This month we explored the Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan release. It’s available free from the Mac App Store, and is mostly a refinement of the previous Yosemite release.
Split View is similar to the feature on the newest iPads, allowing two full-screen applications to sit side by side on the Mac screen. Getting into Split View for supported applications is not obvious. You start by long-clicking on the green dot in the upper left corner of the window of the first application, to fill half the screen, then finish by choosing an open application in the open desktop area to fill the other half.
If you have trouble finding your cursor on the screen, you can now shake your mouse to temporarily magnify the size of the pointer. El Capitan has a new more readable system font, San Francisco, which originated on the Apple Watch and is now also used in iOS 9.
The Spotlight search tool can answer some natural language searches like “slide presentations from last month.” It can also answer questions about weather, stocks, and sports, if you enable that in the Spotlight system settings.
Mail has a few improvements, suggesting calendar events and contacts found in e-mails. It’s also more flexible when composing an e-mail, allowing you to view and copy text from other e-mails.
The built-in Notes app has become more of a competitor to Evernote and Microsoft OneNote, supporting more of a rich-text format including saving web links, map locations, photos, and videos. It also has a checklist feature so that you can check off items when completed. The enhanced notes are also available by way of iCloud in the corresponding Notes app on your iOS devices.
Some other app improvements are that Photos now supports extensions from third-parties for additional editing. Safari has a pinned sites feature for your most frequently used sites, and you can quickly silence a tab that has unwanted audio playing. Maps, as is also true on the iPhone and iPad, now includes transit directions.
We also discovered, because of a member’s question about disk partitioning, that Disk Utility has been updated and appears to support resizing of existing Mac partitions.