Apple just finished with the 26th World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) keynote at the Moscone West convention centre in San Francisco. Apple fans had been eagerly waiting for this event for the announcement of Apple’s next iteration of OS X. The latest operating system for Mac has been christened OS X El Capitan while iOS 9 will be the new operating system for iPhones, iPads and iPhones. El Capitan is a famous vertical rock formation in Yosemite National Park – a fact that has been cleverly used in the titling of the latest Mac OS.
While the announcement of El Capitan was a much-awaited moment, it will not be a monumental leap for Apple’s series of operating systems. El Capitan will be more of a refinement of the features of Yosemite. Craig Federighi of Apple broadly categorised El Capitan’s features into two sections – Performance and Experience.
Performance
Apple has claimed that it has made significant improvements with El Capitan. The inclusion of Metal to the latest Mac OS will give games and graphic-hungry apps direct access to the graphic processor of the system. This results in better and quicker rendering of graphics. Metal also helps in better integration of CPU and GPU. Apple also claims that there has been a 1.4x times increase in app launch times, 2x improvement in app switching speeds, up to 4x improvement in PDF opening in Preview and so on.
Experiences
Apple has finally got the Split View mode running that lets you use two apps simultaneously. This feature has been available on the Windows OS for a long time that lets you fill the screen with two apps and even lets you decide the proportion of the area to give each app. Mac users can finally reduce app-switching time.
There have been other substantial improvements in OSX’s features too. Safari Browser got a boost by having features like tab-pinning and quickly identifying tabs having audio playing back automatically. These features come late from Apple since they have been present in Chrome since a long time. Spotlight Search is another area that has had improvements. It can now use Siri for natural language search terms. It can also work in a similar fashion to look up weather, stocks and games.
Notes by Apple have also been enhanced quite a bit. Users can now make a checklist, take photo notes, draw scribbles on notes, add URLs or even add a map location. All the Notes data can be synced across Apple devices via iCloud. Other apps like Maps, Mail and Mission Control Centre have also had gone through enhancements. However, these changes are not really earth-shattering.
El Capitan will be lapped up by rabid Apple fans but this update might not be a massive change over Yosemite. On the other hand, Windows 10 may just win the OS war this year.
