Apple Announces OS X 10.11 ‘El Capitan’, Brings Vast Gesture & Spotlight Updates

At WWDC, which kicked off this morning in San Francisco, Apple’s Craig Federighi took the veil off of the company’s next major OS X release. Its name? El Capitan. Didn’t see that one coming, did you?

Before he dove into new features, Craig boasted about Yosemite’s rather incredible adoption rate. In a mere 8 months, 55% of active Mac users made the upgrade, which Apple claims is the fastest adoption rate of an OS ever.

In El Capitan, the major focuses revolve around Spotlight, the built-in apps, and window management. There are a bunch of little improvements too, though, such as being able to shake your cursor back and forth when you return to your computer, which will briefly enlarge it so that you can quickly see where it is (helpful when busy wallpapers are used.)

Part of the update to the built-in apps includes improved gesture support, effectively giving you similar controls to what you have on the iPhone. Most notably, this affects Safari and Mail. In Mail, you can swipe left or right on a certain message to archive or delete, and in Safari, you can swipe left on a tab to pin it.

The updated Safari will also include a couple of useful features we’ve previously seen in other browsers, such as being able to see which tab is producing sound. Apple takes things one step further though by allowing you to quickly mute the offending tab from right inside of the browser.

Window management is another area improved in El Capitan. You can grab an app and pull it to the top of the screen to make it full screen, and quickly dock two apps beside each other. Once again, this is a feature we’ve seen in previous OSes, but Apple improves it by letting the user scale the docked apps – not everyone will want both apps to be exactly 50%, after all. The elegant thing about this is that as you scale one app, the other one scales automatically.

Finally, Spotlight has also been given a serious working over. Now, it can respond to full-blown questions, such as “slides from Brian about El Capitan”, or “Email I ignored from Phil”, and then show you the respective results. That’s impressive.

Apple also gave us an update on Metal, its low-level graphics API. It’s now been ported to OS X, and acts on behalf of both graphics and compute, and according to some companies that matter, the performance improvements are staggering. On the compute side, Adobe has already committed to supporting Metal in its apps going forward, and Epic Games’ will be adding support for the API in Unreal Engine.

To give us an idea of what Metal can bring to the table, Apple brought Epic Games on stage to show off an upcoming game called Fortnite. If you’ve seen demos with Mantle, DirectX 12, or Vulkan, you pretty much know what to expect here. The performance is great, either inside of the game, or inside of the editor. Admittedly, Fortnite isn’t the most graphically intense game out there, so it’ll be nice to see even beefier examples down-the-road.

Those signed up for Apple’s developer program will be able to download the first beta of El Capitan today, while regular folk will be able to snag it in July. When the final build drops this fall, it will follow in the footsteps of the previous versions and be a completely free upgrade.