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OS X El Capitan supports third-party tools that will be available from the Mac App Store and accessible right in the Photos app. Use multiple editing extensions from your favourite developers on a single photo, or use a mix of extensions and the editing tools built into Photos. Whether or not you've downloaded it in the past, you can now download OS X El Capitan 10.11.6 (6.21 GB) via this link which will open first in the Browser, then in the App Store. OS X El Capitan. This version of OS X El Capitan is for users running OS X Snow Leopard who would like to upgrade to macOS Sierra. OS X El Capitan 10.11.4 Update The OS X El Capitan 10.11.4 update improves the stability, compatibility, and security of your Mac, and is recommended for all OS X El Capitan users. This update:. Adds the ability to passcode-protect notes containing personal data in Notes.
OS X El Capitan gives you simpler, smarter ways to do the things you do most with your Mac. Like working in multiple apps at the same time using Split View. Searching for information with an even more helpful Spotlight. Keeping your favorite websites handy with Pinned Sites. Managing your email with full-screen view and swipe gestures. And turning notes into useful checklists. Improvements under the hood make your Mac snappier and more efficient for all kinds of everyday tasks — from opening PDFs to loading your email. And with Metal for Mac, you get faster and more fluid graphics performance in games and high-performance apps.
Split View
Give two apps your undivided attention.
Running lots of apps at the same time is one of the great things about using a Mac. Focusing on just one app in full-screen view is another. With Split View, you get the best of both. It automatically fills your screen with the two apps you choose. So you can make dinner plans with a friend in Messages while finding the restaurant in Maps. Or work on a document in Pages while doing your research in Safari. All without the distraction of your other open apps, and without having to manually resize and drag windows around. And your desktop is always just a swipe away, so it’s easy to get back to everything else you were doing.
Mission Control
You’ve never been so good atspace management.
A streamlined Mission Control makes it easier to see and organize everything you have open on your Mac. With a single swipe, all the windows on your desktop arrange themselves in a single layer, with nothing stacked or hidden. Mission Control places your windows in the same relative location, so you can spot the one you’re looking for more quickly. And when you have lots of windows competing for screen space, it’s even easier to make more room for them. Just drag any window to the top of your screen and drop it into a new desktop space. It’s never been this easy to spread out your work.
Call out your cursor.
Lost your cursor on your crowded desktop? Just shake your finger back and forth on the trackpad or give your mouse a shake, and the pointer gets bigger so it’s easy to spot.
Spotlight
Even more versatile. And helpful.
Spotlight gets even smarter in El Capitan, delivering results for weather, sports, stocks, web video, and transit information. And now you can ask Spotlight to find a file using natural language — so when you’re looking for the presentation you created last Friday, just type “presentation I made on Friday.”1 Spotlight is also more flexible: You can resize its window to see more results and move it anywhere on your desktop.
Ask in your own words.
Searching for files has never been easier now that Spotlight understands natural language.1 For example, type “email from Harrison in April” and Spotlight shows you email messages that match. You can also use more complex searches, like “spreadsheet I worked on yesterday that contains budget,” and you’ll get just what you’re looking for. You can search with your own words in Mail and the Finder, too.
Look what just landed in your inbox.
Improved full-screen support and swipe gestures in Mail let you make quick work of your correspondence. OS X also helps you manage your calendar right from your inbox.
Work more easily in full screen.
The enhanced full-screen view in Mail lets you juggle all your email conversations at the same time. The email message you’re composing slides to the bottom of the screen, so you can access your inbox — perfect for copying text or attachments between messages. And if you’re managing multiple email threads, you can switch between them with easy-to-use tabs.
Add suggested events.
When you receive an email containing details for an event like a flight or a dinner reservation, you can add it to Calendar with just a click.1
Swipe to manage your inbox.
Now you can take care of your email with a swipe, just like on your iOS devices. Need to triage your inbox? Swipe right to mark an email as read or unread, or swipe left to delete. You’ll be focused on what’s important in no time.
Notes
Collect more than just your thoughts.
The powerful new Notes app is more than a great way to jot down a quick thought and keep track of it for later. Now you can turn a list into a checklist in a snap. Or easily add a photo, video, web link or map location to a note. And thanks to iCloud, all your notes and everything in them are kept up to date across all your devices. So you can create a note on your Mac and look at it on your iPhone when you’re out and about.
Add all kinds of content.
Notes easily handles almost any type of file you’d like to include. Save documents, web links, photos, map locations, PDFs, videos and more to a note with a simple drag and drop.
Save content from other apps.
Planning a trip? Save a hotel website to a note right from Safari, or a restaurant address from Maps. You can save content to Notes from many other apps as well. Just click the Share button in an app to save items to existing notes or create new ones.
Create useful checklists with a click.
Now it’s easy to create checklists in Notes. With a single click, you can create an interactive to-do list, grocery list or wish list. Then check off items as you complete them.
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Use the Attachments Browser to see everything in one place.
All the attachments you’ve added to your notes are organized in one simple view: the new Attachments Browser. You can sort through photos, videos, map locations and web links without having to remember which note you put them in.
Your notes. On all your devices.
Notes works with iCloud, so your notes are up to date and with you no matter what device you’re using. Make a checklist on your Mac, and you’ll have it on your iPhone when you’re out on the go. Check an item off the list on your iPhone, and it’s checked off on your Mac. Take a picture on your iPhone, add it to a note, and it will be synced to all your devices. Any changes you make to a note on one device instantly appear on your other devices.
Photos
More things to do, places to go and people to see.
Give your photos a more personal touch with third-party editing tools. And with enhanced organization capabilities, support for the new Live Photos format and faster performance, the Photos app gets even better.
New editing extensions let you go further with your photos.
OS X El Capitan supports third-party tools that will be available from the Mac App Store and accessible right in the Photos app. Use multiple editing extensions from your favourite developers on a single photo, or use a mix of extensions and the editing tools built into Photos. From adding subtle filters to professional-quality noise reduction, you can take your photo editing to a whole new level.
Everything in its place.
Photos has been fine-tuned to make it even easier to manage your library. Now you can add a location to a single image or a group of photos. You can batch change photo titles, descriptions and keywords. Naming your favourite people in Faces is faster with a streamlined workflow. You can also sort your albums — and the contents inside them — by date, title and more.
Safari
The smartest way to surf.
With new tools built in.
With OS X El Capitan, the best browser for your Mac brings new tools for better surfing. Now Safari lets you keep favourite websites open and accessible with Pinned Sites. You can quickly mute audio without hunting for the tab it’s coming from. And use AirPlay to stream video from a web page to your HDTV.
Pinned Sites keep your favourite websites handy.
Keep websites you visit often — like your webmail, Facebook page or Twitter feed — open, up to date and easily accessible by pinning them. They’ll stay active in the background, and they’ll stay put on the left side of your tab bar.
Use AirPlay to share web video without sharing your whole screen.
Play video from a web page to your TV with Apple TV — without showing everything else on your desktop. Just click the AirPlay icon that appears on compatible web videos and you can watch your video on the big screen.
Easily tune out a tab.
Want to stop the music without hunting for the tab it’s coming from? Now you can mute it right from the Smart Search field. If you’re listening to audio in one tab and another website starts to play, you can mute the one you don’t want to hear. And if what you really want is silence, you can mute all audio from your browser, too.
Maps
Now arriving. Public transit info.
If you get around by train or bus, you can now get around more easily in select cities around the world thanks to Maps. You’ll find everything you need to go from point A to point B, including built-in public transportation maps, directions and schedules.
Mass appeal.
Choose a destination in Transit view and Maps offers you the best routes, with detailed walking, subway, train, bus and ferry directions. See routes for complex trips, such as linking a bus ride to a subway ride via a two-block walk. You can also plan your trip according to when you want to leave or when you need to arrive.
Get directions on your Mac.
Read them on the go.
Plan your route on your Mac, then send it to your iPhone with just a few clicks for stop-by-stop directions when you’re out and about.
Fonts
A distinctly modern take on type.
OS X El Capitan introduces new fonts that look crisp and beautiful on your Mac and in your documents — a modern, space-efficient system font called San Francisco, a new Chinese font called PingFang with thousands of redesigned characters and six new line weights, and four new Japanese fonts that offer even more choices for everything from presentations to email.
San Francisco
Designed from the ground up for use on all Apple devices, San Francisco has been fine-tuned for optimal readability on a Mac, and looks particularly crisp and refined on a Retina display. The new San Francisco system font optimizes legibility with size-specific letter shapes and dynamic character spacing. You’ll feel its subtle effect in the things you do every day.
Distinct characters
Similar characters like a capital I, lowercase L, and the number 1 are now more easily distinguished.
Dynamic spacing
Spacing between letters and words shifts depending on the font size, which helps readability.
PingFang
Enhanced readability.
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The new Chinese system font PingFang was designed specifically for digital displays, delivering unmatched legibility in both Simplified and Traditional Chinese.
More variety.
PingFang is available in six weights from ultralight to semibold. The different weights give you flexibility for headlines, captions and more.
Japanese Fonts
YuMincho +36p Kana
Tsukushi B Round Gothic
New document fonts.
OS X El Capitan includes four new Japanese fonts, each available in two weights, that add personality to your documents and presentations.
Hiragino Sans
Enhanced Hiragino Sans.
Hiragino Sans, the Japanese system font for OS X, now offers a full set of ten line weights for use in documents.
Input Methods
Mac becomes even more fluent.
Now it’s easier to write Chinese and Japanese text on your Mac.
Chinese
Apple Store El Capitan San Diego
Advanced keyboard input.
Thanks to advanced learning capabilities that quickly memorize your word choices, using the keyboard to input Chinese has never been simpler or faster. Vocabulary lists are frequently updated so you can use the latest words and phrases, and a smarter candidate window displays more character selections.
Improved trackpad handwriting.
Enter characters on the trackpad as swiftly and accurately as you do on paper — just by using your finger. A new Trackpad window reflects the proportions of your physical trackpad, gives you more room to write and lets you write multiple characters in a row.
Japanese
Live conversion for keyboard input.
OS X El Capitan dramatically improves the ease and speed of entering Japanese text. With an enhanced vocabulary and improved language engine, it automatically transforms Hiragana into written Japanese as you type — eliminating the need to press the space bar for individual word conversions.
Apple Store El Capitan San Diego
The new OS X El Capitan features a new Split View, features in Safari, Mail, Notes, Maps, and Photos, and more. To get your hands on all this new stuff, you have to install the operating system on your Mac.
If you want to perform a typical OS upgrade, it’s easy. You download it through the App Store. Here, we’ll go through the steps of installing EL Capitan from Yosemite.
It’s about preparation
Before you install the upgrade, there’s a little bit of prep work you should do. Our article on how to get your Mac ready for OS X 10.11 El Capitan is what you should read before you proceed. It covers:
- Compatible hardware and older versions of OS X
- Verifying the health of your Mac
- Installing updates
- Backups
- Encryption issues
Go read that article and come back here when you’re ready to go.
How to download El Capitan
Apple provides the El Capitan upgrade through its App Store. The download is a bit over 6GB, so you may want to download it at a time when you have other things to do—how long the download takes depends on your Internet connection and the amount of activity at the App Store. Or you can use your Mac while you wait, but be ready to save your work and quit when the download is done.
To download El Capitan, launch the App Store app in your Applications folder (or go to Apple menu > App Store). You’ll probably find El Capitan right away, especially if go to the App Store soon after the official release. Apple will probably have a banner at the top promoting El Capitan, but if you don’t see one, you can probably find it in the Free section in the far right column (you might have to scroll down to see it). And you can always do a search on El Capitan.
When you get to the El Capitan page in the App Store, click on the Download button. You may have to enter your Apple ID name and password, and after you do, the installer will download.
Copy the installer
When the download finishes, the installer automatically launches. Don’t click Continue in the installer just yet. What you may not know is that the installer is downloaded to your Applications folder and then deleted after the installation is done.
If you ever need the installer again, you can get it in the App Store. But I like to make a copy of the installer. I often have to perform OS installations, so I make a bootable flash drive that I can use; it’s a lot faster than waiting for the download.
To copy the installer, you need to hold down the Option key as you drag the Install OS X El Capitan app in your Applications folder to the copy destination. If you don’t hold down Option, you’ll create an alias, not a copy.
Install El Capitan
OK, now you can click that Continue button in the installer window. (If the installer isn’t running, go to your Applications folder and double click the Install OS X El Capitan app.) You’ll be asked to agree and then confirm that you agree to the license agreement.
The next screen will ask you to select the disk for the El Capitan installation. If you have one storage device with one partition, you’ll see it in the installer window. But if you have multiple storage devices and/or multiple partitions, you can select the one you want by clicking the Show All Disks button. Make your selection and click Install.
To continue, you must enter your username and password. The install will prepare to install, restart your Mac, and perform the installation. The Mac may restart again during the installation process. The install will take several minutes, so you may want to go for a walk, call your mom, take a nap, or catch up on chores while the software does its thing.
When the installation is finished, the Mac will restart and you’ll need to log in with your username and password. You may be asked if you want to send diagnostic data to Apple and that you need to log in with your Apple ID, and then a setting up screen will appear and go away. You’re done.
Want to do a clean install of El Capitan?
A clean installation is when you install the operating system on a blank storage device. You can do this by creating a bootable El Capitan installer, and then use it as the boot drive for your Mac. You run Disk Utility to erase your drive and then proceed with the El Capitan installation.
Once the installation is done, you use Migration Assistant to transfer your data from a Time Machine backup.
Why should you do a clean install? Maybe you partitioned your storage device and want to change the scheme. Or maybe you’ve installed and removed lots of apps over time and want to get right of any lingering software components—if this is the case, don’t restore your data from a Time Machine backup. Manually copy your files and reinstall your software.