Apple OS X 10.11 El Capitan review

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.