Gadgetory

there's new operating system for the Mac it's called El Capitan it's coming in the fall but you can look at a beta of it this July but we have the Developer Preview right now let's take a look there's two things to know about El Capitan the first is that it's faster Apple has added metal to it which means that graphics render faster and in general it says that apps launch faster so if we launch the Photos app here you can see it's spun up and launched pretty quickly in terms of experience there's a few different areas you need to look at the first is window management so I'm gonna open up Mission Control here and you can see that it has a little bit of a lighter theme and I can take a window I can drag it up to this area add it to a new space that's basically the way it worked before but what you can do now is you can hold your finger down on the green spotlight button and you see there's two different sides of the screen here I can drop it in and that's drop it into a split screen view and then I can choose the other app that I want to see in split screen like notes and now I have two apps open in full-screen mode but in split screen and you can change the dividers between these things and you can go back to your main window and you can take another thing you can put it into full-screen mode I can go back to the desktop and so on and I can take this thing and I can drag it into this photos and calendar and now I've got another split screen view here so pretty convenient if you use full screen apps it works really well spotlight search has also gotten better in El Capitan if you start it you can do a search for things like the weather in Toronto and it'll give you the information for that thing you can also search for stocks all sorts of structured data you can even search for cat videos if you want to the other thing that spotlight can do is you can use natural language so for example I could search for emails from Nilay and it will show those emails you can use all sorts of natural language I could search for PDFs from June and there's a PDF that I had open in last June about a terrible Android tablet the neat thing about spotlight is it doesn't just work inside spotlight you can use those same kind of natural language searches and notes or mail or a whole lot of other Apple apps and that's really kind of it for the big system level stuff in alchemy there's a new system font there's new support for other languages but the really big changes come inside Apple's own apps and my favorite changes are in Safari so you can see here I've got a bunch of tabs open and they're little that's because they're pinned tabs they've finally added this that something that chrome is done for a really long time you can see here I've got a bunch of tabs open so I don't have to reload the page like I do with the bookmark and they're just sitting there loaded or ready to go which is pretty great the other thing that they've added in Safari which is cool is if you have something making noise like this Jimmy Fallon video you can just click in the address bar to mute it and if you hold your finger down on that button it also shows you all the tabs that have sound going so you don't have to deal with being embarrassed in the office anymore now speaking of things that Apple is finally doing they're finally adding transit directions to maps so you can add a transit layer to your map screen and you can see here I can see all these subway lines and I can even zoom way in and look at an actual map of the underground station of a particular subway which is pretty cool and you can click on a thing and you can see what the delays are at least in New York it's not available in a lot of cities to start but they'll be adding more as they go it is everywhere in China which is interesting mail has also seen a big improvement Apple says that it can sync messages faster they've also added some new full-screen mode so if I go into full screen and I start a new compose message I can start a bunch of them and you can see that they are separated out into tabs and if I minimize it it's it's down here at the bottom of the full screen so I don't lose it the other thing I've done in mail is they're trying to add some structured data so I've got this email here that says you wanted me for lunch at 1:00 p.m. and Apple has added a little thing to let me automatically add it to my calendar that works for basically calendar entries in contacts but it's not as full featured as what Google does with Gmail with flight tracking information and package tracking and all the rest so if there's one app that sort of sums up what makes El Capitan cool it's the Notes app Apple's added a ton of new features and functionality so there's really boring stuff like I can bold text but you can also do other neat stuff like you can add checklists for shopping milk eggs butter in the dairy section but on top of that you can drag images into it there's an image you can even drag URLs into it so if I drag a URL in here you'll see that it's created a neat little you know preview card that tells you what is inside that link you can also share map locations to note so if I want to save this thing in this a subway station into my Notes app pops up a little thing and now I've got that reminder in my notes there it is the reason that note sort of sums up how I feel about El Capitan is if you live in Apple's ecosystem if you use its Notes app if you use its Maps app it's great because everything sort of talks to each other and works together really well and then spotlight is able to search all of it with really natural language so it's cool if you don't live in those worlds you don't quite get all of those features so your email lives over in Gmail and your notes live on Evernote and you know whatever else and that's a fine way to live but it's not necessarily the way Apple wants you to live what Apple wants you to do is use all that stuff together and if you buy in it feels really compelling