A Week With El Capitan, the Next Version of Mac OS X.
The latest version of Mac OS X, El Capitan, was named quite intentionally. Apple’s next big update for OS X is coming this fall, but we’ve already spent some time with the preview, and can share some initial impressions about OS X 10.11 El Capitan with you, dear reader.While El Capitan puts a needed focus on efficiency, Apple is still a hardware company, and its interest is in selling you new hardware, not in optimizing your older Macs. I’m starting out with something that may seem minor to many because it happens to be among my favorite new additions to OS X with the El Cap update: Notes. The native Notes app in OS X has long been a staple of mine for quick memos, thanks in large part to cross-platform syncing, but I often fall back to TextEdit for longer work because of the limitations of Notes as a more robust word processor.
We cover the watchOS 2 pending updates in some detail, too, and specifically address the new Time Travel and Complications features available to developers. El Capitan is a rock formation in Yosemite National Park, and the name is Apple’s signal that the new version is an incremental upgrade to the current one, not a massive overhaul—as Yosemite was last year. Now, Apple has added a lot of muscle to Notes in 10.11, turning into a much better competitor not only for other text editors, but for things like Evernote, too. Yosemite brought a completely new design, some big changes to the built-in apps, and a suite of features like Handoff and Continuity that made the Mac a much cleaner part of the Apple ecosystem. You can integrate images, PDFs, videos and other media right into notes via drag-and-drop insertion, for instance, and create checklists out of line-separated items with a single click.
The real-world El Capitan has an almost vertical rock face that only the most expert climbers can conquer, but the operating-system El Capitan presents an almost-flat learning curve for anyone who already uses OS X. Apple Music is just around the corner, too, and we reveal some details that many may have overlooked, given the focus of Apple’s official announcement. The only bumps on the trail are some new window-management features that take a few minutes to get used to, and even those bumps may get flattened by the time Apple releases a public beta in July. The only big design change is the new San Francisco font, originally designed for the Apple Watch, which lends a slightly cleaner and lighter look to the OS. (Very slightly.) In the week I’ve been using it, it’s begun changing a couple of habits—but the fact remains this is an update, not an overhaul. So I was excited when I heard that El Capitan will launch apps up to 1.4 times as fast and open PDFs up to four times as quickly as what we’re running now.
Folders keep things more organized, and thumbnails provide easy identification of what’s within a Note from the sidebar menu when you’re including media. El Capitan’s enhancements can be divided into four main categories: an improved Spotlight search with Siri-like natural-language abilities; new window-management conveniences; a completely overhauled Notes app with flexible features like those in Evernote and Microsoft’s OneNote, and new features in Safari, Maps, and Mail (including iOS-like gestures in Mail); and enhanced performance.
I’ve never used them before, because unless you’re watching a movie, there’s rarely a reason to have only one app visible. (Focusing is overrated.) But I do tend to use two apps side by side: Research and writing, maybe, or the NBA Finals and work I’m supposed to be doing. They default to splitting the screen evenly, but you can drag the slider in the middle to change the size. (It’s supposed to remember how you position certain apps and combinations, then automatically put them there when you go full-screen, but that hasn’t worked for me.) It’s a small thing—and exists in basically identical form on Windows, some Android tablets, and now the iPad—but it makes for a super-clean way to work. The enhanced Spotlight now responds to queries like “documents created in November,” “Yankees roster” or “weather tomorrow.” The same natural-language smarts are built into Mail’s search box, so you can search for “messages I ignored from Dave” or “messages with attachments from Colin” or “messages I replied to from Sean” (though “messages from Sean that I answered” doesn’t currently work). To access it, you either long-click on the little green circle that normally puts an app into full-screen mode, then select from one of your other open apps to pick what takes up the right side of the screen, or drag an app to an open one in Mission Control to have it occupy the other half of your display alongside the first. Unlike the new Notes app for iOS, however, you can’t draw notes with your finger, though via iCloud you can display any jottings from the iOS version of the app inside the El Capitan version.
Apple’s Craig Federighi, Apple senior vice president of Software Engineering, speaks about OS 10, El Capitan, during Apple WWDC on June 8, 2015 in San Francisco, California With El Capitan, this movement causes the cursor to magnify until it’s unmissable to even the most myopic. Public transit directions have been added to the Maps app, for London, San Francisco, Toronto and the New York City metropolitan areas, with more cities coming in the fall when El Capitan launches. El Capitan adds these features, but in a way that’s less annoying than Windows’ habit of snapping windows into new configurations when you don’t want them to. Apple is doing more to improve desktop management, making it easier to use Mission Control for managing your active apps and desktops from an eagle eye perspective.
Among the small but potentially handy niceties comes the ability to silence audio playing in the background in Safari without you having to embark on an expedition trying to figure out where the darn sound is coming from. You can now see everything in a single layer, meaning stuff won’t hide behind other open app windows, and locates things relative to their actual position on your working desktop. Google and the Linux community run ecosystems that don’t focus on needing new hardware to realize upgrades, which hasn’t really worked out for either of them.
It’s a subtle change though if you look closely you can see differences – the capital I is no longer the same height as lower case L, for instance, which is clearer, especially in words like “Illumination”. You can also now drag and drop full-screen spaces on one another to enter Split View, as mentioned, and swipe with three fingers to get your overview, and to move between spaces. Google has found that phone makers just don’t bother to offer timely Android upgrades because they’d rather sell new phones, and Linux has never gotten any real traction in the consumer PC market, in part because it’s no impetus for selling new, powerful PCs. (Linux has done much better in the server realm, where vendors make profit on service contracts as much as hardware.) For a company like Apple, which profits by selling PCs and phones, hardware and software have to move in sync. Drag one app window, then a second app window, into a thumbnail, and you get a split-screen desktop containing both apps, with a drag-able border between them that lets you change their relative sizes. Apple needs to stop people like me, and prevent the syndrome John Dvorak once described as “having a Ferrari idling in the driveway”—having no software that requires the latest hardware.
I’m speaking of the under-the-hood graphics technology Apple is pitching to developers called Metal, which arrives on the Mac after debuting last year on iOS. Multi-tasking is nothing new on a Mac, and Windows had a similar feature in the past, but this is more elegantly done and is a useful precursor for a comparable feature due in the autumn for the iPad Air 2. The Spotlight search function is improved, fixing little gripes along the way: in the previous version you couldn’t resize the search window; now you can. In Mail and in Finder, you can do the craziest searches you can think of: Emails from Anna from April that have attachments or PowerPoints from 2013 with Richard in the title. And the company is letting you use natural language searches via Spotlight or in the Mail app, along the lines of, “show me the unread email from Brian in February.” But you have to type in such queries.
And they work! (Of course, few beyond Mac loyalists use Mail all that much.) As Apple continues making the iPad more like a real computer, supporting keyboards, multitasking, and an on-screen trackpad, it’s taking the Mac up another notch. That’s too bad — one of the things I’m most excited about when Microsoft launches Windows 10 next month is that the obedient voice assistant Cortana is coming to PCs. One useful feature lets you select some text, click on the Font button in the toolbar and convert the text into a checklist, with open circles next to each item; click on the circle when you’re ready to mark the item as done. Sport is also an area where Spotlight is smarter than the average Yosemite bear, featuring more information, stats and logos, showing when a team is playing, who’s on the team and more. But making it manipulable like a regular window is probably going to work a lot better for users looking to integrate it into their existing workflow.
A toolbar button leads to a tabbed browser that displays all the photos, videos, sketches, maps, web links, audio, and documents that you’ve attached to your notes, so you don’t need to navigate to the right note to find the item you’re looking for—you just choose it from the browser. This welcome split screen feature may be new to the Mac but is old hat to folks accustomed to using the Microsoft Windows “snap” feature, which launched back with Windows 7 in 2009.
Spotlight is a great example of how Apple is taking improvements it made in the last couple releases of OS X and refining them to really expand on their existing momentum and potential. If you add a link using the OS X Share Sheet (that button you use constantly in iOS to move data between apps but probably never think about on the Mac), it’ll format neatly and append to the bottom of a note. Safari in El Cap lets you pin sites for easy access (and to keep them getting lost among your millions of other tabs), for instance, mute playing audio and stream content to AirPlay devices. Tabs that play sounds get a mute button (resembling a hidden feature in Chrome), and you can mute multiple tabs by clicking on a mute icon in the search bar.
If you’re not quite in need of everything Evernote offers and just want to keep your shopping list and vacation plans synced to your phone, it easily does the job. Pinning them in the upcoming release of Safari means they always remain ordered in the left side of your tab bar, and that they remain open and run in the BG for fresh updates.
But that’s a weekend-long project—backing everything up, re-installing all the applications from scratch, trying to find our Microsoft Office license key, all of that. Improved intelligence in the message-reading window now lets you click a button to create a calendar event when a message mentions a meeting, flight, dinner, or anything else that looks like an event that you might want to schedule. So if a friend says they’re arriving on the British Airways 286 in the body of an email, the system is clever enough to connect you with the latest flight status information and confirm the airport and terminal. Maps gets transit information that’s better-presented than similar information in Google Maps, but limited to a small number of cities in the western hemisphere—though 300 cities in China are already included. It’s supposed to understand trending subjects, so when I type “steph” while the Finals are on, it should show Steph Curry’s box score—right now it doesn’t.
It doesn’t do much of anything intelligent or context-aware, but I’m told those are just beta problems, and when the servers flick on for good you’ll see it there. Mail has never really had any serious challengers from third-party email applications on OS X in my opinion, but these additions go a long way to making it a more comfortable place to manage your communications.
In addition, Apple is talking about a new software technology called Metal that will make more efficient use of GPU processing power for faster drawing and more detailed games, though you won’t see the effects until developers incorporate Metal into their software. The absolute best thing about are the performance enhancements, which sound great—40 percent improvement in rendering efficiency! 10 times faster draw call performance!—but are hard to evaluate on the super-high-end, 15-inch MacBook Pro Apple lent me to test the early version. Schedules are included, too, letting you specify when in the future you want to leave and providing approximate arrival and departure time for buses and trains along the way. Yosemite and iOS 8 changed the system font from the long-established Lucida Grande font to a typeface called Helvetica Neue that suffers from a kind of hipster cool that makes it boring and characterless to look at to look at. This is actually huge, since it means that third-party developers can build additional tools for Photos to make it a much more flexible and robust image editing stool.
For example, when it displays the time (as in 10:23), the colon is raised slightly so it’s vertically centered between the two numbers, but when the same font displays text, the colon takes its normal position on the same baseline with letters. These are available via the Mac App Store, and can be plug-ins thrown in with full standalone apps, or simple extensions that live entirely in Photos itself.
If your computer suddenly starts playing music, from an advert on a page, say, it can take time to track down which page is revealing to the rest of the office that you’re connected to something non-work-related. Extensions could bring some of the missing pieces to the app that users were looking for in Photos as a replacement to Aperture, but it’s more likely going to just expand the ready-to-hand quick edit options for more general users.
The first thing I do after installing El Capitan and Yosemite is go to System Preferences, open the General tab, and, next to Appearance, replace Blue with Graphite. Improvements include faster launching across apps (not just for Photos) and better switching before apps, as well as improved performance around PDFs and email.
If it’s anything like the public beta of Yosemite last year, it should be stable enough for moderately fearless users to install on their working machines. That could suggest more future Macs that share common design inspiration with the new MacBook: peppier performance on the software side allows for a lot more hardware efficiency. Apple’s “foundation” year in its platform software could be the best year for users of its notebook and desktop computers, given the smart additions the preview already holds for OS X’s most-used and most potential-filled apps and capabilities.