Apple OS X El Capitan (10.11) for MAC – Features, Release Date & Everything Else you need to Know

OS X El Capitan is the next iteration of OS X which comes with the version 10.11 for the MAC Operating System. Apple has earlier announced about this new OS X EI Capitan and now it has unveiled that it will be made available for Mac OS devices from September 30. Apple is planning to launch this new Operating system in order to refine the experience and improve its performance by building on the features and design changes introduced with OS X Yosemite. Here are the features, release date and everything else you need to know about Apple’s awaiting OS X El Capitan for Mac OS.

What is OS X El Capitan?

Apple is going to unveil a new Operating system for Mac namely OS X EI Capitan, which is an improvised version of OS X Yosemite (version 10.10). The latest version of OS X EI Capitan is 10.11 for the Mac OS which is mostly designed to tweak, fix, and add minor features to the previous OS X Yosemite version 10.10. This new OS comes with splendid features, improved performance and OS X EI Capitan is all about refining or streamlining features present in Yosemite so as to ease your common actions. OS X EI Capitan comes with unique functionality, updated apps and refined search to Apple laptops and other desktop computers.

Features of OS X El Capitan

Apple mainly focused on two major areas with this new OS X EI Capitan. One is User experience and the other area is Performance. It has done much more improvements to the apps, window management, enhanced Spotlight Search, unique technology to launch apps in a faster way. With El Capitan, Apple focused on two major areas: user experience and performance. Here is the significant features of OS X EI Capitan that are explained in a detailed way. Have a look!

1. Significant performance improvements

The new OS completely focused on performance and system stability. According to the Apple company, the new OS EI Capitan is up to 1.4 times faster at launching apps than Yosemite. Also, it is two times faster at changing or switching between the apps. OS X EI Capitan seems to be pretty peppy compared to previous operating system Yosemite. The users who are currently running Yosemite on their Mac devices will be able to switch on to the new OS and run it on your old Yosemite OS.

In terms of performance, Apple has introduced a metal graphics technology that improves speeds across the Mac by increasing or boosting system-level graphics rendering. Graphics improvements and other enhancements make standard apps perform better and to see significant performance boosts for games and other pro apps. All these are the significant performance improvements made to the new OS X EI Capitan.

2. Enhanced Multi-Window Management

Apple has brought significant changes to the new OS X EI Capitan by an enhanced multi-window management. Improvement in windows management is one of the biggest changes brought by El Capitan for the Mac devices. Mainly, it focussed on two changes wherein one is mission control and the other is split view for multitasking.

Mission Control

• Mission Control is a new feature on OS X’s window management. Mission control comes with a facelift that streamlines the experience by giving better layout.
• Mission Control also provides easier access to desktop Spaces and full-screen apps.
• When you open multiple windows, it will not be overlapped rather they are displayed separately in order to easily find individual windows.

• To view all the currently running apps on your device, just hit F3 on Macs that displays all open apps on your Mac and also enables them to be placed in various spaces.
• It is easy to drag and drop a window to the top of the screen so as to create a new desktop space automatically instead of creating a new desktop to organize windows.
• It might be a slight change, but makes quite a difference for those who manages a lot of apps to complete their tasks just a bit quicker.
• There is a cleaner in Mission control that comes with a more streamlined design for quicker window organization.

Split View for Multitasking

Split View in EI Capitan makes it possible to run two different full-screen apps side-by-side so that each one takes up half of the display on the screen. Yosemite, the previous OS had the similar feature like OS X EI Capitan, but in Yosemite, you have to resize windows whereas Split View in El Capitan makes the process quicker as there is no need of resizing the app windows manually and change their positions on the screen.

• You can do this by taking a page from Microsoft Windows, you’ll be able to put two apps automatically side by side in full screen.
• Click and hold the green full-screen button in the upper left corner of the window so that you can drag the window to either side of your desktop and it will automatically fit into that half of the screen.
• Now, you can select one more window from your desktop to occupy the other half and the two apps will now be in full-screen mode.

• A standard three fingered swipe on a trackpad can be used to switch to other desktop spaces.
• Suppose, if you wish to view any of the two windows in a larger way, you can also  drag the divider in the middle to show more of one window or the other.
• This feature is very much useful to focus on two different apps simultaneously without the diversion of the rest of your desktop.

Example: When you are taking some important notes from a website, you can open the notepad page and website window simultaneously by scrolling through content on one side while writing on the other side.

3. Better Spotlight search

Search has been made improved in EI Capitan using the Spotlight search that can now generate results in order to access more data sources like displaying weather, stock, sports scores, Web video and transit info right in the Spotlight window.

• You will be able to perform a search for file queries using natural language.
• Spotlight search result is capable of showing web videos right beside existing data sources like Wikipedia, News, Definitions, and Bing Search.
• There is a significant change which is available in Spotlight in El Capitan is a resizable window. You can resize Spotlight window by making it larger or smaller to display exactly what you want to see.

Example: You can search in Spotlight by asking queries like “What’s the weather in San Francisco?” or “Steph Curry highlights in 2015” that will return a forecast or list of videos without leaving the Spotlight window. You can also search for your documents like, “Documents I worked on last Tuesday” and Spotlight will only give you results that match that criteria. It is also capable of handling more complex queries such as “Numbers documents I worked on yesterday with the budget,” and Spotlight will display Numbers spreadsheets that contained the budget.

4. Updated Apps and Services

Renovated Notes app

Apple has made significant improvements to Notes in order to put the app on a standard with more robust note-taking apps like Evernote. Using Evernote, you can add a lot of third-party content like URLs, PDFs, documents, and other files, and Note app is also similar to Evernote.

• Notes is a robust option in the Share Sheet of many apps in El Capitan that is very helpful in sending any kind of info to the Notes app.
• Notes in El Capitan have checklist abilities that enable you to quickly stick in an interactive to-do list or grocery list, with tasks and items that can be checked off in the app.
• Notes have an incorporated Attachments Browser, where you can view all the photos, links, documents, and map locations that you’ve added, organized by type.

Example: You can use the Share tool to quickly send a website to Notes. In Maps, you can send a map or directions to Notes, and in Photos, you can quickly add a picture or video to Notes. This change hugely improves the functionality of Notes, transforming it from an app that’s pretty useful for small more than text to an app that can assist as a strong digital workspace and project management tool.

Mail

• Apple has made some small tweaks to the Mail app that helps in making schedules easier which is a bit more like iOS Mail.
• For beginners, when you get an event invite, Mail will automatically block out the time on your calendar without you having to do anything.

• You can use a two-finger swipe gesture on individual emails in order to speed up going through your inbox. This gesture can be used on individual emails to mark them as read or send them to the trash.

Exciting Improvements to Safari

• A couple of most exciting refinements have been made to Safari in the browser of EI Capitan that will be much useful for the Mac users.
• A new Pin feature is introduced that lets you pin a Web page to the browser which results in a small tab with only the site icon that sits on the left side of your tab bar.
• Once a website is pinned, that particular site will stay up to date in the background even if you restart your PC. Through this, you can always see current info when you click over it.

• This feature is most beneficial for the sites like Facebook, Gmail and Twitter that often refreshes in the and always displays the most recent info.
• Safari introduces a new “Mute All Tabs” button to mute the audio for an individual tab which can be quickly accessible right in the address bar of the browser.
• When you are watching a web video in Safari, it is possible to AirPlay the video to the Apple TV without having the need to share your entire desktop.
• Mute All Tab also kills the sound and allow you to identify which tab is actually causing a problem.

Photos

Photos feature in El Capitan is being improved with the attachment of third-party editing tools. Through this Photo editing apps from the Mac App Store, you will be able to share the tools with Photos that eventually helps you to make pretty edits to images without the necessity to leave the Photos app.

• You will be able to use numerous filters and extensions from various developers without the need to import a photo into multiple apps.
• It also includes tools to add locations to single images or complete Moments, and the workflow for naming Faces in photos has been streamlined.
• Albums sorting is also advanced, with additional sort options for organizing albums and images within by date, title, and many more.

Maps

Maps in El Capitan introduces a new Transit view, which displays the routes while walking, moving in a subway, train, bus, and ferry. This is the most advanced app that shows Transit directions for the people who often plans out for a trip involving mass transit routing.

• Earlier, we used third-party mapping service to get the required transit directions. Now, you can choose to incorporate transit routes when getting directions.

• Transit directions will only be available in a selected number of cities at launch, including Baltimore, Berlin, Chicago, London, Mexico City, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Toronto, Washington D.C., and several cities in China.

Two-Factor Authentication

Two-factor authentication feature uses new methods to trust devices and deliver verification codes for a more streamlined user experience. Whenever you sign into any device with the new authentication system, it becomes a trusted device that can be later used to verify your identity when signing into other devices and services linked to your Apple ID. Through this two-factor authentication, it is pretty much easy to simplify the process of trusting devices. It is capable of texting and making phone calls as a backup option when a trusted device is not available. You can also use this app to gain Apple’s customer support team in order to recover Apple IDs through a recovery process if trusted devices become inaccessible and accessing an account to change a password is impossible.

5. Metal graphics technology

Metal graphics technology in El Capitan combines OpenGL and OpenCL under a single API. This technology is capable of calculating the amount of work that the CPU requires to do in order to render graphical effects and offloading tasks to the GPU.

Using this Metal graphics technology, system-level graphics rendering is 40 percent more efficient and 50 percent faster which is translated to get better performance from graphics-intensive apps. Metal brings some significant improvements to games. and also enhances draw call performance by up to 10x, which could lead to more realism and detail in future titles.

Release Date

Apple’s biggest iPhone September Event had introduced various products that include a pair of iPhone ‘s’ series, iPad and many more. Following its September 9 media event, Apple is planning to update its website and it will be announcing the public launch of OS X EI Capitan on September 30, 2015. Less than a couple of weeks are left for the announcement of Apple’s new Mac OS X EI Capitan.

Compatibility

OS X El Capitan has the capability to run on any Mac that is able to run Yosemite, including some Macs that are more than seven years old. As seen already with the advanced performance enhancements features, EI Capitan may even run faster than Yosemite on some Macs. Here is a complete list of Macs that can run El Capitan:

• iMac (Mid 2007 or newer)
• MacBook Air (Late 2008 or newer)
• MacBook (Late 2008 Aluminum, or Early 2009 or newer)
• Mac mini (Early 2009 or newer)
• MacBook Pro (Mid/Late 2007 or newer)
• Mac Pro (Early 2008 or newer)
• Xserve (Early 2009)

Price and Availability

OS X El Capitan for Mac users is absolutely free of cost. After launching EI Capitan on September 30, it will be made available in the Mac App Store. You can easily install the new OS onto your Apple device.

This is the complete information about the OS X EI Capitan that you need to know. Here are the advanced features, release date, compatibility, price and availability of the new OS X EI Capitan. Hope this detailed information helps you to get a clear idea about the new MAC OS.