The IT Nerd

The final part of this review will cover the new user interface and user experience changes in El Capitan and my overall thoughts on Apple’s latest OS. Here’s what is new in El Capitan:

• Split View: This feature makes full-screen mode twice as useful by letting you split your screen between two apps. This might not be useful if you have a MacBook. but if you have a large screen, this will be very useful.
• Mission Control is way more useful than before.
• If you lose the cursor you can shake your mouse or rub your finger quickly on the trackpad and the cursor will get very large so you can see it.
• Spotlight can do a lot more of the things Siri can do on your iPhone. It can find info on stocks, scores, news and a lot more.
• Mail on OS X is now just like Mail on your iDevice. It can allow you to add contact details or event times found in the body of messages to the address book or calendar app. You can also swipe to delete or mark messages as read as well. I can also make messages full screen as well as tabbing replies just like it was a web browser.
• Maps now has transit directions that are sharable with iOS devices and the Apple Watch. But just like iOS 9, what you get or don’t get will depend on where you live as transit directions aren’t yet available everywhere. But like iOS 9, if you get them, you will love it.
• You can hide the menu bar if it annoys you. It doesn’t annoy me, but I know people who find the menu bar annoying.
• In Safari, you can pin your favorite tabs so that you can cut clutter, yet have access to them when required. Plus you can mute tabs that are autoplaying sounds or videos that you can’t stop easily.

So, that doesn’t sound like a huge list of features. It isn’t. Remember that this version of OS X is about under the hood improvements rather than new features. So far it all seems to work. Though one other issue that has cropped up is that Office 2016 has major stability issues on El Capitan and complaints are piling up on the Microsoft forums about this. Microsoft and Apple are working on a fix, but that casts a bit of a negative shadow on El Capitan. So do the issues that I raised in part two this review.

So, should you upgrade? The price is right, performance is a tad better, and the update has no show stopper bugs (at least for me), thus I would say yes. Just make sure that you follow my advice on upgrading and you should be fine.

This entry was posted on October 6, 2015 at 8:00 am and is filed under Products with tags Apple. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.