane on the right hand side of your screen. It’s the same basic idea as the widgets that are coming to Notification Center in iOS 8, and they’re wildly more useful than I expected them to be.

Apple has created a few default widgets for you to use (in Apple’s parlance, they’re actually called "Extensions"). There’s a basic "Today" view that shows the weather and upcoming appointments, a great little calendar view, a world clock, weather, and even a calculator. More will come when third-party developers are able to release them in the App Store, and you can manage them with a simple drag and drop.

Spotlight

Apple’s search tool now appears smack in the middle of the screen as a big, pop-up search box. We’ve seen this interface before — both Alfred and LaunchBar do the same thing — and it’s a much better user experience than the old menu-style drop-down, giving Apple more space to present detailed search results.

In addition to showing full previews of a file you’re hunting down, Spotlight can show you some intelligent web results for certain searches. If you type a name that you don’t have in your contacts, for example, you can get a tiny Wikipedia preview. You can grab movie showtimes, maps, and even recent news results. Most of these little previews are interactive, too: if you search for a contact, you can email or call them right from Spotlight.

All those extra features are great, but sometimes Spotlight feels a little inconsistent. Yes, you can get information from the web, but searching for something like "Skype" is more likely to give you contact info and less likely to allow you to just open up Skype’s website. Spotlight is super powerful as an app launcher and for local search, but it’s not going to obviate launcher apps like Alfred and LaunchBar anytime soon — they still are more extensible and more powerful.

Safari

Safari is receiving its biggest visual overhaul in a long time. Apple has minimized the size of the toolbar, going to extremes to cut out visual clutter and leaving you with a view that cuts out tabs and bookmarks in favor of a simple address field and just a few buttons. Even the address bar has been simplified, showing only the top-level domain of the site you’re visiting until you click it.

But hidden beneath that sparse exterior is a lot of power. When you click on the address bar, you’ll see a small drop-down with your top bookmarks and most frequently visited sites. The autocomplete is also enhanced — in addition to history, bookmarks, and search results, you can also search Wikipedia, Maps, and iTunes, just like Spotlight. Safari’s Reader button has been moved to the left, thankfully distant from the page-refresh button, and there’s a condensed "add" button for bookmarks and your reading list.

Tabs get some attention, too. When you have a ton, you can now scroll through them horizontally — though unfortunately you still can’t "pin" them as you can in Chrome and Firefox. The "show all tabs" button is also much nicer — giving you grouped thumbnails of all your open tabs up top and a list of other tabs from your iCloud-connected devices underneath.

But the best thing about the new Safari is that it’s just stupid fast. I haven’t run it through a full suite of benchmarks, but in my day-to-day browsing it feels like it’s running circles around other browsers. I’ve been a Chrome user for some time now, but it’s increasingly hard to justify using it when Safari just feels this much better on OS X.

Other apps

Along with a slightly updated look, Mail gets access to a new cloud service called "Maildrop" which is an optional place to store large attachments for a month rather than email them directly. A new feature called "Markup" lets you annotate images and PDFs directly within the Mail app. It’s neat to draw circles and arrows, but the best part is that you can directly sign PDFs with the trackpad. Messages has a couple little features like the ability to rename group chats and send short voice messages. Both are nice, but probably not enough to convert you if you’re not already an iMessage user. One thing that might: you’ll be able to send regular old SMS texts once iOS 8 comes out.

The Calendar app finally has a proper day view, showing you more detail about what’s going on in your daily events in a side panel instead of in a pop-up. Plenty of other apps and settings have received tweaks, too: Facetime has been slightly redesigned, you have more granular control over sharing options throughout OS X, and there’s even a "dark mode" for the entire OS that should please photographers, video professionals, and goths.