Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan: A first look at the next Mac operating system (pictures)

Apple's next OS X iteration is named El Capitan after a vertical rock formation in Yosemite National Park.

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The enhancements are mainly centered around Spotlight search, window management and how you work with built-in apps.

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Craig Federighi, senior vice president of software engineering, detailed some of the new features that are part of El Capitan. A Split View feature, for example, makes it easier for you to resize windows for side-by-side viewing.

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Another look at Split View.

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You can now mute the audio coming from Safari tabs, so you can silence audio coming from the tabs you're not currently viewing.

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Also coming to Safari is the capability to pin frequently visited sites.

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An update to Spotlight search will allow you to search in your own words to do things like find unread messages in your email.

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Another example of using your own words to search in Spotlight.

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Federighi said El Capitan will also improve performance including 1.4x acceleration in app launching, 2x improvement in snappiness of switching apps, twice as fast to get new mail messages and 4x as fast to get into preview.

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Metal was introduced to allow iOS 8 developers to create visually sophisticated software.

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OS X graphics stacks will run natively on Metal, which  promises a 50 percent improvement on rendering and a 40 percent improvement in the amount of CPU necessary to do graphics.

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Adobe said it saw 8x improvement in rendering effects inside of AfterEffects using Metal for OS X.

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Adobe saw up to 10x improvement in drawing performance in games.

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Epic Games demoed how Metal has made it easier to create and change effects in real time.

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Other major game developers are on board with Metal for OS X, too.

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Apple Mac OS X El Capitan is available to developers today, with a public beta arriving in July.  It will be rolled out to everyone with a free upgrade this fall.

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