This is an improvement you only really notice when you use a computer without this tech – it seems to really drag. Now you can opt to hide the menu bar at the top of the display in the same way, giving you a completely clean view of your desktop. There’s a Find My Friends widget now (sorry if that’s one of the apps your’ve been judiciously hiding in iOS). Window management is becoming easier. In El Capitan, you can, if you prefer, have those keystrokes open your various open tabs instead. If you have a MacBook with one of the new “force touch” trackpads, there’s a new option in System Preferences that lets you click completely silently.
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Afterwards you’re presented with the other open apps to choose for your second window, and once selected the two windows will be split down the centre of the screen. Another might be for goofing off. If you’re on a laptop, it’s easy to switch by swiping three fingers on the touchpad left or right. You must supply your own copy of Windows. Spotlight search can now be moved and enlarged and responds to natural language searches such as “files I worked on in March” or “email I sent to Alex about adblocking” – which sounds great, but in practice just skips out a bit of syntax such as “subject: adblocking”. Click it to shut up all browser windows (while preserving sound from the rest of your Mac, like alert tones and your music player).
Spotlight is also pretty handy, now. Typing colloquial commands was a pleasant departure from inputting more formulaic searches like “is: XXX”, “from: XXX” or “filename:XXX” within programs like Gmail, though it did struggle with slightly more complicated requests. Full-screen Mac Mail is now easier to use with compose windows that minimise to the bottom of the screen and stack in tabbed windows.
A four finger swipe up on the desktop meanwhile reveals your available desktops if you are full screening apps, and then lets you access the new spilt screen feature so you can run two full screen apps on the same screen at the same time. And you can search for emails using natural language such as “emails I wrote last week”. You can do this either in the Updates section of the App Store or through Software Update in the Apple menu. In toying with it, I can see myself relying on it for those times I’m in San Francisco or New York.
Apple has also turned a spotlight on its methods of organising your pictures.
A pin is like a bookmark on Apple’s Safari browser, except the website you’re pinning is always open and refreshing in the background. Spotlight, though, continues to become more useful-and more like Siri. I can’t see why you wouldn’t upgrade, although maybe wait and see whether any bugs pop up before updating your main machine.
The Notes app in OS X has been updated to match the new Notes application in iOS 9. You can add photos, links, PDFs, videos, map locations, Pages documents, Numbers spreadsheets, Keynote presentations or audio files to Notes. (See how these things are coming together?) It’s not just an app for taking notes in meetings, it’s a hub for everything. You can quickly search for images dropped into Notes by clicking on the Attachments browser button, or create to-do lists using the Checklists button.
For a small but growing number of users the simplicity, security and efficiency of iOS has already superseded OS X; PC sales have cratered in the last decade, which is hardly coincidental, and while Apple has constantly outperformed the industry on that score, it’s harder now to see an iPad (or even a phone) as a “consumption” device you’d take on a trip, with your “work” laptop nestled by its side.
Apple Maps gains public transport directions, mirroring iOS 9. You use other devices, but you increasingly expect the rest of the world to look like your iPhone. Metal, Apple’s graphics-enhancing software suite that it created for iOS 8, now works on the Mac too-that means power-user apps like Adobe After Effects and any of the 12 decent games that support Macs can run better, but it also means developers will have an easier time moving their games from iOS to Mac and vice-versa.
And perhaps the biggest innovation to the mouse cursor since the birth of the mouse cursor appears in El Capitan: If you lose track of the little pointer, shake it and it will enlarge.
Back in February, before Apple was even talking about OS X El Capitan to the public, the company released a major update to iPhoto.
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Not only does it tell you which train station and entrance you need, but Maps also lets you schedule trips via mass transit for the future.
