A free OS upgrade is always a good thing, especially with performance and feature improvements. Your Mac will thank you for it.
Apple today announced that OS X El Capitan, the latest major release of their desktop operating system, will be rolling out as a free update to Mac users. Among the operating system’s new abilities are updates to its window management system and Spotlight search, and performance improvements that aim to make everyday activities like launching and switching apps, opening documents and accessing emails faster and more responsive. “El Capitan refines the Mac experience and improves performance in a lot of little ways that make a very big difference,” said said Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering.
The system’s Mission Control is now streamlined, making it easier to view and organize open applications on Mac. Swiping arranges all of these running apps in an interface that makes finding specific programs easier. The updates in Spotlight enables users to check information such as stock prices, weather conditions and forecasts, sports scores, schedules and standings, and even athlete information (although the latter is more relevant to US context.) This version of Spotlight now supports natural language queries for hunting down system files, such as “email from Pramod in June” or “the spreadsheet I worked on yesterday”, which definitely lends an added layer of convenience to the desktop experience.
There are updates in El Capitan’s built-in apps including the ability to pin sites in Safari to keep them always open, and muting the audio from a particular browser tab. On the email front, there are now Smart Suggestions, which recognise names or events in a Mail message and prompts adding them to contacts or the calendar with a single click. Borrowing from iOS is the ability to swipe to delete messages and organize emails while in full screen mode. In Photos, you can now edit locations, batch change descriptions, sort albums by date or title, and work with third-party editing extensions from your external developers.
The new Notes app in El Capitan now lets you drag and drop photos, PDFs, videos and other files into a note, and add content directly from other apps, such as Safari web links or Maps locations, using the Share menu. Reminiscent of Google Keep is the addition of checklists for individual list items, with your notes syncing to the cloud (iCloud in this case) so they get replicated across your Apple devices.
Finally system performance is also purportedly higher in El Capitan: Apple’s own internal testing has shown that Metal--Apple’s new graphics technology--accelerates core animation and core graphics to boost system-level rendering by up to 50 percent, and efficiency by up to 40 percent, resulting in faster graphics performance for everyday apps.
Look out for the upgrade heading to your Mac system starting today.
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