Of all the announcements at Apple’s developer conference, I think the OS X Mavericks one caught my interest the most.  Yes, all day battery life in the MacBook Air is very welcome, but I can’t upgrade my Air yet.  The Mac Pro announcement was long overdue.  IOS7 is a work in progress with not much value added to meet my eyes.  iWork on the web?  Yawn.  Nobody is even mentioning the Time Machine in the Air Express.  But the updated operating system?  There might be something I can use in there.

Finder Tabs looks very useful.  Instead of having a multitude of mishmash Finder windows minimized in my icon bar, the plan is to put them in tabs like multiple browser windows.  This might be useful, especially with the ability to move files from one tab to another by dragging and dropping.

Tags sounds like it has good potential, especially for people who use iCloud.  See, there’s no file system in the iCloud.  Files in iCloud are very app dependent, which is a problem for cross-app files and for finding things on a laptop or desktop platform.  iCloud is useless to me for files, because it takes an all or nothing approach, and I have too much of all to be able to use iCloud without paying Apple for storage, and I have too many other options to be able to justify that, so I sync iCal and the one or two other Apple apps I can’t sync any other way, and that’s it.  Which means Tags probably won’t be useful to me, either, but it seems to offer possibilities.

The ability to use iBooks on a laptop or desktop computer is long, long overdue, but at least Apple has finally made that possible now.  Could it even help iBooks to be a relevant ebook platform?  Not for me it won’t.

Will the supposed improved scrolling and under the hood performance serve my needs?  Hard to say.  Will it run on my late 2008 Mac Mini?  Not really a relevant question, since I plan to upgrade the machine around Christmas time.  The addition of the new Mac Pro has made that a question of whether I’ll choose a higher end Mac Mini or a lower end Mac Pro.  The information on the Mac Pro is too sketchy to say at this point, and I haven’t heard if Apple will upgrade the Mac Mini series this fall or not.

I’m currently running Snow Leopard on my Mini and Lion on my Air.  Mavericks looks interesting.