Right on the heels of iOS 9 and the iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus, Apple is ready to release the latest version of OS X for the Mac.
With OS X El Capitan, which will be officially available for download on Wednesday, Sept. 30, Apple is refining what made OS X Yosemite such a successful release.
Last year, OS X Yosemite was a major release. Yosemite gave the Mac the same kind of visual overhaul iOS received back in 2013 with iOS 7 and furthered the integration between the two operating systems.
The analogy isn't perfect — there are certainly new features in El Capitan — but even the naming convention (El Capitan is a mountain in Yosemite) makes it clear that this is a release really focused on making OS X better than ever, rather than simply being new and shiny.In a lot of ways, El Capitan reminds me of Mac OS X Snow Leopard — the first time Apple aimed to not add more features to the OS, but to work on refining what was happening under the hood.The look and feel
As Mashable Chief Correspondent Lance Ulanoff discussed in his hands-on earlier this summer, many of the visual differences between Yosemite and El Capitan are subtle. So subtle, in fact, that at first glance you might miss them.
Still, there are some visual differences beyond just the new default background.
For starters, El Capitan uses Apple's new system font, San Francisco. San Francisco made its debut on the Apple Watch and is also part of iOS 9.
San Francisco replaces Helvetica Neue on the Mac — itself a recent addition with OS X Yosemite. Apple says it designed San Francisco to be used on all Apple devices and on the Mac, it has been finely tuned for the bigger screen.
As with Helvetica Neue, San Francisco really looks great on a Retina display. Still, in my testing on my MacBook Air, the font looks good.
Apple also designed a new Chinese system font and includes new Japanese fonts too.
Better window management
Perhaps the biggest new feature — from a user perspective — coming to El Capitan is the improved window management.
I've always had a bit of a love/hate relationship with the way Apple handles window management by default. I tend to have lots of apps open at once and although Spaces (Apple's term for virtual desktops) has made it easy to keep different "screens" full of apps, something simple like having two apps appear full screen side-by-side has required a third-party app.
No more. With El Capitan, Apple is introducing a new mode called Split View, that allows users to easily have two full-screen windows open side-by-side at once. To activate split view, click and hold the green window indicator on an app and move your application to the left or right.
Then select another open app on your desktop to fill the space.
You can adjust how much space you want each app to take on the screen — which is useful if you want to have more room to type or browse the web but still want to keep a site or email client open
You can also create new Split View windows by dragging apps to the Spaces bar.
Mission Control — Apple's tool for seeing all open apps on your screen — now makes it easy to see what Spaces are open at any given time. Swiping up with three fingers shows not only what apps are open in your current desktop, but what other desktop Spaces are being used too.
The Spaces bar being visible just above Mission Control makes using Spaces even better.
It's worth noting that Split View works almost identically to how it works in iOS 9 on the iPad Air 2 and the upcoming iPad Pro. This strikes me as important, because
Not all apps will work in Split View — it's up for the individual app and developer to support. All the core OS X apps work, of course, and nearly every third-party app I use worked, with the exception of my Twitter client of choice. In fairness, that app wasn't designed to support the full-screen mode in OS X anyway.it's slowly but surely closing that chasm between iOS 9 and OS X.
The improved windows management in El Capitan will make it easier for people who switch from Windows to OS X and back, and for power users to get the most out of the Mac desktop.
Spotlight improvements
If you've never used Spotlight, you're missing out on one of the best ways to find anything on your Mac. Click the spotlight icon on the system bar — or press Command-Space — top open up the search window. Start typing in a name of a document or file to get real-time, fast searching across your drives, networks and apps.
Last year with Yosemite, Apple overhauled its venerable (and awesome) Spotlight full-system search, adding in the ability to pull up Siri-like data from the web, including news headlines, Wikipedia articles and basic sports information.
Apple has added even more information to Spotlight in El Capitan, adding support for stock lookup, enhanced weather forecasts, web video searches and transit directions.
Spotlight also now lets you use natural language to find files. You can type in "photos taken in June" to get access to those photos or "review document I started Friday" to zero in on what you want.
This type of natural language support is something Apple has been adding to iOS and OS X over the last few years, first with Calendar and Mail and now with Spotlight. It adds a lot to the experience.
Now you can also adjust the size of the Spotlight menu and move it around.
App updates
A lot of the core apps in OS X get updates in El Capitan. Many of these changes may look familiar because they are similar to additions that came via iOS 9.
Notes
Notes got a big overhaul in iOS 9 and those new features are now in El Capitan, including support for images, PDFs, videos and other files. You can also put drawings, maps and checklists directly to the note.
The new Notes app also supports headings and more rich-text like features. You can also save to notes from apps such as Safari, Maps, Pages, Numbers, Keynote and other apps. The upgrade places Notes in a nice middle ground between the old, sparse version and something super robust (sometimes too robust) like Evernote.
Being able to add an email, URL or document to an existing note quickly is something that will make the way I work much faster.
Photos
The Photos app was released last spring as a total overhaul of iPhoto. The big addition with El Capitan is that Photos now supports editing extensions. Think of these extensions as adding in a little bit more finesse and some extra features to the Photos experience, but without making you open up a separate app.
Extensions can be bundled with other apps or on their own and are available in the Mac App Store.
Maps
The stand-alone mapping app in OS X now has transit directions. It's about time. Transit is powered by the same tools that power transit on iOS 9. This means that if you're in the U.S. or a major European city (like London), you're probably good.
If you live in Croatia, the update might not be quite as good.
The best part about transit directions being part of El Capitan is that you can get real-time reminders about when you need to leave, based on the location of calendar events.
You can also send directions easily to the iPhone or Apple Watch. As someone who seemingly looks up directions 200 times a day, I love that I can just fling the transit directions to my watch or iPhone.
Safari
Safari get a lot of improvements to the way it handles tabs. Just like in Chrome, you can now pin tabs. Pinned sites stick around after you close your browser. If you want a pinned tab to go away, just unpin it.
Also like Chrome, it's easy to find out if a tab is playing music (there is an icon), and it's easy to mute a tab playing audio.
And in a final Chrome-like gesture, you can now AirPlay video from a webpage directly to your Apple TV without having to send the whole desktop. This isn't exactly like Chrome's casting functionality, but it's close enough in practice and can be really useful if you just want to show a video and don't want the whole world to know you have a photo of Taylor Swift as your desktop background.
Safari gets some of the Spotlight improvements, including improved weather info and sports scores, which appear directly in the search bar.
The swipe gestures introduced in Mail on iOS 8 (Trash, Flag, etc.) are now in El Capitan.
El Capitan also has better full-screen mode for Mail, making it easier to see and compose messages on the big screen.
The feature I love most is the ability to use tabs in Mail. A single compose window now can have multiple tabs so you can see all of your open drafts at once.
As with iOS 9, Mail on El Capitan can show suggested contact info — including a new phone number or email address — so you can update a contact card quickly and easily. It also helps anticipate events even without an attached calendar invite.
Under the hood
A lot of what's new in El Capitan is actually under the hood. Apple has moved its Core Animation and Core Graphics libraries from using OpenGL to using Metal. First introduced with iOS 8, Metal is a new set of technologies that allows apps to have even greater access to the CPU and GPU, meaning graphics performance should improve.
In the past, apps had to be abstracted for OpenGL and OpenCL. Metal is a unified runtime API built on C++ and it lets developers access both GPU and compute features at once. This is important because before, developers had to optimize for the CPU and for the GPU.
Metal is also designed for multithreading (unlike OpenGL), and it's optimized for Intel's multi-core processors. This is potentially a big deal — not just for game makers, but for all app developers.
Apple says that both Unity and Unreal are adding in support for Metal to their game engines, which should mean we could see some great improvements to gaming on the Mac in the coming months.
Adobe is working on bringing Metal support to After Effects CC and other CC apps in the future.But if we're honest, the Mac has never been known as a gaming platform. It is, however, known as a great platform for professional video, graphics and audio tools.
When Adobe added OpenGL and OpenCL support for OS X a few years ago, it resulted in some fantastic leaps in performance. Having even more complete access to the GPU and CPU should yield even better performance.
But it's not just pro apps and games. Because Core Animation and Core Graphics are now based on Metal, regular apps — and built-in functions — should perform better too.
Apple says opening PDFs — especially large and complex PDFs — is now four times faster in El Capitan than it was in Yosemite. Switching apps is now up to twice as fast, and apps launch 40% faster.
Metal doesn't work on every Mac. You need at least a MacBook Pro or MacBook Air from mid-2012, a late-2012 iMac, a late-2012 Mac mini or a late-2013 Mac Pro (or newer).
In my tests, mail and PDFs certainly seemed faster in El Capitan. I use a 2014 MacBook Air at work and a late-2013 15-inch MacBook Pro at home. Especially on the MacBook Air, which has less power, I noticed performance improvements.
Other tidbits
Boot Camp now natively supports Windows 10, if you're into that kind of thing. The battery improvements from OS X Yosemite are also here in El Capitan, so you should expect the same battery life as before.
Every Mac that ran Yosemite should run El Capitan. This means you can go all the way back to 2007 for the MacBook Pro or iMac, 2008 for the MacBook Air, 2009 for the Mac mini and early 2008 for the Mac Pro.
You can upgrade from OS X 10.6.8 or later via the Mac App Store — but most users will probably just be coming straight from Yosemite.
Final thoughts
El Capitan isn't the most exciting OS X release, but it really doesn't have to be.
The core improvements are there and they're great. Built-in apps work better than before, window management has improved dramatically, and the new system font has a nice new look.
This is a great upgrade for OS X users. Much like iOS 9 made the iPhone better, El Capitan makes the Mac better.
It is interesting to see how similar iOS 9 and OS X El Capitan have become. At this point, the experiences feel very much the same — it's the execution that is different.
With the iPad Pro launching next month, I can't help but wonder what that means for the future of the Mac. The two OS worlds are merging, but in a way that I think plays to the strengths of both platforms.
OS X El Capitan is free for Mac owners and will be available on Wednesday on the Mac App Store.
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