Just a month after the first Developer Preview was released at the Worldwide Developer's Conference, Apple's
OS X 10.10 Yosemite is already starting to show up in significant numbers in general Mac web traffic statistics. While 0.2 percent may not seem like a lot, it is four times higher than the percentage seen by the last major OS X upgrade, Mavericks, at the same point in its pre-release state. New features and better integration between iOS and OS X appears to be driving adoption.
The data comes from Chitika, a mobile advertising and app analysis firm that measured ad impressions generated by apps running on the first two betas of Yosemite. The initial spike in usage was matched two weeks later when the second beta was released. A third has
since been issued, but is not covered in the dates Chitika selected for its survey.
The adoption numbers broadly translate to developer excitement about building updates to existing apps and new apps to take advantage of the new technologies featured in Yosemite. One of the most promising is called "Handoff," which allows OS X and iOS devices to be aware of what applications the user is using on other device, and if a corresponding app exists on the other (such as Mail, Safari or Pages for example), a small icon on the lock screen of an iOS device or on the dock of a Macintosh lets the user instantly pick up where they left off on the other device.
Other features of interest to developers in Yosemite include Spotlight results integration, the moving of "widgets" to the Notification Center, the forthcoming iCloud Drive expansion that will allow users to store and sync any sort of document to iCloud, and improvements to iMessage that allow Macs to make and receive relayed phone calls and messages, not to mention the newly-upgraded Swift programming language that promises to make future development for both platforms more efficient.
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