The Ultimate El Capitan Handbook

Apple has done it again! Hot on the heels of last year’s OS X 10.10 Yosemite, it has released the new OS X 10.11 El Capitan, which takes using a Mac to even greater levels of excellence. While the look and feel of El Capitan is very much like Yosemite (El Capitan is, after all, a particular rock formation in Yosemite National Park), there have been some important additions that make using a Mac easier than ever. Of particular note is Split View, a great new way of working with two apps at once, and there have been some important improvements in Mission Control that make it easier than ever to switch between your open programs and work more productively on your Mac. There are also great improvements in Photos,…

Ultimate Handbooks are designed to give you a complete guide to a device or piece of software you own. We aim to help you get more from the products you love and we guarantee you’ll get the following from each book… ● A reference guide you can keep on your desk or next to your computer and consult time and time again when you need to know how to do something or solve a problem ● New skills you can take with you through your life and apply at home or even in the workplace ● Expert advice to help you do more with your hardware and software – from solving new problems to discovering new things to try out, we’ll show you the best ways to do everything ●…

The all-new, all-singing, alldancing, OS X 10.11 El Capitan is here – and you’ll love it! Like its predecessor, OS X 10.10 Yosemite, it continues the theme of Californian place names: El Capitan is the name of a rock formation situated within Yosemite National Park. Also like Yosemite, this new version can be downloaded for free from the Mac App Store. (Find out about upgrading from an older Mac or migrating from a Windows PC on page 34 onwards.) If you have an iPad or an iPhone, you’ll be right at home with El Capitan’s freshlooking interface, which takes many a cue from iOS – in fact, as of their 2015 releases, all three of Apple’s operating systems (watchOS being the other) use the same system font – a custom…

Apple’s latest update to OS X, El Capitan, takes its quirky name from a vertical rock formation in Yosemite National Park. Like its namesake, El Capitan rises from Yosemite, the version of OS X it replaces, building upon its solid foundation to deliver a stronger operating system that’s packed with feature enhancements. In many ways, El Capitan is like a modern version of Snow Leopard, the 2009 version of OS X in which Apple introduced hardly any new features. Instead, it rewrote underlying code and focussed on improving performance for the long term. However, that doesn’t mean there are no new features in El Capitan. Far from it. There are some real gems to discover, both in plain sight the moment you start using it and as you dig deeper…

Apple is determined to make Spotlight the go-to place for finding anything using your Mac. Not just files and folders, but also online information, weather reports, your contacts and much more. In recent years, Apple has started to blend search results from the internet with the ones from your Mac, adding a few new sources to make Spotlight more effective at answering a range of questions. El Capitan gives you the ability to find certain things – files, folders and email – by expressing yourself using natural language. Spotlight then interprets your meaning to give you more accurate results, such as files you worked on a week ago when you want to continue a project. One small but very welcome improvement is that you can also move the Spotlight window…

E l Capitan’s revised Notes app enables you to add almost any kind of file to your notes 8>. You can even add audio and video files directly inside a note, and play them back there too. 9> A neat trick is to record audio notes in QuickTime and attach them to notes. They show a play button, and they work on iOS. The Attachments Browser enables you to view every file and piece of media you’ve attached to your notes. This makes it easy to find things visually. The browser’s tabs enable you to switch between viewing documents, photos and videos, sketches, maps, websites, and audio. 10> Click an item to select it and then press the spacebar to preview it in a Quick Look window, or double-click to…