OS X El Capitan Release Date Tips

One of the biggest new features in El Capitan. It’s recursive across all of my devices, and the practice of using it doesn’t change much when I go from El Cap to iOS 9.

There are also improvements to Photos, checklists and a new Attachments Browser which arranges attachments in one convenient place.

Or take the mouse cursor.

There are other small but crucial tweaks that make life easier. Another might be for goofing off. If you’re on a laptop, it’s easy to switch by swiping three fingers on the touchpad left or right. I’m not insane that it ends up sniping a few screen real estate from me (it hosts pinned tabs in a bar up top), but I like not having to open the same set of windows ever day, and cursing at myself when I accidentally shut one of them down after clearing out a series of open tabs. You then choose whether you’d like to position it on the left or right of the screen with the help of a blue veil. Now, the small versions of all the documents sit separately. I like Yosemite quite a bit, and wasn’t expecting much from El Cap – but the subtle changes have made a big difference. In full-screen mode, your document window fills the entire monitor, and the menu bar and window edges are hidden.

Not only does it tell you which train station and entrance you need, but Maps also lets you schedule trips via mass transit for the future.

Well, they do the same thing with the Mac’s operating system.

A brief explainer: Think of virtualization as the ability to run Windows or other “guest” operating systems such as Linux or Chrome as virtual machines that largely behave as if they’re stand-alone computers. It’s not dissimilar to the Helvetica that preceded it but looks elegant and familiar – it’s also used in iOS 9 and on the Apple Watch.

If you are upgrading from Snow Leopard and you’re using FileVault, you should disable FileVault before upgrading.

Meanwhile other, more intensive software, such as games and graphics editors, are able to hook into Metal directly. PDF load times are up to 4x faster, Apple says, and again while I’ve not put it to the stopwatch, big PDFs do indeed seem to open faster in Preview than before.

But if iOS still lacks sophistication in the workplace, it also brims with potential. Notes now lets you plonk photos and videos into notes as well as maps and URLs or even saved web pages. Choose your disk (or partition) from the list that appears, verify that you’d like to have the disk (or partition) erased, and then wait for the files to copy over. This is very handy.

Any problems require you to boot from a different startup volume in order to make repairs.

Similarly, the Photos app released earlier this year has been enhanced so that it’s easier to find stuff and file albums. Updates to the share menus in other apps allow you to push content directly to a new note. iCloud keeps things synchronized across devices, though there’s still no multi-platform support as, say, Evernote offers. You can now add location info to images (individually or in bulk – your call), and sort your albums by date or title. It’s limited for now to a series of cities including London, New York and 300 cities in China. For example, you can look up “messages sent from Henry Blodget yesterday” and get exactly that. We’ll show you how to do it with version 4 and update the article when the update is released. In Mail, you can swipe on the trackpad to quickly delete or archive an email. When using the program at full-screen, you can jump between multiple tabs for various email drafts you might have in progress. Clicking and pressing down on the green dot in the upper left hand corner of the first app you’d like to resize opens Split View.

A four finger swipe up on the desktop meanwhile reveals your available desktops if you are full screening apps, and then lets you access the new spilt screen feature so you can run two full screen apps on the same screen at the same time.

You’ll be able to search your mailbox for “messages ignored from …” for example, or search your files for “documents I worked on last June”. Also in the inbox, the search field responds to natural language requests, similar to the way Spotlight search handles queries. It’s so natural you wish Siri was part of OSX. Both in its own window and in the Safari address bar, Spotlight can deliver sports scores, look up basic information, and find the weather for you.

And there’s a very handy button to mute sound coming from Safari.

There is nothing more annoying than when you have several tabs open and once and all of a sudden, one of them starts singing at you but you aren’t sure which one it is.