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Apple announces OS X El Capitan

By James Lu - on 9 Jun 2015, 2:00am

Apple announces OS X El Capitan

Apple announced the latest version of its Mac operating system at WWDC 2015 today. El Capitan, named after a rock formation inside Yosemite national park, focuses on two big areas: experience and performance.

Apple Senior Vice President of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi, detailed the major changes in the new release, starting off with an overhaul to the Safari web browser. You can now pin sites in the tab bar just by dragging them to the left.

The Safari address bar will now also show if a tab is playing audio (a feature Chrome has had for a few years).

Spotlight search has also been improved with the ability to search for results in natural language, such as asking it to find "documents I worked on in June." It can also look up weather, stocks, and sports results.

Mission Control now has new multitasking options with Split View, which splits the screen into two halves, one for each app.

On the performance front, El Capitan is said to open apps 1.4 times faster, app switching will be twice as fast, and PDF files will open up four times faster in the Preview app.

Apple is also bringing its Metal API to the Mac, having first introduced it on iOS last year. It supplants OpenGL for graphics rendering, offering up to 50 percent faster graphics rendering performance.

Epic Games showed off a demo of its upcoming game Fortnite, running on Unreal Engine on El Capitan.  The game looked pretty good, and ran smoothly, with Epic Games saying the company saw efficiency improvements as high as 70 percent.

OS X El Capitan will be made available to developers today and will roll out as a free upgrade to all Mac users later this year.

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