What is El Capitan you may ask? Well it’s the latest update to the Mac OS X Operating System which was officially launched yesterday and like all other previous Mac upgrades this is free and comes with a few little tweaks that might prompt you to switch.
Before you do upgrade, make sure you take a full Time Machine backup of your Mac in case things don’t go quite according to plan!
So in no particular order, here’s a list of the main features.
SPOTLIGHT
This feature shows more detailed results including the weather, sporting results, stocks and a video in the spotlight window.
SPLIT VIEW
Easily splits your screen in half showing the open apps side-by-side. You could do this with Yosemite by resizing the windows but with El Capitan you can easily snap the windows into place.
FONT
The biggest visual change is the new San Francisco font used throughout the system.
POINTER
When you have a large screen with multiple apps cascaded on the screen it can be difficult to locate the pointer at times. They’ve fixed this by enlarging the mouse pointer on the screen when you shake the mouse so it’s clearly visible.
NEW BEACH BALL
When the system’s thinking hard loading a program, you’ll see a brighter and more colourful beach ball effect to indicate the system is busy.
DISK UTILITY
A massive improvement with Disk Utility in that it shows how much disk space is used and what’s using up the space.
MAIL
Comes with a new full screen feature which allows you minimise a new message to do something else within Mail; something that wasn’t possible with Yosemite.
TWO-FACTOR AUTHENTICATION
This replaces the existing two-step verification and does away with the Recovery Keys. Once setup, any device you sign in with is flagged as trusted.
NOTES
This app is now integrated with other programs; so in Safari for instance you can click on the share tool and send a website to Notes and in Maps you can send across directions.
SAFARI
A new “Pinned Sites” shows the most frequently visited sites on the left hand side of the taskbar. It always stays up to date so the information will always be relevant. Ideal for Gmail and other webmail browsers.
MAPS
Maps now shows a more detailed view including walking, underground, train, bus and ferry routes for planning your trip.
HIDDEN IMPROVEMENTS
Apple claim that apps will launch up to 1.4 times quicker and switching between apps is twice as quick. Showing the first message in Mail is said to be twice as fast and opening PDF’s in Preview is 4 times faster.
WILL IT WORK ON MY MAC?
If your Mac’s running Mavericks or Yosemite you’ll be able to run El Capitan but you will need around 6GB of free disk space to install it. If you’re insure which version you have, click on the Apple logo (top left of your screen) followed by About This Mac. The models supported are:
> iMac (Mid 2007 or newer)
> MacBook Air (Late 2008 or newer)
> MacBook (Late 2008 Aluminium, 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)
HOW DO I DOWNLOAD IT?
El Capitan will be available in the App Store updates.
