You can download El Capitan right now and discover all of the new features and performance improvements. I have had the privilege of playing with El Capitan since its first beta and some of the new features have become second nature to me but I thought I would go over my choice of the top 5 of the new features that I actually use on a daily basis.
h4. It’s a 3-Finger Drag!
This is sort of a hidden trackpad gesture that has been re-introduced in El Capitan. If you look for 3-finger dragging in the Trackpad System Preferences, where it used to reside, you won’t find it or a little cute video of how it works. But if you look at Accessibility you will find the toggle to activate 3-finger dragging. The path to get there is System Preferences > Accessibility > Mouse & Trackpad > Trackpad Options. Click on the box that says “Enable Dragging” and select 3-finger dragging. Now, why is this handy? I mean we have one finger, two finger, pinching, swiping and tapping. Well, if you are like me and do cutting and pasting from documents you might also be tired of clicking on one part of a document, and shift clicking on another to select it.
To drag with three fingers simply rest three fingers on the trackpad and drag to select text, move windows, files or tabs. Check it out, you will probably wonder how you ever lived without it!
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h4. Take a Note
The Notes App has been significantly improved and is much more useful now with El Capitan. I used Notes occasionally before El Capitan but it I was making most of my notes in Stickies or in Mail. With the new improvements to Notes, I am using it a lot more often and find Notes to be a very useful tool. In the past, it was pretty much just a free form note taking app but now you can not only take notes you can add photos and videos, sketches, maps, websites, audio and whole documents.
One of my favorite new features is the Checklist button. Many times I use notes to remember a bunch of things to do for this project or that project. If you select those items in Notes now and hit the Checklist button, little checkboxes are put before each item. Easy checklists that are now available on your Mac or any of your devices from the Notes App.
Let’s say you were planning a trip and needed that checklist but also need directions, a picture of your destination and the website for the hotel. You can add all of that to your note so you have all your information for the trip in one place. As I head south for the winter, I will put the website for dog-friendly hotels, a map with my selected route and of course, my checklist all in that note. I can access all of that from my iPhone or iPad on the road, too.
You can add audio files that will play right from the Notes App so if your friend gave you verbal directions you can listen to them right there. Adding information is easier now, too, as the Share button now includes Notes in Safari, Photos, Maps and other Apps.
You can organize your notes into folders now, too, which makes it even more handy! I think you are going to love the new Notes App in both El Capitan and iOS 9.
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h4. Pin it and Shut up!
Safari gets some nice new features with El Capitan which I use every day now. My favorite is the mute button. How many times have you had a number of tabs open in Safari with several websites open and suddenly some automatic audio file starts playing some cheesy music or some talking head is trying to sell you something. With El Capitan you can now shut them down! You have the ability to silence all tabs, a single tab or every tab but one.
Muting all tabs is as simple as opening a new tab that is not playing sound and clicking on the Mute All Tabs button in the address bar. Don’t forget to un-mute all tabs if you want to listen to something. To mute a single tab you simply click on the sound tab in the address bar for that tab. If you want to listen to one tab and mute all the others you click and hold on the sound icon of the tab you wish to listen to and a menu will appear that gives you the choice of muting that tab or muting all the other tabs.
Pinned tabs are nothing new. Chrome has had them for some time but pinned tabs come to Safari with El Capitan. You can right click, control click to pin a tab but I just drag it to the left of the tab bar and it is pinned. You can also drag it to the right in the tab bar to unpin a tab. Pinned tabs are persistent on all Safari windows even when you quit.
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h4. Do the Splits
You have always had the option to have multiple windows open and copy and paste between apps but El Capitan goes one step further and allows you to easily put two apps side by side on your screen. That way you can easily jump from one app to the other like if you are working on a Pages document but need information from that Numbers spreadsheet.
There are at least a couple ways to activate split screen. The first is to click and hold on the “full page” button on the top of the window. That will create a blue hue on half your screen that you can fill with that app. The other half of your screen will display thumbnails of your remaining open apps. Simply click on one of those and bingo you have two apps in full screen mode side-by-side. You can even adjust the dividing line so you can go to 60/40 or any other size for the two apps.
The second way is to use Mission Control which has had some changes with El Capitan. You can access Mission Control any number of ways but my favorite is to swipe up with four fingers (you can set that gesture in Trackpad options to be 3 or 4 fingers). Once you are in Mission Control, if you have one app running in full screen mode it will show up as a desktop and you simply drag the other app that is compatible with spit screen (not all apps are) onto that desktop and you are good to go.
To exit from Split View you can simply hit the Escape key or click on the expand button.
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h4. Spotlight Gets Brighter
I still do not understand why Apple has not brought Siri to Macs but with enhanced dictation activated you might be able to simulate Siri. Nevertheless, Spotlight got a bigger brain with El Capitan. There is a lot more information available from sports scores, stock quotes, video search and more. The results come up really quickly with more information in the results. They fixed the one most annoying feature of Spotlight – the fixed position of the search window. While clicking on the magnifying glass will bring up the search box in the middle of your screen, you can now move it out of the way. You can also ask questions in natural language, like “Show me documents I worked on yesterday”.
You can still use Spotlight for currency conversion, simple math, finding the weather or finding that missing file on your desktop.
