[NewsPoster]

As part of the announcements made during the WWDC keynote on Monday, Apple has unveiled both the name and focus of the next OS X version, 10.11, now known as "El Capitan." As previously reported, the focus with the next update, scheduled for release this fall, will focus on improvements to the user experience as well as honing performance from the current 10.10, Yosemite. Although improvements are the focus, a few new features are also included.

As with Yosemite, software chief Craig Federighi noted that El Capitan will feature a public beta period, which will begin next month. Developers will be getting their hands on the new release today for testing. In a demo of some of the improvements, there were some notable "lifts" from iOS in Mail's new support of trackpad gestures for trashing or marking unread certain emails. Mail also gains tabs, allowing users to work on multiple new outgoing emails at the same time.

Other improvements include a simpler-to-access Mission Control, and more intuitive control of spaces and placing applications in them, including making new full-screen app spaces on demand. The company has been optimizing the overall performance of the OS software, resulting in 1.4x faster app launching, switching to accounts and applications is now twice is fast, as is the retrieval of mail messages. Opening documents in Preview is now four times faster.

In the interest of further improving graphics speed, Apple has brought over the Metal API from iOS to OS X. This is said to over up to a 10x improvement in games, but also an 8x improvement in other apps that rely heavily on graphics cards, such as Adobe's Creative Cloud suite of graphics applications. The company says it is committed to incorporating Metal in all Mac versions of its tools. In addition to 50 percent overall greater performance, Metal reduces battery use for graphics by 40 percent.

El Capitan's Spotlight

Spotlight has also gained some improvements, including a resizable window and more local and contextual information in answers. The program is also better able to use natural-language queries, such as "all my photos of Yellowstone national park." A query on the local baseball team will bring any upcoming game dates, current game scores, and related information.

Split screen view

A big new feature found in El Capitan is a split-screen view, which allows users to quickly place two or more applications side-by-side to make it easier to move information from one to another. An example seen in the demo showed Safari and a new Mail message where Federighi was able to easy grab pictures and URLs from a Safari web page and copy them directly into his message.

[Jeronimo2000]

"A big new feature found in El Capitan is a split-screen view"

Yeah, "big" and "new" surely are the keywords here. It used to be that Windows played catch-up with OS X... now it's the other way round.

[JimWall]

Metal seems like a good idea. The other improvements seem more like intrusions to me. I don't need Siri or my Mac tracking me so tightly that it can guess what I want.

[Charles Martin]

Yes, you'll note we didn't use the term "original" when referring to the split-screen idea ... there were apps for that before even Windows et al started doing it. However, Apple's implementation looks really nice (since I don't use Win 8.1, I can't say how it compares).

As far as spotlight and Siri "tracking," you can if you want turn off spotlight suggestions and control how much access to your location etc that Siri has, but if you're concerned about this you may want to abandon using a cell phone, delete your FB and Google accounts, and perhaps consider getting off the Internet entirely ... when it comes to data collection, Apple is at least transparent about what it needs, why, and whether it stores or keeps it, and generally gives users a lot of options about going along with that or turning it off. Unlike "some others."

[aroxnicadi]

Found today presentation boring. Beginning to wonder if WWDC has run it's course since there was nothing really new announced. The music thing is boring to myself but maybe not to other people but I'm not forking out 9.99 for anything that you can get for free on other sites. Was really hoping that they would have anounced that they were going to make a concerted effort on eliminating the bugs in Yosemite that have been prevalent since it came out last fall.

[Stuke]

Is discoveryd removed so that mDNSresponder can return? I'm tired of my mac being auto named "....(2)"!

[Charles Martin]

It's helpful to bear in mind that WWDC remains oriented around developers, not consumers. Most of the conference, and indeed most of the keynote, was about expansions and other areas in which developers will be able to create new products and increase their wealth.

As for Yosemite, you must have been tuned to different audio than I was, since the whole Yosemite presentation emphasized -- repeatedly -- that El Capitan is about improving and refining the experience and performance of what was achieved with Yosemite.

[Mike Wuerthele]

Stuke, DiscoveryD is gone in the 10.10.4 beta. No idea in the developer preview of 10.11.

Apple replaces flawed discoveryd in new OS X 10.10.4 beta release | MacNN