Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference has kicked off in San Francisco this morning with a keynote talk at 10am PST. Surprisingly, Apple has skipped the usual round of business updates and went right for the big news.
Following months of speculation and rumor mongering, the California firm has formally unveiled the next major version of the Mac operating system. It’s called OS X 10.11 El Capitan.
Yup, you read that right.
OS X 10.11 has new gestures like the shaking gesture to show the mouse pointer and more.
Safari Pin Tabs
In Safari, you can pin a website.
Pin Tabs have a dedicated icon left to the tab bar. If a tab plays audio, there’s a new option to see what website is playing and can mute it with a click of the mouse button.
Spotlight Search Improvements
The improved Spotlight has better natural language processing so you can search for stuff like “Mail I ignored from Phil,” “Documents I worked on last June” and more.
Improved Mission Control
You can now snap windows to either side of the screen directly in Mission Control, similar to Windows 7, which provides a great way to work split-screen.
And if you drag a window past the top of the screen, it takes it immediately full screen. And if you drag another window on top of it, you’ve just created a split-screen environment.
Super handy.
Performance
OS X El Capitan features some serious plumbing work to accelerate your daily computing. You’ll experience 1.4 times acceleration in app launching, 2x faster in snappiness, four times faster opening PDF in Preview and more.
Metal, an iOS 8 framework for close-to-the-metal access to the GPU is now available to Mac developers.
Metal in OS X El Capitan delivers 50 percent increase in graphics performance and 40 percent greater rendering efficiency, leading to better battery life.
Metal will do wonders for all kinds of Mac applications.
Apple is working with Adobe, which will update its creative apps for the Mac with support for Metal technology. Epic Games showed off an updated Unreal Engine with Metal support.
A demo shown off on stage included 64 layers of shading, with all the effects done completely in real-time. Epic said Metal on OS X El Capitan delivers a 70 percent reduction in CPU use compared to OpenGL.
Cody has more on Metal for Mac.
Availability
OS X El Capitan is available to developers starting today.
A public beta will launch in July for members of Apple’s Public Beta program. The software will be rolling out to everyone with a free upgrade this fall.
This post will update with more information after the event has wrapped up.