Apple OS X 10.11 El Capitan review

According to Apple, OS X Yosemite had the fastest adoption rate of any PC operating system ever. If that is true, version 10.11 El Capitan looks certain to do the same. It’s an iterative update, rather than a complete overhaul, but the tweaks and upgrades make the whole experience just that little bit slicker and, considering OS X was already incredibly user-friendly, that’s quite the achievement.

Available for free for all iMac and MacBook owners, with support going all the way back to 2007/2008-era devices, El Capitan can be downloaded through the Mac App store. It’s a 6GB download, but you won’t need to create a boot disk or re-format your existing installation.

On the surface, very little seems to have changed, save for Apple making the switch from Helvetica Neue to its new custom San Francisco font. It’s a subtle difference, one that is designed to improve readability at smaller sizes and higher resolutions, but it at least adds consistency with Apple’s mobile operating system – iOS made the switch with version 9.

Mission Control & Split View

Multi-tasking is one of El Capitan’s biggest improvement areas, with full-screen window management and the Mission Control desktop overview both receiving upgrades. In previous versions of OS X, applications were grouped together in stacks when using Mission Control, making it hard to pick out a particular window if you had several open at once. Now, every window is displayed individually, expanding out to fill the screen from roughly where they were on the desktop and in proportion to their size. Thumbnails for any virtual desktops stay hidden until you move the mouse cursor to the top edge of the screen, making more room for application previews. If you only want to see windows for the application you’re using there’s still the option: CTRL+Down arrow on keyboards and a three-fingered swipe down on touchpads.

^ Finding a particular window is far easier now that Mission Control doesn’t stack by application

Mission Control is great if you like working with windows, but El Capitan also makes improvements for those that prefer working in full screen. Split View now lets you use two full-screen applications side-by-side, a first for OS X. A long press on a window’s green maximise button will highlight half of the screen; dragging and dropping the window onto either half of the screen will fill it, before presenting all your other open applications to fill the other half. You can also drag a windowed application onto a full-screen one in Mission Control to automatically start Split View.

When you have two applications running in Split View, you can adjust how much screen space they take up by clicking and dragging the divider between them. Returning to windowed mode just needs another click on the maximise button, which will leave the remaining application in full-screen mode.

^ Running two full-screen applications is nice, but OS X still works best with windows

Split View works best with the default Mac applications and refuses to work with others, including Microsoft Office 2011, although it does work with Office 2016. It’s also frustrating that you’re restricted to two applications; Microsoft might have borrowed many window management tricks from OS X, but Windows 10’s ability to split windows into quarters is now a step beyond what Apple’s operating system is capable of.

Spotlight search

Spotlight search had a major overhaul in OS X Yosemite, putting your results in the centre of the screen and giving you live previews of files, folders and shortcuts before you opened them. The search window can finally be dragged around the screen in El Capitan, rather than obscuring the centre of your monitor as soon as you use the CMD + spacebar keyboard shortcut or click on the magnifying glass icon in the Menu bar. Clicking and dragging will let you position it anywhere, and it will continue to appear there the next time you activate Spotlight.

^ Spotlight now understands natural language requests, plus it recognises when you're after the score from last night's game

Apple has taken some of Siri’s natural language searches and integrated them with Spotlight, letting you search for photos from a specific date or email from one particular person by typing “Photos from yesterday” or “mail from Steve”. Weather and stock results are built into Spotlight now as well, giving you the weather for your current location as well as a ten-day forecast.

You can even type in the name of your favourite sports teams to see scores and max fixtures. Top-flight UK football teams are represented, but currently this feature mostly supports American sports including NFL, NHL, baseball and NBA.

Notes, Maps, Mail & Safari

Although they haven’t received huge overhauls, as with iPhoto’s transition to Photos earlier this year, several major OS X applications have gained new features in El Capitan. Some are small; Maps now includes transit directions, for example, helping you plan journeys using public transport just as you can with iOS 9.

Mail also gains some iOS-like abilities, in the form of swipe-to-delete messages. Now a two-finger swipe on any message will delete it, saving you a click. Siri-style intelligent event recognition will also pull appointments and meetings from your emails, adding calendar suggestions that let you quickly drop invites into your diary.

^ It’s not 100% accurate, but event recognition can save time if you get a lot of invites

Composing multiple emails is easier too, at least in full screen mode, thanks to tabbed messages. The CMD + N keyboard shortcut will now create a new email in a tab, rather than opening another window, although doing the same in windowed mode reverts to the old behaviour. You can also minimise the compose email field when in full screen mode, letting you return to your inbox even if you haven’t finished writing.

Safari might not be everyone’s preferred web browser, but the addition of pinned tabs adds another familiar feature that could convince Chrome users to make the switch. Right clicking a tab and selecting Pin Tab will shrink it down to a favicon and shunt it to the far left of the tabs bar, letting you keep more of your favourite tabs open at once without taking up screen space.

^ Muting tabs is now just a click away – it’s easier here than it is in Chrome

It’s easier to mute tabs that are playing audio now too – a speaker icon appears on any tab that’s currently making sound, and clicking it will mute that tab. Doing so won’t take you to that tab, either, meaning you can continue reading one tab while muting another. This is an excellent addition, and one Google is sure to pinch for Chrome at some point.

It’s the humble Notes that has received the biggest upgrade, and is now much more than a simple text tool. Just like the iOS version, Notes now has rudimentary text formatting, dashed, bulleted or numbered lists, tickable checklists and the ability to add content from other applications as attachments. To use the latest version and synchronise using iCloud, all of your devices have to run iOS 9 or OS X El Capitan.

^ Notes is far more than just text now – it’s a digital scrapbook for all your links, pictures and videos

Notes has been added to the context-sensitive Share menu, letting you add virtually any website, image, video, map, audio clip or document to a particular note with a right click. A Browse Attachments icon shows all the attachments you’ve added to your notes, split by type, although deleting them from individual notes will also remove them from this list. Sketches added to your notes appear here too, although currently the only way to create them is to do so on an iPhone or iPad running iOS 9, then sharing them to OS X through iCloud syncing. Essentially it brings Notes up to par with third party applications like Evernote, becoming a digital scrapbook for links, images and videos.

Behind the scenes: Metal graphics API

Metal, so-called because it lets graphics code get “closer to the metal” of the GPU, is a new graphics API that should remove some of the overheads currently found in the OpenGL and OpenCL programming languages. It arrives with El Capitan, but developers will need to add support for it into their applications before you’ll see any advantages.

By moving some of the processing load from the CPU to the GPU, Metal should help reduce bottlenecks and speed up graphics processing. Currently only Apple programs and a few third-party applications from Adobe support Metal, but the differences can be drastic; rendering in After Effects, for example, can be up to eight times faster on El Capitan than on Yosemite.

Metal also brings OS X development and iOS development together, which could make porting applications from mobile to desktop much easier in the long run.

...and the rest

Casual users are less likely to visit the OS X Disk Utility on a regular basis, but that hasn’t stopped Apple from giving it a design overhaul for El Capitan. The UI hadn’t changed for quite some time, and was in need of a facelift, so the simplified look is more than welcome. The tabbed interface is gone, replaced with buttons, and some of the more confusing terminology has been axed.

One other neat new addition for anyone using an eye-searing 5K iMac is the expanding cursor. With so many pixels it’s easy to lose track of your mouse pointer, but wiggling it for a second or two will make it temporarily expand, helping you find it again.

Should you upgrade?

Quite simply, yes. Based on early testing with the final build of El Capitan, there are no performance issues versus Yosemite, and the small updates here and there add up to create a meaningful whole. It’s a free update, and whether you’re currently using Safari, Mail and Notes or not, the improvements made to each are genuinely worthwhile and could even convince you to switch back from third party alternatives. It will take longer for developers to make the most of behind-the-scenes tweaks like Metal, but when dramatic performance improvements are only lines of code away, anyone using 3D-accelerated creative software should definitely make the switch. For everyone else, the Spotlight and multi-tasking additions are worth the little effort it takes to upgrade.