WWDC 2014: You can now receive SMS texts and calls on your Mac

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Apple began its 2014 Worldwide Developers Conference with the announcement of Mac OS X Yosemite and continued on to talk about ... continuity.

"It starts with AirDrop - it now works between iOS and the Mac," Craig Federighi, Senior Vice President of Software Engineering at Apple explained.

AirDrop makes transitions between iOS and Mac seamless while Handoff helps your devices see each other using proximity awareness; you can to swipe up from a Mac or iPad and see the info from one device and "hand it off" to another.

The new lock screen icon on the lower left allows you to swipe up and keep working on your iPad in real-time to do things like compose emails on a Mac and finish it off on an iPad, or complete the last bits of a Keynote presentation on an iPhone and hand it over to the Mac for a presentation.

Another new feature is Instant Hotspot, for automatic configuration by close proximity, or recognized devices.

Using your Mac as a phone?

The Mac can now accept calls, show messages and even use the Mac as a speakerphone. This works when the phone is in another part of the house too - and you can even dial phones too.

The Mac is basically now very, very aware of what you're doing on the phone and uses its capabilities too.

To demonstrate, Federighi called Dr. Dre, of the recently acquired Beats company to welcome him during the conference.

iMessages gets upgraded too

Federighi also noted that "the next thing we wanted to handle was SMS."

More specifically, your SMS and other non-iMessage messages can now sync across all of your Apple devices and you will now be able to make and receives calls from your Mac running the new OS X Yosemite operating system.

"We love iMessage, but we have these green bubble friends. You know they have inferior devices."

• Safari's better now too!

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