It’s WWDC time, and Apple kicked off its keynote by announcing the latest version of Mac OS X. Dubbed “El Capitan” – named after a rock formation in Yosemite National Park – it brings a new slew of features and performance improvements.
A new addition that will be see many users rejoice will be Split View – allowing you to neatly have two applications side-by-side when they are in full screen mode. You can also create new desktops and split view screens by dragging the application to the Spaces Bar in Mission Control.
Also demoed on stage by Senior VP Craig Federighi was Spotlight. It now can process more natural language queries and you can now search in more places to get more useful results, including the weather in a specific city.
Other additions include Mail gets new gesture shortcuts and tabs; while Safari adds pinned tabs – a feature that has already existed on its rival browsers – and has the ability to mute any background audio right from the address bar.
In terms of performance, Apple claims that it makes “all kinds of things run fast”. It claims applications will load 1.4x faster than Yosemite, switching between apps is now 2x as fast, while opening a PDF in Preview is 4x faster.
In the graphics area, El Capitan will bring Metal graphics rendering engine from iOS to the Mac. This will give developers near-direct access to the GPU and provide up to 50 percent faster rendering performance. Apple says that it will be great for games, showcasing a game from Epic Games and announcing several game studios and developers will be integrating it into their applications (like AutoDesk and Blizzard).
It will come out in sometime in Spring this year for free worldwide. A developer beta will be available today, with a public beta sometime sometime in the next few months.