Apple's Craig Federighi shows off the next version of Mac OS X at the company's WWDC in San Francisco. Mac OS X Yosemite brings a whole new design that puts search front and center. The new OS version will be officially released in the fall as a free download.



Apple has done away with gradients and textures in favor of flatter icons and windows as well as plenty of translucency. If you're familiar with iOS 7 you will feel right at home. Elements like the dock, title bars, Finder menus and sidebars are now translucent, adjusting their color temperature based on a user's selected background. There is also a new, "dark mode" that dims the entire interface to place the focus on the content. Apple appears to be taking on Dropbox head on with iCloud Drive, which brings all files stored in a user's iCloud account into folders accesible through Finder. Each app you use with iCloud Drive gets its own folder or you can can just drop files and folders and have them sync to the cloud a la Dropbox. iCloud Drive files will sync across Macs and even Windows PCs.

Mail and Safari are getting a stripped down look and some new features to go with it. Most notably for the former is MailDrop. Basically you can now send large attachments up to 5GB in size through iCloud Drive. If the recipient is using Apple Mail he'll see the files as regular attachments or if they're on another client they'll get a secure link to them. This all happens automatically with large files so no need to attach with MailDrop manually. Also new in Mail is an annotation tool called Markup -- much like Evernote's Skitch and many other screen grabbing tools -- that lets you jot down notes on top of pictures or PDFs before sending them. Markup is smart enough to recognize hand drawn arrows and speech bubbles to make them look nicer.

Apple saved arguably the best bits of Yosemite for last, announcing that AirDrop between OS X and iOS is finally supported for seamlessly transferring files, and a new feature called Handoff that let's you start working on your desktop and pick up where you left off on your smartphone. That works for iWork documents, emails, messages (now including SMS) and even phone calls. Craig Federighi offered a quick demo by calling Dr. Dre from the Mac on stage, using his iPhone as a relay, and welcoming him to the Apple family. This works even if your phone is across the house (assumingly via Wi-Fi). Incoming calls show up through Notification Center, complete with caller ID information, so you pick up calls from your Mac, too.