“Apple’s latest operating system for Macs, El Capitan, officially launched September 30,” Jill Duffy reports for PC Magazine. “OS X 10.11 doesn’t have as much eye candy as the last few point releases of iOS, but it does come with a few capabilities that will boost productivity, and help you work smarter and more efficiently. There are also some improvements to the search functionality as well that will help disorganized people find what they need.”
“How often do you fiddle with two windows on screen to get them sized just right so that you can easily swap between them while working? You might have a browser open for research while typing in Word, or your Calendar on one side of the screen while responding to emails on the other,” Duffy reports. “Rather than waste time adjusting the windows to take up the right amount of space, El Capitan can quickly snap them into place for you.”
“Mac’s search bar, called Spotlight Search, launches apps, looks up words, and can even do math problems. In El Capitan, it becomes more powerful than that,” Duffy reports. “Natural language search functionality has been added, so you can search for ‘documents about budget,’ ’emails from mom,’ or ‘photos taken last week’ to find what you need faster than before. Natural language search has been added to the search function in Mail and Finder, too.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Spotlight also does sports scores, weather, and stock prices! It’s a lot more useful. We wish it’d show us local showtimes for movies, too. Hopefully that’ll arrive sooner than later, too.
So snappy.
El Capitan didn’t make me more efficient. It destroyed by e-mail database when I installed El Kapitan. I lost all my accounts and Apple and my techy guys still haven’t resurrected them yet, after many hours on Sunday and Monday. For me 10.11 is the worst ever Mac OS update.
A few new efficiencies of finding the cursor or getting a Contact in my database from the e-mail no way compensate for the time I have lost and will lose tomorrow.
Get a grip Apple, do the fundamentals right. Flashy stuff doesn’t matter if the basics don’t work. Converting e-mail databases is a core basic. Jack
Two thoughts…
First, never install a brand new operating system on your work computer. Phase it in on a secondary computer after letting others serve as the guinea pigs to flush out the bugs.
Second, always have at least two backups – a clone (e.g., Super Duper of Carbon Copy Cloner) and Time Machine. Either one of those would have had you back up and functional in a short period of time. An offsite backup is also important for critical data, especially for a business. That data will not be as readily available as onsite storage, but it supplements the most critical aspect of security.
Are you trying o recommend not to install 10.11?
Because software that is released is always rubbish?
You must be one of the Windows newbies talking shit in public.
Why don’t you claim, that the Mac must be stable, more stable than anything else?
For years now it is the opposite because of people like you !
Shame on your comment !
Sad but true.
What can I do to help out?
Calling himself King tells the whole story for me.
What is a tool good for if it is not reliable anymore?
Ask the Windows people, they are experts in this field of expertise.
Most of us made the move to the Mac years ago, now we are caught in hell. Screw Tim and his greed-alliance of “faster and more and rose-golden everything ”
I am really pissed about the loss of ethics, and if you are not, you are part of that misery.
I installed El Capitan on my computer which is also my work computer. I had no problems.
Anyone who installs ANYTHING on their computer, without having at least one backup in place is a fool.
Anyone who works more than five minutes past reading this without having a backup is a fool.
Anyone who doesn’t know this, at this point in the “age of computers” is a fool.
Stop being such a bunch of blamey cry-babies. ANY computer can fail AT ANY TIME. And nobody claims Macs are immune to this and have 100% reliability. I had total hard drive failure once. Was back up and working in a couple of minutes. Then replaced the hard drive at my leisure.
Super Duper plus Time Machine for two different kinds of backups is a great way to go.
Fer chrissake, take some responsibility. Have some sense.
I have both Time Machine and Carbon Copy cloner backups, and with El Capitan on one of my machines, I can see already that I am going to have to make use of them in the next few days.
As someone said: Apple; get back to the basics before you throw things out there. Applies to both OSX and iOS!
Call me whatever names you like!
After reading the rest of the posts on this article, I have a third thought. Check for application compatibility prior to upgrading.
Is there an independent list of which applications will work? I tried checking with the authors of some of mine and they don’t appear to offer any simple yes/no answers.
It’s also important to know if things like our printers will continue to work the same after the upgrade. Some manufacturers simply don’t bother updating printer drivers, so an existing printer can no longer be used. When that happens, I have to buy a new printer – and it is never going to be from the same manufacturer as the unsupported one.
roaringapps.com
but it is not 100% reliable, what disqualifies it somehow.
I would recommend a warning list, before install, listing apps and extensions, services and so on that are discontinued the moment you hit “upgrade to El Capitan” (the f**** most advanced Desktop OS… LOL)
Just go on discontinue services apps and extensions without warning …behave just worse than MS or IBM because you are now bigger than the rest… great attitude, chapeau !!!
We are suffering here with the missing franker… safari extensions which did a great job. Use Google? N0 WAY!
i think we are not alone with this lasting and painful shift to distraction. Man Up , you still need to dare to stay on top.
Please don’t tell me you didn’t back up your computer before installing a major OS update. Why would you do that?
Destroyed your accounts? Aren’t you using IMAP mail or Exchange? If you are, the mail is all on the server. Just give the Mac your credentials and it will get the mail for you. At least that’s what I do.
For Mail choose ‘mailbox’-rebuild
When I installed El Capitan, I had to wipe all my email accounts on one machine and recreate them. I didn’t loose any data.
On the other, I didn’t loose my account setup, but I recall I had to restore, my mail config from Time Machine, on multiple occasions.
Mail is fine right now, but there were instances of trouble. I wonder if there is a conflict between the old mail database format, and the new one, a bug exists in the migration code.
I feel very fortunate to have had no issues. Such is the case sometimes. Hope everyone gets their issues sorted out.
OTOH, my CH340 USB-to-serial driver no longer works so I can’t do Arduino development anymore. When I get home from the current business trip I need to figure out how to uninstall El Capitan until new drivers are available.
You could set up a HDD partition to support your Arduino development actitvities until you find a suitable USB-to-serial driver.
El Capitan messed up the search within an application. When I try to open a document under a program like Affinity Designer, I am unable to use the open windows search feature. The items that it finds are dimmed out so I can not even open them. Not much of an enhanced search if you ask me.
I gave up using Mail on a Mac. Big waste of time. I started using Outlook in Office 2011 but found it to complicated for my needs so I moved to MailPlane, which I still use but really like Airmail and use it for 95% of my emails.
“More Efficient” … Right!
• By not being able to access any software what-so-ever, especially update in the App Store … which continually informs me that it “cannot access the server”!
• By locking up Outlook for Office 2011 each and every time I switch to another software app, necessitating to Force Quit it!
• By slowing down basically every piece of software and on a 3.4 GHz Intel Core i7 iMac with 16GB Ram.
so far, my problem:
1. Paragon NTFS no longer works. I switched to Tuxera NTFS.
2. Photoshop and Illustrator had some problems with the GPU performance option. PS must use GPU so the screen doesnt jitter. While Ai must NOT use GPU so the screen doesnt jitter.
Other than that, El Capitan is the best. I love the new safari.
Split View is useless.
I’ve had no showstoppers, but one of my gmail accounts decided to download every email I’ve ever had into my inbox.
Also I’ve had odd Photos behaviour where a purple debugging window showed up, and only a terminal command fixed it.
Not what I expect from a shipping OS.
A good resource for what apps that work on which OS is available at https://roaringapps.com. It is not the holy grail of what works where, but it is a good reference. It is also a site that one can contribute their findings too.
Vast majority of Mac users who upgraded to El Capitan, millions of them, are very happy. That’s obviously doesn’t mean much to you, but for all of them, El Capitan is an amazing piece of software and the best OS ever released.
I don’t know what is the cause for the problems for those of you who are experiencing them, but there must be an answer.
Oh, and vast majority of Mac users have upgraded to El Capitan by clicking “Upgrade” in App Store, without any special preparation. Most never bothered with a backup. Normally, this is never a problem. In my decades of upgrading my Mac OSes, on multiple Macs, over 12 versions of OS X, not to mention System 9 (starting with Sydtem 7), I never had to restore anything from backup. My own system upgrades went the usual Apple way — it just works. Always. I know this doesn’t help you much, but reading through comments on this board every time Apple releases new OS, one would think Apple turned into a Microsoft. It didn’t.
Well said.
I beta tested El Capitan and didn’t have any of the problems that have shown up here. I also did multiple backups first. I learned to do that 30 years ago on my first Mac. Anyone who doesn’t have backups, at the least using Time Machine, is asking the universe to swat them. Deservedly.
” every time Apple releases new OS, one would think Apple turned into a Microsoft. It didn’t.”
Based upon my experience, (and the number of wasted hours) and the number of comments here and on Macintouch compared to other “upgrades” (translate “upgrade” to “change” to be accurate) I am not at all sure yet that your comment is accurate.
Mine was the first post in this thread. For the record I have been using Macs since the first Classic Macs hit the UK and had Time Machine and Super Duper backup, but stupidly assumed that Apple Mail OS10.10 would be compatible with Apple Mail OS10.11.
My experience shows that Gollum who wrote: “I wonder if there is a conflict between the old mail database format, and the new one, a bug exists in the migration code.” is correct. There does seem to such a bug.
Like a number of others, it took me hours to get El Capitan to download, after which I was able to effect a clean install from Recovery mode. On balance, El Capitan seems to perform better than Yosemite: Time will tell. My only gripe continues to be with Mail through Apple. The so-called Junk mail settings are junk: Since installing El Capitan, I have received the same piece of junk mail nearly every day. Marking it as junk simply “doesn’t work” – regardless of establishing rules for its deletion, and hasn’t worked since Yosemite. And much to my dismay, e-mail messages now feature a useless “Mark as Read/Unread” banner, along with a “Trash” banner if the e-mail message is swiped to the left or right. There is no setting to turn it off permanently! Instead of one step, such as selecting the trash can, two steps are now required: Unintuitive and unApple like. However, my major issue with Mail, in general, and with Apple, in particular, is the retention of deleted e-mail addresses under Previous Recipients. With every clean install, e-mail addresses I previously deleted – some more than several years ago – using the delete function under Previous Recipients are restored in toto! My question is why? Apple touts itself as the “protector of its users privacy”, yet maintains the e-mail addresses of a user’s previous contacts? Why? Is Apple in bed getting warm and cozy with the NSA? I find this an egregious violation of consumer privacy which clearly underscores Apple’s hypocrisy.
But El Capitan is much prettier and fun watching that colorful beach ball spin all the time!