With the reveal of OS X 10.11 at WWDC, Apple has once again taken a feature “time out” with OS X. Instead focusing on the enhancements and performance of the OS, much like they did with Snow Leopard back in 2009. OS X 10.11 “El Capitan” takes what the prior release offered, and tweaks it, enhances it, and generally improves it, but doesn’t offer much in the way of new features. That’s OK. Speed and stability are definitely features, and by all accounts, Yosemite was in need of some tightening up.
While I usually skip installing the WWDC release because, well, I’ve installed enough of them over the years to know how that usually goes… this year I decided to give it a go on my secondary laptop, a late 2013 13″ Macbook Pro (16GB RAM, 512GB SSD). I did an upgrade install instead of a ‘clean’ install, because that’s how most of us will install El Capitan when it is released later this fall.
It’s been less than 24 hours in, but so far no major hiccups. Things oddly do feel a bit faster, but I have no scientific proof of that yet.
So what does El Capitan promise to bring to the table?
First, the ‘improvements':
Safari gains a new ‘pinned’ tab state. If you’ve used Chrome or Firefox before, you’ll recognize this as something they have had for years. You can also silence a particular tab easily (again, both Chrome and Firefox have had this feature for a while now).
Safari now is also touted as being able to stream video content from a browser to your Apple TV. I gave this a try, and it worked well. It’s not exactly a Chromecast killer, but it removes what was a glaring omission from Airplay before.
The Safari Web Inspector has also undergone a most positive redesign from the horrible Safari 7/8 release. Although you still can’t edit a CSS property in the Style Inspector by double clicking on it, like you can in every other browser (including Safari prior to version 7). Seriously Apple, as someone who builds websites, this is a ridiculous regression.
Mission Control has been revamped, and has adopted some of the ‘split-screen’ features that Apple touted as coming to the iPad in iOS 9. All I could think of while watching this in the keynote is ‘OK, Windows has had these since Windows 8′, but after playing around with it in the WWDC build, it’s not even that comprehensive. at least not yet. In order to pin an application to one side of the screen, you have to go through Mission Control, and in my testing, only some apps can be pinned/split screened at this point, and they were all Apple’s applications. This may require the same developmental tweaks that Craig Federighi mentioned would be necessary for it to work on the iPad. We’ll see. But for now, it’s a feature that seems half implemented and not very useful.
Mail gains a few small improvements, like being able to swipe in the message list area to mark as read or delete/archive a message. Plus you can have multiple tabs of new messages when composing, which sort of solves the problem of composing in Mail when it is in full screen mode.
Notes also gets an upgrade, gaining all most the new features its iOS sibling received. The nifty drawing feature in Notes for iOS didn’t make the transition, but checklists, attachments, and the new organization features did.
Like on iOS, the Maps application gains Transit directions, but again, only for the cities that Apple citied in the keynote (about 10 major cities in the US, London and China). People in smaller cities like Atlanta, GA are out of luck (at least for now).
The Photos app is gaining the ability for 3rd party editing extensions to tie in to the application. This of course requires developers to utilize a new API and modify their applications. Developers like Macphun, who make some great photo plugins should have a field day with this new feature.
Perhaps the biggest ‘feature’ in this release is the ‘intelligence’ improvements made to Spotlight. You can now search Spotlight using plain English. For example, you can use the phrase ‘PDF from September 2014′ and you should be able to see just PDF files from that date range. In my testing, I did see PDFs from that date range, but also PDFs from other dates. This will be a great additional feature when it’s finally finished, but right now it seems like it needs some work.
There are a few other updates to smaller apps. For example, Disk Utility is completely redesigned.
Under the hood, Apple is bringing Metal to the Mac (a graphics API that gives games and apps near-direct access to the graphics processor), and this promises to be a big deal for the relatively small amount of people who actually game on their Mac. Having Metal on the Mac should give developers who have built games for iOS using this technology an easy (or easier) path to bring these apps over to the Mac.
The other big tout in the keynote was overall OS performance, which is hyped at being improved for things like opening apps, time to access messages when first opening Mail, and opening files in Preview. In the WWDC build, which is usually laden with debugging code and slower than the prior full release, I’ve noticed it to be quite snappy even at this stage of development.
El Capitan is to be released this fall, which means it probably has another 4 months of development. There were many grumblings about the quality of the Yosemite release, so Apple was smart to make OS X 10.11 a ‘tune up’ focused release. With many months left to complete its development, Apple is poised to deliver a much more solid OS than OS X 10.10 was at launch.
