Mac OS X 10.11 revealed with OS X El Capitan

Mac OS X El Captain

Apple started off it's big day of software developments by unveiling the next version of mac operating system named OS X El Capitan.

Aside from taking its name from California's famous summit, El Capitan adds in more features such as gestures to make deleting messages in Mail quicker and easier than ever.

Additionally, users can pin websites in Safari to quickly bring them up anytime. Pinned webpages will act very similar to locked tabs in Chrome and Firefox, except they remain hidden in Safari.

OS X El Capitan

Organizing the desktop

On top of bringing new features to the Mac desktop environment, the new version of OS X will allow users to better manage their windows.

Spotlight for starters now comes with a resizable window, which can be moved around as well over the static window found in OS X Yosemite. Spotlight in OS X El Captain will also be able to understand natural language searches such as "mail I ignored from Phil" and "documents I worked on in June."

Window management, similarly, has been improved with tools to auto arrange windows by dragging them to the side, much like window snapping in Windows. Migrating a window past the top of the screen, meanwhile, will make a window go full screen and turn it into a desktop of its own.

OS X El Capitan

Pedal to the metal

Of course, El Capitan also brings performance increases. This includes a 1.4x acceleration in app launching, a two times improvement in switching apps, the time to receiving mail messages is twice as fast, and opening a PDF in preview is four times as fast.

Additionally, OS X El Capitan also marks Metal's introduction into the Apple's desktop environment since it was first implemented with iOS 8 last year. To remind you Metal is a low-level, low-overhead hardware-accelerated graphics API, which should allow for a 50% improvement in performance with up to 40% greater rendering efficiency.

Adobe so far as been able to leverage Metal's capabilities to get an 8x improvement with rendering effects in After effects. The software maker also announced it is adopting Metal in its OS X apps, which has resulted in a 10x improvement in draw call performance.

Epic Games also took to the stage to demo Fortnight running entirely on Metal.

OS X El Capitan

When does it come out?

OS X El Capitan will be available to developers starting today with a public beta to release in July. The Full version of the new Mac OS, meanwhile, will be free to everyone this fall.

Kevin Lee

Kevin Lee was a former computing reporter at TechRadar. Kevin is now the SEO Updates Editor at IGN based in New York. He handles all of the best of tech buying guides while also dipping his hand in the entertainment and games evergreen content. Kevin has over eight years of experience in the tech and games publications with previous bylines at Polygon, PC World, and more. Outside of work, Kevin is major movie buff of cult and bad films. He also regularly plays flight & space sim and racing games. IRL he's a fan of archery, axe throwing, and board games.