At the Worldwide Developers Conference 2015 today Apple unveiled OS X El Capitan, the new operating system succeeds OS X Yosemite which was released last year. The company revealed that over 55 percent of all Mac users are now running Yosemite and this happens to be the fastest adoption rate for any PC operating system.
The improvements in El Capitan are really focused on two core factors: experience and performance. At a glance the new OS brings a more powerful Spotlight, built-in app enhancements and window management advancements.
The OS X El Capitan demonstration on stage at WWDC 2015 started off with improvements made to native applications. There are new gestures in the OS which will allow users to mark new email read in the Mail app by simply swiping right.
In Safari, users can pin websites by dragging them to the left edge of the tab bar. Pinned websites will always remain in the tab bar even if new tabs are opened. Safari will also display right in the tab bar if a tab is playing audio and allow users to mute it from there.
Apple has made major improvements to Spotlight in OS X El Capitan, it’s more powerful and useful than ever before. Users can resize the Spotlight panel and move it around as per their needs. It brings a much more powerful search experience which simply lets users search for items in their own words, for example you can search for “documents I worked on last June” and Spotlight will display the relevant results. This powerful new search also works in other native applications such as Mail and even Finder.
Window Management is a major area of focus for Apple with OS X El Capitan, the new OS makes mission control smoother, simpler and faster than ever. For the first time OS X makes it very easy to work with multiple windows side-by-side. Clicking on the button in a window will prompt users where they want to position the second window and can then drag and drop things like links and text across windows.
The side-by-side windows can be resized, even the expose feature can be used in the second window. It’s easier to launch windows in full screen, users simply need to drag it into the space bar. A window can even be sent directly into its own desktop by simply dropping it on a new desktop in the space bar. These improvements really will take productivity to a whole new level on OS X.
The company has also focused on performance in this update, it says that performance has been optimized across the entire system. It claims that OS X El Capitan is 1.4x faster in app launching, 2x faster in switching apps, 2x faster in fetching first Mail messages and a whopping 4x faster in opening PDF in Preview.
Apple confirmed that OS X El Capitan will enter public beta next month, and that it will be rolled out for all users with supported Mac machines as a free upgrade later this year in the fall.
Filed in . Read more about OS X El Capitan and Wwdc 2015.