There’s a Find My Friends widget now (sorry if that’s one of the apps your’ve been judiciously hiding in iOS).
Advertisement
Under Split View, two apps can be adjusted to run side-by-side, removing the need to resize the windows yourself, a feature that will be familiar to Windows users under the name Snap. In El Capitan, you can, if you prefer, have those keystrokes open your various open tabs instead. You then choose whether you’d like to position it on the left or right of the screen with the help of a blue veil. It’s a handy feature – if you know what clip you’re looking for; because you only get one to hit for videos, it’s better if you know the title of the video you want to see, instead of searching by topic. I’m not insane that it ends up sniping a few screen real estate from me (it hosts pinned tabs in a bar up top), but I like not having to open the same set of windows ever day, and cursing at myself when I accidentally shut one of them down after clearing out a series of open tabs. Speaking of the inbox, the new Mail app borrows a few touch gestures from iOS, including swiping left on the trackpad to delete, and swiping right to mark as unread. It shrinks all of your open windows to miniatures, all simultaneously visible.
Spotlight has been given a decent overhaul in El Capitan to return more relevant and accurate results than in the past, including natural language search recognition. 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”. And that includes your Mac. 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. Just like iOS did before it, OS X has switched to Apple’s own Metal engine, relegating the aging OpenGL to backup duty. The system prompts you to lock that window to one side of the screen, then put another next to it. Locking my Web-based email next to the Calendar app has saved tons of time I used to spend toggling back and forth between the apps or trying to arrange them manually. Mail is also better, with swipeable messages (again like iOS) and an improved full screen mode. The Notes app on iPhones and iPads got a comparable update, and your notes sync across Apple devices.
OS X El Capitan is a free upgrade that users can install at home through the Mac App Store.
If the video you’re watching is playing in the same browser, the audio for that will mute, too.
Apple has also turned a spotlight on its methods of organising your pictures.
There’s much more that’s changed in El Capitan, much of it stuff that you’ll happen upon as you go. The only downside with pinned tabs is that you don’t see in-browser notifications for sites like Facebook. Now you can see them quickly and manage their order and what’s on them easily. Into the Spotlight search bar, you can now type search terms for weather, sports, stocks, athletes, public transportation, and online videos. Games in particular have always been an issue for Macs, particularly since most of Apple’s machines use graphics processors intended for laptops rather than dedicated gaming rigs.
It keeps a small icon locked to the left of the screen, and any link opened within a pinned tab gets a new window.
Anything you’re about to make major changes to your Mac, you need to back up your data.
Most of Apple’s built-in apps for OS X have also been tweaked here and there.
Advertisement
The Notes app has traditionally been little more than a word-processing app. Now, it’s possible to drag in photos, add map locations and create checklists. Notes is more than just a raw text box. You can do this from the desktop (click and hold the green full-screen button) or Mission Control, which now has a cleaner design and a simpler process for creating new spaces – just drag a window to the top of the screen. Updates to the share menus in other apps allow you to push content directly to a new note. iCloud keeps things synchronized across devices, though there’s still no multi-platform support as, say, Evernote offers. But it’s finally catching up to Google Maps now that it has public transit directions built into the El Capitan version. Choose your disk (or partition) from the list that appears, verify that you’d like to have the disk (or partition) erased, and then wait for the files to copy over.
