OS X 10.11 El Capitan To Be Yosemite’s Snow Leopard

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Apple announced Monday at the World Wide Developer’s Conference that Version 10.11 of OS X will be called El Capitan, and will refine the Mac experience that’s struggled a bit in OS X 10.10 Yosemite and improves system performance. Building on last years Yosemite release, El Capitan introduces enhancements to window management, built-in apps and Spotlight search, and according to Apple makes everyday activities from launching apps to accessing email faster and more responsive. Metal, Apple’s newest graphics technology, is integrated into El Capitan, and claimed to deliver system-wide performance gains and enabling games and pro apps to tap into the full power of Mac graphics processors.

Photo Courtesy Apple

“OS X delivers unparalleled integration between Mac hardware, iOS devices, apps and online services, and has helped Mac sales outpace the PC industry every year for the last decade,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering. “Customers loved last year’s landmark OS X Yosemite release and made it the fastest-adopted PC operating system ever. With El Capitan, we’re further refining the Mac experience with enhancements to window management, Spotlight and built-in apps, and improving performance so everyday activities from launching apps to accessing email are faster and more responsive.”

Refinements to the Mac Experience

OS X El Capitan refinements begin with the new system font, San Francisco, a modern and easy-to-read typeface optimized for the Retina display. Mission Control, the quickest way to view all open windows, has a cleaner design so you can find the window you need even faster. When your desktop gets crowded, you can simply drag a window to the top of your screen to access the new Spaces Bar in Mission Control and create a new Space, OS X’s intuitive way to group applications. And, the new Split View feature (which is shared in iOS 9 for the iPad Air 2) automatically positions two app windows side-by-side in full screen so you can work with both apps without distraction.

Built-in apps are touted as more streamlined in El Capitan. Safari now features Pinned Sites to keep your favorite websites open and active in your tab bar and a new mute button to quickly silence browser audio from any tab. Mail introduces Smart Suggestions, which recognizes names or events in a Mail message and prompts you to add them to your contacts or calendar with a single click. You can also now swipe to delete messages, just like in iOS, and juggle multiple emails while Mail is in full screen. In Photos, you can add locations to a single image or an entire Moment, and sort albums by date or title. Additionally, you’ll be able to download third-party editing extensions from the Mac App Store and access them directly within the Photos app.

With the new Notes app in El Capitan you can drag and drop photos, PDFs, videos and other files into notes, and add content directly from other apps, such as Safari or Maps, using the Share menu. Easy-to-create checklists help you keep track of important to-do items, and the new Attachments Browser organizes your attachments in one simple view, making it easy to find what youre looking for. With iCloud, your notes stay in sync across all your enabled devices.

Spotlight gets smarter in El Capitan, generating results for even more topics, including weather, stocks, sports, transit and web video. You can now resize the Spotlight window to display more results or move it anywhere on your desktop, and use natural language to find documents and files on your Mac based on when they were created or who you sent them to.

Improved System Performance

OS X El Capitan improves system performance across your Mac, making many of the things you do everyday faster and more responsive. Metal, Apples groundbreaking graphics technology, accelerates Core Animation and Core Graphics, and is claimed 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. Apple says Metal also takes full advantage of your CPU and GPU, delivering up to 10 times faster draw call performance for a richer, more fluid experience in games and pro apps.*

El Capitan also features enhanced international language support, including a new Chinese system font for both Traditional and Simplified, with 50,000 characters for crisp on-screen readability. Chinese keyboard input methods now offer regularly updated vocabulary lists and a smarter candidate window. El Capitan makes entering Japanese text faster by automatically transforming Hiragana into written Japanese and reducing the need to individually select and confirm word conversions. You can now also select the perfect font for your documents using four new Japanese typefaces.

The developer preview of OS X El Capitan is available to Mac Developer Program members starting immediately . Mac users can participate in the El Capitan Beta Program in July and download the final version for free from the Mac App Store this fall. Users interested in signing up for the public beta can visithttp://www.apple.com/osx/elcapitan-preview/ for more details.

*Testing conducted by Apple in May 2015 using 2.7 GHz Intel Core i5-based 13-inch MacBook Pro systems with 128GB of flash storage and 8GB of RAM. Tested with prerelease OS X v10.11. Not all features are available on all devices. Performance will vary based on system configuration, application workload and other factors.

**Testing conducted by Apple in May 2015 using 2.2 GHz Intel Core i7-based 15-inch MacBook Pro systems with 256GB of flash storage and 16GB of RAM. Tested with prerelease OS X v10.11. Not all features are available on all devices. Performance will vary based on system configuration, application workload and other factors.

For more information, visit:
http://www.apple.com/osx/elcapitan-preview/

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