Apple on Tuesday announced its new operating systems for its Mac range of computers and mobile devices at the WWDC 2015 keynote.
The desktop OS X El Capitan, aiming to make the user experience better, brings with it gesture support similar to the ones used in iOS. For example, users can flick emails in the Mail app using the mouse to archive or delete messages.
Speaking at WWDC, the company’s annual developer conference, Apple’s senior vice-president for software engineering Craig Federighi showcased a new feature called ‘pinned sites’ for Safari, which now allows users to pin websites in the default browser by dragging the respective sites to the left. Any link opened from a pinned website, say Twitter, opens in a new tab, without disturbing the other open tabs in Safari.
Federighi also announced that users will now be able to mute audio in any Safari tab by simply clicking on the speaker icon in the address bar. Google Chrome also has this feature, but not in the wider release version.
In Spotlight search, OS X El Capitan now understands natural language searches. Federighi demonstrated this feature by looking up ‘Mail I ignored from Phil (Schiller)’ in the Mail app, and OS X El Capitan giving users all unread mails from Schiller (Apple’s senior VP).
Mission Control gets a major UI boost with El Capitan too, with users now allowed to auto-arrange all windows with just a drag of the mouse. This is similar to Microsoft Windows’s Snap feature.
On the performance front, Mac OS X El Capitan is 1.4 times quicker in launching apps and 40% faster in rendering graphics (courtesy Metal).
Apple will make available the developer beta version of its new desktop OS today, while the free upgrade to consumers later this year. The public beta release has been scheduled for July.
