Apple’s 26th WWDC started off with a bang. An amazingly directed video to start off the show and then we are right down to business. Craig Federighi took the stage shortly after to walk us through the latest iterations of Apple’s software operating systems. Let’s see what he had to say about OS X’s next build.
He started off by praising Yosemite as it was obviously Apple’s most successful OS ever. It had an amazing adoption rate of 55%, the highest for any PC OS.
According to Federighi, Apple’s biggest challenge was coming up with the name for the latest OS. They called in the marketing team, but sadly, it didn’t work out as expected. The next thing they did, Federighi says, is that they brought in a consultant. Who told them the answer must be found within Yosemite. Thus, the new OS was ultimately named El Capitan.
Two areas were the primary focus foir OS X 10.11: Experience and Performance.
Spotlight has become more expressive and powerful. Built-in apps get huge enhancements.
Then he starts off by showing off El Capitan’s features. The mouse cursor, for example, magnifies if we give a little shake, making it easier to locate it. Also, gesture system has been newly enhanced to make the user experience much better. He demonstrates this in the Mail and Safari apps.
Safari, too, has received its very own makeover, pinned sites being one of the newly added features. Same can be said about Spotlight, whose panels can now be rezied and moved around.
The search system of the OS has also been revamped. You can type in your search as if you are speaking to your PC and the computer will understand you and bring up relevant results.
A new innovative way to navigate your windows has also been introduced dubbed Mission Control. Swipe three fingers on the trackpad to invoke it and you get a full screen which can help organize the windows.
We get new full screen features in any app as well as better multitasking experience. We also get many new gesture controls (which strangely, remind us a lot about Windows 10).
This was just a gist of the new experience we could get from El Capitan.
Federighi next turns to performance. He starts off by saying that the new OS is 1.4 times faster in terms of App launch, 2 times faster in terms of App switching, 2 times faster for first mail messages and 4 times faster in opening PDF previews.
Metal comes to OS X! (This guy takes the overhead out of OpenGL)
50% rendering improvements, 40% reduction in CPU necessary to do graphics. Also, better performance and battery life. Metal’s also great for high-performance apps. It can compute power of OpenCL and graphics performance of OpenGL in a high-performance API that does both. In theory, we get 8 times the previous gen performance, according to Adobe.
Adobe is committed to adopting Metal in OS X apps. Gaming will surely be a wonder. And as expected, next we get a demo of the OpenGL and OpenCL performance.
El Capitan will be available for developers in developers beta form. The public beta will be supposedly out it July. The Update will be free for all existing users in Fall.
That’s El Capitan for you guys. There are amazing new innovations, some better than the others, but all in all, there’s progress in everyone’s favourite OS.
