MacMost: Archives

Mail in El Capitan allows you to easily work with multiple messages in full screen mode. You can minimize the composition window and return to it. You can also put multiple messages into the composition window and select them using the titles of the messages at the top.

You can place handy little app widgets in the Notification Center sidebar on your Mac. Included with El Capitan are widgets like stocks, weather and a calculator. You can also purchase new widgets from the App Store.

With the Maps app in El Capitan you can now search for transit directions. If this is available in your city, you'll be able to see how to get from one point to another using public transportation. You can specify the start time or arrival time and often can choose between many options. You can share these directions with your mobile device or print them. You can also simply view transit lines without setting start and end points.

A new feature of Mail in El Capitan is the ability to swipe across a message using your Mac's trackpad to access some common functions. This is similar to how Mail in iOS works. You can mark a message as Read or Unread, or delete it. You can also change the delete option to archive. This even works for messages not currently selected.

Safari in El Capitan allows you to see which tabs are currently playing sound. You can click to mute or unmet individual tabs. You can also Control+click to see a list of tabs with sound. This is handy when a tab you are not viewing starts playing sound and you need to find it to turn the sound off.

The Photos app lets you easily identify faces in your photos. You can assign a name and Photos will help you find that person in other pictures. Once you have assigned some faces, you can search for them and view photos that contain those people.

Alignment guides in Pages, Numbers and Keynote make it easy to align objects to their centers or edges. With alignment guides you can quickly build groups of shapes or photos that lock together with perfect spacing and sizes.

With the Photos app in El Capitan, you can adjust the time and location data for your photos. If you have photos taken with a regular camera, it may not include any location data, and the time can easily be off if you haven't set your camera's time or are traveling in a different time zone. The Photos app makes it easy to go back later and make changes to time and location.

With new updates to Pages, Number and Keynote you have new ways to select colors in those apps. This includes an eyedropper tool on the iPad that allows you to select a color from anywhere on the screen and use that to color text, shapes and other objects. This eyedropper tool also exists on the iPhone, but in a different location.

A useful new tool in Pages is the ability to create sections that can be rearranged easily. This will make it easier for those writing stories or scripts, compiling reports, or creating study notes. You can put multiple pages in a section and drag and drop the entire section to reorder your document.

The Notes app in El Capitan adds all sorts of new features such as checklists, styles and attachments. You can import photos, documents and other files into a note. You can even add web and map links. A new media browser in Notes allows you to view all of the items attached to all of your notes.

A new feature in Safari for El Capitan is the ability to save web pages you frequently visit as a pinned tab. Pinned tabs will always appear to the left side of the Safari tab bar as small icons. You can access them like other tabs, but they will automatically appear on any new Safari window you create. If you click on an external link in a pinned tab, the other site will open in a new tab. Plus, pinned tabs are persistent across all windows, matching the same page and page position.

We thought that instead of writing a beginners book on El Capitan, why not do what we do best and create videos! So we’ve created The Video Guide For El Capitan. We put together 21 videos with more than 3 hours of instruction, and made it super-easy to get by putting it in the Mac App Store.

This is a great way for beginners to get to know Mac OS X, and for casual users to dig deeper into the features. The videos are unique, not something that can be found anywhere else. The app lets you jump easily from video to video and you can resize the window for better viewing, even going full screen.

A new feature of Photos in El Capitan allows third-party developers to build extensions. These extensions can add more features to the Photos editing tools and other parts of the Photos app. It is early, so only a few extensions exist, but developer will undoubtedly be adding more soon.

El Capitan adds several new features to Spotlight searches, including the ability to search for weather, sports information and stock prices. You can also search your own files using natural language such as 'documents I modified yesterday.' You can customize what shows up in Spotlight searches in System Preferences.

Mission Control gets a makeover with El Capitan. It is now easier than ever to use multiple desktops and full screen apps. A new feature of El Capitan is the ability to split a screen between two apps. Learn how to use Mission Control to become more productive.

The News app is a new app from Apple for the iPad and iPhone that comes with iOS 9. It aggregates news articles from channels and topics that you choose and shows them in a format that is generally more readable than the web. You can customize your sources, save favorites and view your history.

There are hundreds of keyboard shortcuts for Mac users. There are Mission Control shortcuts, Finder shortcuts, system shortcuts, application shortcuts and more. Many you can find by just looking through the menu bar for that application. You can find system ones by looking in the System Preferences under Keyboard.

A new app in iOS 9 called iCloud Drive gives you the ability to access all of the files in your iCloud Drive. Even files for apps such as Preview which has no equivalent in iOS can be accessed. The iCloud Drive app acts as a simple viewer for images and PDFs, and can show previews of other document types. You can then share those documents with other apps on your iPhone or iPad.

The right side of the Dock can be used for easy access to files and folders. By putting aliases to folders on the right side, you can have access to the files in them without needing to open a Finder window. You can set these folders to appear in three different formats. It is important to understand that these are shortcuts to the files, and not the files themselves.